Women and Work: Contextualizing Female Workforce in India

I have always been intrigued by the trend in job opportunities for women in India. Growing up, some of the opportunities promoted by family would be medical and education fields. Times have changed, and now women are exploring newer fields like engineering and information and communication technology. However, the labour reports show trends that are devasting in terms of the participation of women in the Indian workforce.  The Oxfam India's Discrimination Report 2022 blames "societal and employers' prejudices" for women's lower wages, and non-participation in economic activity. Pearson argued in her article Reassessing Paid Work and Women’s empowerment: Lesson’s from the Global Economy that just the evidence of income cannot be related to the idea of “empowerment” of women.

As a working woman myself, I have faced discrimination in workplace at various levels. I can recall an instance, where I was told “leave from work is not a right but privilege”. Which essentially means that your work contract may have assigned casual leaves, but it is not necessary that you receive those leaves. Fonderson’s idea of “regulation” and the normalization of power works effectively in the Indian context of female workforce.

The marginalization of female workforce does not happen only at the employer’s level, but also at the societal level. The Oxfam Labor Report 2022 states "The inequality for women and other social categories is not just due to poor access to education or work experience but because of discrimination.". The Indian society has struggled with caste bias for ages, and the 2022 report shows that the bias still exists, despite of multiple policy changes at the government level. According to the report, the Dalit (lower caste) and Muslim (minority) women are the most marginalized groups. The report looked at government data on jobs, wages, health and access to agricultural credit among various social groups from 2004 to 2020 and used statistical models to quantify discrimination. They found that on an average men earned 4,000 rupees ($50; £44) more than women, non-Muslims earned 7,000 rupees more than Muslims and those at the dalit and tribespeople made 5,000 rupees less compared to others.

The wage gap oppresses women dually, one based on gender and the other based on their identity as a dalit or a Muslim woman. The other area which affects the regression in  female work force, is female infanticide. Thousands of female foetuses are aborted annually in India, due to the societal belief that women are not a source of economic benefit to the family. Women are considered a liability, due to the dowry system that makes the family of women pay large sum of money to the man’s family. Due to the oppressive structures of Indian society, women are largely cut off from being part of this thriving country, either through female infanticide or through discrimination.

The need of the hour then is to not only focus on the inclusion of women within the workforce, but to create campaigns like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao ( Save a Girl, Educate a Girl) to function in tandem with economic structural changes and policies that aim at inclusion of women in the workforce. These campaigns are not effective in the current times as they are clouded by political agenda and are implemented in isolation.

References

Lairap-Fonderson, J. (2003). The disciplinary power of micro credit: Examples from Kenya and Cameroon.

Pearson, R. (2007). 16 Reassessing paid work and women's empowerment: lessons from the global. Feminisms in development: Contradictions, contestations and challenges, 201.

BDNews24, (2022). Women's participation in Indian workforce low due to gender discrimination: Oxfam