Women & Work - All the important updates from February 2024
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
Our team has had an eventful month – on February 22, we co-organised the Women in India Inc Summit in Mumbai in collaboration with The Udaiti Foundation and Godrej DEI Labs. It was great to meet some of you there!
Before the summit, we had the opportunity to release our report based on a survey of human resource leaders and listen to and learn from many practitioners from India Inc on what they are doing to enhance women’s participation in the workforce. We bring you some key findings from the same in this edition, along with a bunch of noteworthy news updates and a lot of food for thought.
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. Thank you!
🗞️In The News
India’s Labour Ministry has released an advisory for employers to promote women’s workforce participation. The advisory, which is available here, includes a range of guidelines and recommendations related to wages, safety, healthcare, childcare, social security that cater to a variety of industries and workforce. In its introductory note, the Ministry said:
“The Government of India has implemented several programs and initiatives to improve employment rates and quality of work for women…These initiatives have contributed immensely to addressing the gender gaps and improving female workforce participation in the country. Still, there are several challenges that need to be addressed to encourage women to participate in the workforce predominantly, by proactive initiatives by the employers towards improved access to safety, flexibility, and social security.”
Additionally, the government has also launched a survey to assess employer-level practices that enable women’s participation in the workforce. For this, the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has reached out to its subscribers seeking details regarding the working facilities available for women workers, including provision of flexibility in working hours, equal pay, availability of creche facilities, transport facilities etc.
Our take: Demand-side barriers are an important part of the equation that makes it difficult for women to enter and stay in the paid workforce. But we often don’t know about the scale of these due to the lack of data. As such, this survey is a very welcome step, as it would help identify specific workplace factors that present challenges for women already in the labour force, and discourage those outside the workforce from entering paid work.As we had noted in one of our editions last year, beginning 2024, companies in Australia that have more than 100 employees will be required to publish their gender wage gap data. 2024 is here. The numbers are out. And they don’t look good (But we know this only because the data is available, so kudos to the country for that!). The median gender gap in total remuneration gap in 2022-23 was 19 percent (in favour of men), and it was significantly higher in some of the top firms in the country (with the highest in Morgan Stanley - 48.2 percent!). Read more in this Reuters report.
One-third of posts in public sector organisations in Telangana will be reserved for women. The state government issued an advisory to this effect earlier this month. Read more here.
Advancements in technologies in the auto industry’s manufacturing lines are helping give a boost to women’s employment in the sector, a report in The Economic Times notes. As automakers adopt advanced technologies requiring precision handling, the number of women on shop floors and in functions traditionally dominated by men is seeing an uptick. Read the full report here.
On that note, do not miss this heartwarming and fabulous ground report from Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu in Mint!
Speaking at the Mumbai Tech Week, India’s Minister of Women and Development and Minority Affairs, Smriti Irani, made some critical observations about the barriers women entrepreneurs face due to gender bias among venture capitalists (VCs). “Talent, resilience, innovation and ideas are not the bottlenecks,” the Union Minister said, adding:
“The bottleneck is those people who sit as VCs in financial institutions who don't want to take the chance with women failing and are okay with men failing, even when the ratio of men failing is higher.”
The Minister also pointed out that beyond VCs, many start-ups often recruit women to be the face but do not give them any financial control of the company. But that seems to be a problem as much with start-ups as with established companies. Only 45 companies among the 2,257 listed on the National Stock Exchange have a woman in the chief financial officer or the director-finance role, data compiled by Primeinfobase and reported by The Economic Times shows. Read more here.
💡Research Spotlight
Even as a large share of companies claim to care for gender inclusion and say they have gender diversity goals, only a handful actually have action plans/internal strategies to implement those goals.
This is among a series of findings that have emerged as part of a survey of 200 hiring managers conducted jointly by us (the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University) and The Udaiti Foundation and released on Feb 22. This research is part of CEDA’s ongoing project investigating demand-side barriers to women’s participation in paid work in India.
The survey interviewed 200 senior HR leaders across five sectors – fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, retail, IT/ITeS, and banking and financial services and insurance (BFSI).
While 73 percent of the respondents reported that their organisations had set gender diversity goals, only 21 percent reported having internal corporate strategies in place to implement these goals.
In addition to the gap between claimed intent and practice, we also found a worrying gap in the implementation of provisions mandated by Indian law.
For instance, more than half (59 percent) of the survey respondents said that their organisations had not set up Internal Complaints Committees that are mandated by the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act. More than a third (36 percent) of the respondents said their companies did not offer maternity leave benefits.
There are also gendered gaps in organisational recruitment and retention practices.
For instance, in response to a question about the factors they considered when shortlisting candidates for recruitment, the responses of hiring managers reflected some gendered trends. While they were most likely to prioritise factors like academic background, work experience, and professional skills for both men and women, there were differences.
38 percent of the respondents said they considered marital status when shortlisting female candidates, and only 22 percent said they did so in the case of male candidates. When it came to work experience, 80 percent of the respondents considered this while shortlisting men, and 72 percent said this was a factor when shortlisting female candidates. For women, 26 percent of the hiring managers considered location as a factor, and for men, 21 percent of the managers did so.
It is important to note that the survey is not a representative one. And that is all the more reason to be concerned, for the sample came from companies with larger employee cohorts (with 50-500 employees) and high turnovers (53 percent of the companies had annual revenues exceeding INR 100 crores). It is very likely it represents a better-than-average picture.
As Ashwini Deshpande, CEDA’s Founding Director and Professor of Economics at Ashoka University, observes:
“The survey highlights the critical necessity for fundamental change in corporate attitude towards gender diversity. We find that even organisations with stated gender diversity goals often lack actual mechanisms to ensure a female-friendly and gender diverse work culture. Employers can play a huge role in attracting women into formal paid work. The right mix of policies at the workplace will enable women to stay on, advance in their careers, and contribute to the growth of the organisation.”
You can access the full report here, and feel free to get in touch to learn more about the report and our project.
📊Datapoint
India’s stock exchanges - the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) - have imposed penalties exceeding INR 25 crores on 452 listed companies FY 2018-19 onwards for not having a single woman on their board of directors, data shared by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in the Parliament has revealed. This is a violation of the requirements under the Companies Act, 2013. Additionally, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) also fined 81 non-listed companies since FY 2015-16.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Ronit Mukherji, 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?
Ronit Mukherji: Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of “blind” auditions on female musicians by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse is one of the very first papers I read in the literature on experiments using policy changes in labour economics. Using a policy change which allows for “blind auditions” for musicians to not reveal their identity, the paper finds a 50% higher chance for women musicians getting hired. The paper is lucid and so well written and takes you in the depth of identification techniques in economics.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
‘The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for all of us’ written by Janet Yellen. A brilliant essay tracing labour force participation of women in the US and how it has impacted the society at large.
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 recommend Hidden Figures. It is a brilliant movie that sheds light on the issue of workplace inequality and the barriers that African-American women had to overcome to achieve success. Set in the times of the space race and after the passing of the Civil Rights Act it brings together the struggles that women face not only because of their race but also their gender. Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer’s acting elevates the film and not to forget the brilliant music by Hans Zimmer.
And a book that did the same?
Prothom Protishruti (The First Promise), a novel by Ashapurna Debi, originally published in Bengali in 1964, is a must read in my opinion. The author uses an easy and conversational style to tell the story of the struggles and efforts of women in nineteenth-century, colonial Bengal. We witness the life and struggles of Satyabati as a child bride who leaves her husband’s village for Calcutta, the capital of British India where she gets caught in the social dynamics of women’s education, social reform agendas, and urban entertainment. She tries to make sense of the changing complexities in the world, all the time questioning how society defines her role as a woman and how she can break away from it.
⏳Throwback
The photograph depicts an embroidery from 1994 titled ‘Our life in July' by Juliana Damian of the Llully Cooperative in Puno, Peru. The co-operative was formed by a nun and sixty other women to ensure that women earned fair wages for their work. Damian, a member of the cooperative, depicts life in her village called July in this embroidery. Picture via the excellent Women’s Art on social media platform, X.
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