Women & Work - all that we’ve been reading in April 2024
Women & Work - all that we’ve been reading in April 2024
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
From field notes about our project, research on the gig economy, to some critical and noteworthy news developments, lots to read, watch and think about – this edition brings you all the important updates on women in work from the month of April. We hope you will enjoy reading it.
Before we get started, a request: We are curating ‘Women & Work’ with the hope that it can provoke, stimulate and amplify conversations about women’s participation in paid work in India. If you like this edition, please do share it on your social media, and with your friends, family and colleagues. You can also press ❤️ to show us some love. Thank you!
🗞️In The News
While the central government’s rules provide for up to two years of leave for childcare to women and “single” fathers, a female employee working in a government college in Himachal Pradesh has been denied the same by the state government. The petitioner is a single parent and her fourteen-year-old son has a rare genetic condition for which he has been undergoing treatment. As a consequence, the mother had exhausted her sanctioned leave entitlement. The state government refused to grant her the two-year child-care leave since it had not adopted the policy on the same. The matter is currently in the Supreme Court. In a recent hearing, the Court said that denying the child-care leave to a mother who is taking care of a child with disabilities violated the constitutional duty of the State to ensure equal participation of women in the workforce. It has asked the Himachal Pradesh government to constitute a committee to look into the matter and submit a report to the Court.
On that note, do read: Mom, baby and us: Who takes care of the children? Ashwini Deshpande writes in The Indian Express
A hard-hitting field report in Mint looked at the impact of high joblessness in a village in Maharashtra. Jiwnapur – home to about 2,500 people – is witness to high unemployment among those who are educated, and low farm incomes for those in agriculture. But as data and research has often told us, the unemployment crisis has gendered implications.
The women of the village work in farms in nearby villages earning a meagre INR 150-200 per day. “The men are not interested. They would rather work at construction sites, where the wages are higher – upwards of INR 300 per day. But those jobs are hard to come by,” says the report. As a result, women are nowhere to be seen during the day, and the men cover up their situation by joking, “While the women are out working, we play cards and ludo.” Read the full story here.
Deloitte released the fourth edition of its report ‘Women @ Work: A global outlook’ based on a survey of 5,000 women in workplaces spread across 10 countries. Among its many findings, the report says there are very few organisations that are “Gender Equality Leaders”, but women who work in these are more optimistic about their career prospects, and report higher loyalty towards their employer, higher productivity and motivation to work. Read the full report here.
Don’t miss these two reports – both from Al Jazeera – featuring women working in non-stereotypical occupations. The first profiles Ekawati, a single mother who drives an auto rickshaw in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the second report is a photo-essay looking at the women being trained to fly fertiliser-spraying drones under a government program in India.
💡Research Spotlight
What does the online, high-skill, freelance job market look like from a gender perspective?
A World Bank study by Namita Dutta et al (2023) offers some insights.
The researchers looked at online profiles of 19,000 freelancers listed on one of the largest global online freelancing platforms. The freelance workers were spread across 150 countries and 10 task categories – administrative support, artificial intelligence, information technology, finance, engineering, design, writing and translation services, HR, legal, and sales and marketing.
This is what they found:
Women comprised 39.5 percent of all freelancers listed on the platform
This representation varied across regions – from 60 percent in East Asia and Pacific to 22 percent in South Asia (worth noting that South Asia had the highest shares of freelancers listed on the platform)
Women were more likely to be participating in HR, writing/translation and admin work and least likely to be involved in IT or AI work, reflecting, as the study notes, “similar patterns in occupational segregation in the offline labour market”
Women consistently quoted lower hourly rates than men – the median rate quoted by male freelancers on the platform was USD 25, while for women it was USD 20
This gap was present across tasks, except design, where women quoted higher prices than men, on average
The study notes that women quoted ~10 percent lower rates than men even when controlling for other factors, and the gap is statistically more robust in three regions – East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia and North America.
The authors of the study suggest that this gap is most likely on account of the confidence gap, indicating women’s lower expectations. However, on an encouraging note, this gap can be mitigated by a simple design tweak, notes the study (now how many times have we written about that before!). Getting freelancers to pre-fill a salary request along with showing them information about the median salary bid of similar candidates could easily help bridge this gap, the authors note. We hope the platform is listening.
Read more about the findings in this note here.
📊Datapoint
Indian women’s labour force participation rates (LFPR) are much lower than that of men. Sample this, in 2022-23, 34.1 percent of women of working age (15-59 years) were part of the labour force as compared to 82.1 percent men. Further, LFPR across age groups within the working age group looks very different for men and women. For men, labour force participation is near universal after 25 years of age, while for women, the likelihood of being in the labour force was the highest in the 40-44 years group – 50.5 percent of women in this group were part of the labour force in 2022-23. Read more in our analysis on how LFPR varies by age here.
📑 Field Notes
In a blog post Ashwini Deshpande, our founding director, takes us #BTS of her on-going research on the impact of social networks and role models on enrolment in skilling program in this blog post. This research, being run in collaboration with Pratham Skilling, is part of CEDA’s ongoing project on addressing demand-side barriers to women’s participation in paid work.
Here’s an excerpt:
"On a hot and dusty day in 2023, Anisha Sharma and I had set off for Moradabad for a test run of our research plan on women’s employment. We had been working on a research design to get answers to the following questions: if given an opportunity for free vocational training that will also place them in a job, would women in rural India (in this case, Uttar Pradesh) take it up?
"Our pilot study taught us a great deal. For one thing, it was clear to us that enough women in rural Uttar Pradesh wanted to be in paid work. Not everybody was willing (or was going to be able) to move to the city because the urban infrastructure is inhospitable, difficult to navigate, and with no guarantee of support systems. Even women with families encouraging them to migrate might not be able to.
“But there was palpable evidence that women wanted to try, wanted to aim higher than where their mothers had been to reach, and more importantly, had the education that was one of the essential ingredients needed to translate their dreams into reality."
Read the full post here.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Abhishek Rai, Assistant Professor of Economics, Ashoka University
What’s an essential academic work that you would recommend to someone who is just getting started with working on the subject of female labour force participation?
Abhishek Rai: I would like to recommend Engines of Liberation by Greenwood et al. They show how improved access to labour-saving consumer durables (washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, refrigerators etc) improved female labour force participation in the United States. Over the 20th century, technological progress reduced the relative price of home appliances, making them affordable to a larger share of US households. Increased use of these appliances reduced time needed for household work, which enabled women to participate in market work. Through the lens of a macro model, they show that falling prices of consumer durables alone can account for more than half of the increase in FLFPR.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
I find the points raised in the two-part podcast episodes of IDR’s podcast on women in the workforce (Part 1, Where women work, Part 2 What the data doesn’t tell us) instructive about multiple aspects of female work in India.
Is there a film that you can recommend which, in your opinion, does a good job of portraying the world of work from a gender lens?
I would like to recommend Chak De! India and Hidden Figures. While Chak De! India depicts how the Indian women’s hockey team overcomes the bigotry and sexism, Hidden Figures tells the story of three African-American women working in NASA as “computers” during the space race era.
And a book that did the same?
The book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Nobel prize winning economist Claudia Goldin is a great synthesis of a lifetime of excellent research.
⏳Throwback
In 1936, the Associação Beneficente das Domésticas de Santos (Santos Domestic Laborers' Association) was founded in Brazil. This was the country’s first association of domestic workers. The brain behind this was Laudelina de Campos Melo, a Black Brazilian woman who was a domestic worker herself.
Her vision was to create a platform that could help improve the working conditions and lives of domestic workers. Melo dedicated her life to advocate for the rights of domestic workers and to improve the lives of Black Brazilians. Her work bore fruit many years down the line – in 2013, a constitutional amendment paved the way for domestic workers to be considered similar to other categories of workers with social rights. Read more about Melo here and here.
That’s all from us for this edition. Thank you for reading! We will see you next month. In the meantime, if you have feedback, questions, tips, or just want to say hello, feel free to do so by replying to this email, or drop in a word at editorial.ceda@ashoka.edu.in
Curated by: Akshi Chawla for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian