Opinion: India, Where Have All the Women Gone?
N Chandra Mohan is an economics and business commentator.
Women account for less than half of India’s population but their
participation in the workforce is way below that of men. They account
for 27 per cent of the workforce. If – and it is a big if – their number
were to increase to the same level as men in the workforce, the
country’s output of good and services would expand by 27 per cent,
argues Christine Lagarde, managing director of the Internatgional
Monetary Fund.
women certainly boosts economic growth.The sad reality, however, is
that progress towards gender parity in the workforce has stalled, if it
has not been thrown into reverse gear. Instead of steadily rising, the
share of female workers in population is trending down.
The
men-women gap in workforce participation rates widened to 32 percentage
points in 2011-12 from 25 percentage points in 1977-78, according to the
five-yearly surveys of the National Sample Survey Organisation. Gender
parity entails 195 million more women joining the workforce and is
indeed a daunting objective to secure a gross domestic product (GDP) GDP
expansion of 27 per cent. Reducing the gap by 25 per cent by 2025 – a
G-20 pledge – translates into 5 million more women joining the workforce
every year for the next 10 years. However desirable that may seem, the
reality is that only 2 million jobs are being generated annually in the
Indian economy.
Women’s workforce participation that dropped to
21.9 percent in 2011-12 from 29.7 per cent in 1977-78 at the national
level has an important bearing on the observed narrowing of male-female
differentials in the rates of unemployment. The rates of unemployment
for women typically are higher than for men. Their rate of unemployment
registered a high of 3.2 per cent against 2.1 per cent among males in
1977-78, after which the differential vis-à-vis males narrowed down by
2011-12, according to the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO)
measure of chronic unemployment. These narrower differentials are due to
a decline in rates of joblessness among women as male rates are stable.
