Prime minister Narendra Modi was spot on when he linked “flexible workplaces, work-from-home, and flexible work hours” to “opportunities for women’s labour force participation” in a speech on Thursday. This ties in well with the vision to harvest “naari shakti”(women power) for the development of the country, a focal point of his Independence Day speech this year. The government and industry need to pull out all the levers to encourage women to join the mainstream workforce and facilitate their continued participation at the workplace. India’s female labour force participation rate is at an alarmingly low level, compared not just with peer economies but also with some least developed countries. From 30-32% in the first decade-and-a-half of liberalisation, it has seen a sharp downward turn to 25.1% in 2020-2021, covering the first and second waves of the pandemic, according to the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey data. The larger part of the gain in 2020-21 was in the rural areas, whereas in the urban areas, it barely moved. Read with the fact that women’s share in tertiary education in the country has been on the rise over the past decade or so and has reached parity with that of men, it could indicate a lot of educated talent missing from the workplace.
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This is made worse by the fact that this is not a question of employability—the India Skills report shows a higher proportion of women (51.4%) were employable than men (46%) in comparable cohorts.
So, if work-from-home and flexi-hours do get more women to choose remunerative work outside of home, this needs to be welcomed. Findings from a survey cited in a Moneycontrol article suggest that this is indeed the case, at least for white-collar work. Attrition levels among women employees dropped sharply as companies moved to work-from-home arrangements, pushed by the pandemic. Also, as India’s first Time-Use Survey showed, just 20.6% of women aged 15-59 were involved in paid work, while 94% participated in unpaid work at home and elsewhere. For perspective, the corresponding figures for men in that age group were 70% and 49%. And, of course, women spent a much larger part of their time on unpaid work than the men who participated in such work. But in a scenario where working outside of home may not be a choice for millions of women because of various reasons, including socio-cultural ones, WFH can bring at least some of them into paid, formal work.
That said, WFH fixes only a part of the problem. To encourage women’s participation in the workforce, many fundamentals still need fixing, though there has been some progress under these heads over the past couple of decades. To begin with, nutrition gaps need to be addressed, as the continued prevalence of significant levels of anaemia among women in India shows. Women in India also are more likely to have poorer health than their peers in some comparator economies, as data from the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report 2022, shows. This, of course, would have a bearing on both job-seeking by women and their continued employment.
While India Inc reconfigures the nature and manner of work and working as also other factors such as pay parity, care support, etc, governments will have to focus on ensuring healthier, better educated/skilled women. This is imperative as estimates suggest that closing the employment gap between men and women could expand the gross domestic product by close to a third by 2050.