Women & Work - what we’ve been tracking through February 2025
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
☕☕Something’s been brewing here at CEDA for the past few months! We’ve been working on identifying important interventions that can help address an important gap in the labour market — how to enable women’s re-entry into the workforce after a career break.
And we are now ready to share our learnings with you all! We will release our report, ‘The Returnship Road’, next week at Godrej DEI Lab’s ‘Women at Work’ event in Mumbai. The event will also feature a conversation with industry leaders and experts on this important matter.
If you’re in Mumbai, please join us. We’d love to meet you all! Do register for the event via this link:
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.
And in case you would like to read any of our past editions, they are available here.
🗞️In The News
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu took to social media earlier in the month to announce that the state was planning “‘work from home’ in a big way, especially for women”. Concepts such as remote work, co-working spaces, and neighbourhood workspaces hold the potential to empower businesses and employees alike to create flexible, productive work environments, he added, expressing hope that the initiatives will enable more workforce participation, especially of women professionals.
A survey to understand the changing dynamics of women’s labour force participation looked at the role of male migration patterns of rural women’s engagement in paid work. Conducted by Artha Global’s Centre for Rapid Insights, the survey found that women with migrant husbands were more likely to work for pay, with 42 percent of them engaged in paid work compared to 33 percent of those whose husbands reside in the same village. The survey sample comprised 2,381 women across four northern states (Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand). Interestingly, when the men returned, it led to an increase in unpaid work among women, with many shifting from casual labour to assisting in agricultural and household-based activities. Read more here.
The Indian government has recently launched Swavalambini, a programme to promote entrepreneurship among young women in the north-eastern region of the country. Launched by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), in collaboration with NITI Aayog, the initiative aims to equip young women enrolled in higher education institutes with an entrepreneurial mindset, resources and mentorship. More here.
And just ICYMI, read Aloke Kar and PC Mohanan’s response to the question “Is the rise in female work participation due to an odd set of instructions to enumerators?”.
💡Research Spotlight
A few years ago, Alpha (pseudonym), a global, technology-focused, multinational corporation, wanted to address a problem that impacts many large organisations: how to avoid unnecessary delays in the hiring process that often end up negatively impacting candidate experience, or worse, leading to some of the best candidates choosing other job offers over theirs?
So, Alpha decided to tweak its hiring process a little in a staggered manner across its various global teams.
The tweak led to an unintended and unanticipated impact – the company ended up hiring more women!
Here’s what happened.
At Alpha, there were two key teams involved in the hiring process – the HR department and hiring managers. (For those wondering what’s the difference – Human Resource (or HR) departments are mainly responsible for hiring candidates. Hiring managers may be from any department, and these are the people candidates end up working with once they are hired. So, leaders of various teams hiring for their own teams).
Previously, HR team members would simply pass on all applications received to hiring managers, who would then shortlist candidates, and then interview them, and finally select them.
Now, HR teams were tasked with shortlisting candidates from the initial pool, and passing on a maximum of seven candidates per job role to the hiring managers, who would then interview and select them. To help the HRs perform this effectively, another tweak was introduced. Earlier, HRs would simply document the job requirements as indicated by the hiring managers. Now, hiring managers were required to explain the requirements to the HR.
Thanks to the staggered implementation of this new process, researchers Almasa Sarabi and Nico Lehmann were able to study the impact of this new process statistically. They looked at the data comprising 8,750 externally hired candidates over a 24-month period. They also looked at other data and also conducted qualitative interviews with various stakeholders.
Using a difference-in-difference estimation technique, they found that the share of women hired in the new model was higher by 5.9 percentage points.
This, they argue, was happening because of the increase in expert knowledge in evaluating candidates, and reduced opportunity costs. In simple words, HRs were more likely to have more expertise in candidate evaluation and hiring. And they were also more likely to invest time in the hiring process, compared to hiring managers.
In short, who was hiring was making a difference.
So what’s the learning here – should only HRs hire? The answer is both yes, and no. This is what the authors say:
“[O]ne interpretation of our findings could be that the devolution of HR responsibilities to managers may induce adverse effects for workforce diversity. But our theorizing might also offer a more subtle interpretation, which is that, at least in the context of diversity, it may not matter who takes on HR responsibilities as long as decision makers are properly trained and incentivized.”
Read the full study published in the Administrative Science Quarterly here.
📊Datapoint
The factsheet of the latest Time Use Survey was released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation earlier this week. The numbers speak for themselves, and the gender gaps remain the widest when it comes to employment as well as unpaid domestic work for the household.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially our readers by Arunava Sinha, Professor of Practice in Creative Writing, and the Co-Director of the Ashoka Center for Translation, 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?
Arunava Sinha: In Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (2021), the 2023 Nobel Prize winner for economics Claudia Goldin takes a clear-eyed look, with the help of copious data, at how, and why, women become the victims of pay disparities after having children. It's not sexism alone but the system, she argues.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
A report in Scroll titled 'Shift in India’s female workforce sees increase in salaried women but gender wage gap persists' examines an important structural change in women's participation in the workforce. The article reveals that the share of women in salaried employment is rising, even as it is falling in casual wage work. The gender pay gap, however, persists.
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?
Satyajit Ray's 1963 Bengali film Mahanagar (The Big City), based on a Bengali story of the same name by Narendranath Mitra, which portrays the family and social pressure a married woman with a child has to face when she defies the norms and gets a job to augment the family income. Ironically, when she wants to give it up because a colleague has been humiliated, her husband, who has just lost his own job, insists she continue.
And a book that did the same?
KR Meera's Malayalam novel Aarachaar (2012), translated into English by J Devika as Hangwoman (2014), tells the story of Chetna, who aims to be the first “hangwoman” in Bengal (and India). Hanging convicts sentenced to death is the traditional profession of the males in the family she has been born into, but there is no suitable man in her generation to do the job. And thus begins Chetna's quest for the right to do this work.
⏳Throwback
In 1982, Ann Hopkins, an employee at the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, was considered for partnership at the organisation. However, she was neither offered, nor denied the same, and the firm decided that her candidacy would be reconsidered the following year. But that did not happen.
This was despite the fact that Hopkins had performed well in her role, including helping the company bag one of its biggest contracts. Despite this, when her name came up for promotion, those making the decision pointed out her aggressive and abrasive behaviour. Much of the critique was gendered.
Sample this:
She was described as being “macho” by one partner, as overcompensating for being a woman by another. Hopkins’ use of profanity was criticised - not because such language was unacceptable - but “because it's a lady using foul language”. A partner advised her to take "a course at charm school", and the supervisor of her department suggested that she "walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry".
Hopkins left the company but sued it for sex discrimination. In a landmark decision in 1989 (Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989)), the US Supreme Court held that the company had indeed indulged in sex discrimination. The ruling was historic in recognising gender-stereotyping as the basis of sex discrimination.
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