Women & Work - here’s what we’ve been reading through January 2025
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
It’s the first edition of 2025, and it comes just a day ahead of the Union Budget. All our eyes will be on the same, as reports suggest that improving women’s participation in the labour force is likely to find a mention. In the meantime, we bring you all the noteworthy updates about women and work from this month. We hope you will enjoy reading this edition!
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
The Indian government is set to launch a pilot programme that will involve door-to-door mobilisation of adolescent girls for skilling programmes, The Economic Times reported. The pilot will train 3,800 girls across 27 districts in 19 states in non-traditional sectors including IT, hospitality and green jobs. The programme will cover the costs of boarding and lodging, conveyance allowance, one-time travel allowance, and also give a post-placement stipend. The larger aim is to improve India’s female labour force participation. Read more here.
Can you avail maternity leave if you are going to have your third child? The Madras High Court has recently observed that this should be possible in certain situations. The court was hearing the petition of a nurse who wanted to take paid maternity leave. While this would be her third child, she had not availed the leave for her previous two children when she was still a contractual employee and not eligible for the leave. However, her leave was rejected since it would be her third child.
The Court observed that maternity leave rules (that allow paid maternity leave for only two children) have to be interpreted in such a way that a woman employee would be entitled to seek leave twice during her service period (and not necessarily only for two children), Live Law reported. Read more about the case in The New Indian Express here.
Women comprise just about a tenth of the workforce in the Indian real estate sector, a joint report released by realty firm Max Estates and In Tandem Global Consulting estimates. There are only 70 lakh women among the 7.1 crore workers employed in the sector, the report estimates, according to the Press Trust of India.
Do read: The demand-side story: Structural change and the decline in female labour force participation in India by Ashwini Deshpande in VoxEU
💡Research Spotlight
What can we learn about the labour market outcomes from essays written by 11-year-olds?
An interesting and new research project by Sreevidya Ayyar, Uta Bolt, Eric French and Cormac O'Dea tries to find out.
The authors use machine learning algorithms to run a text analysis of essays written by thousands of 11-year-old children in the United Kingdom in 1969. The essays were written as part of the National Child Development Study (NCDS). The study is an on-going panel survey containing “almost the entire population of Britain born in a particular week in 1958”, and it collects data about and from respondents over the course of their lifetimes, beginning at birth, and then ages 7, 11, 16, 23, 33, 42, 46, 50 and 55. (Many would call this a dream dataset!).
Children were asked to write an essay on the topic: “Imagine you are now 25 years old. Write about the life you are leading, your interests, your home life and your work at the age of 25.”
As part of this study, the authors analysed the textual data from these essays to understand how much of the children’s visions conformed to gender norms, and then looked at the labour market outcomes of girls in their later lives. To measure conformity, they train a Word-Embedding Model to identify gender-associating words.
They illustrate via two excerpts (the first of which exhibits a stronger gender association):
Essay 1: “There was a pile of washing waiting to be done in the laundry basket waiting for me to wash. Oh how I wish I was young I thought to myself. Just as I had the water in the washer I heard my five month old baby crying in her pram outside. It was her bottle time I have to leave every thing to get her bottle ready. As soon a I had fed her my husband came home for his dinner. It had to be a ham (sand/samwhich) samwidgch today so I could get my washing done quicker. [...]”
Essay 2: “If I was 25 now, I would probably live in a small flat. I would go to work at 9 o’clock in the morning and finnish at 5 o’clock, I would make my own meals. After my tea I would go out in my car. When summer came round I would go away for a week say Paris or New York. My flat would have modern furniture in it. I would hold lots of parties and have beer, sausage on sticks, salad and Chinese food. [...] ”
They find:
Girls who had stronger conformity to gender norms had slightly lower earnings in later life. In slightly technical terms, “girls with one standard deviation stronger gender conformity have 3.5 per cent lower lifetime earnings”, the authors find.
The lower earnings are a consequence of both lower wages, and also fewer hours of work. The girls with stronger gender conformity were also more likely to enter lower-paid occupations, have lower educational attainment, and have marriages and children earlier.
The authors also try to make sense of what could be influencing the likelihood of young girls internalising these.
It is not simply passed down from parents to children, though they find some indication that girls whose parents have lower educational levels and/or female siblings might be more prone to stronger gender conformity. Instead – and they found something noteworthy here – girls who grew up in areas that had higher shares of women workers were less likely to conform to gender norms. Similarly, they say, in areas with larger shares of adult women who attended university as compared to men, girls tended to display lower levels of gender conformity.
Their research has been published as an NBER working paper - read it for their interesting data set, and also explore the full website of their research project.
📊Datapoint
Across India, four in every ten micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that are registered on the government’s Udyam portal are owned by women, data shared by the Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in response to a Parliamentary question shows. The chart above shows how this varies by state.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Sneha Bakshi, 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?
Sneha Bakshi: Sharing the Work - a book by Myra Strober, an economist who writes movingly about her struggle in the male academic world of 70s America.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
This report in ThePrint which talks about how the gender of the leader changes what the IAS Officers' Wives Association focuses on and how it is prioritized.
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 have two recommendations. The first is And, Towards Happy Alleys, a film directed by Sreemoyee Singh. It is Singh's tribute to Iranian poetry, but in doing so she cannot escape the issues of societal censorship of women in work and public spaces. In her effort to understand the beauty being both stifled by and emerging out of the religious and political repression, she witnesses the women's uprising in that country in 2022.
The second is Soni, directed by Ivan Ayr. It’s a film about women police officers in Delhi written and directed by a man who grew up in north India but was able to look at his country with a new perspective after living and studying abroad, this portrays with immense empathy the daily struggle of the women protagonists not just in their work but in their personal lives in a gendered society.
And a book that did the same?
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It is hard to call this piece 'non-academic' and yet it is accessible to all. Woolf gets at the heart of the freedoms and the lack of them that keep women from work and from being able to create. As true and relevant today as when it was written. Another book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. If 'work' is survival and sustenance (and evolution), then this book's recommendation applies here. Otherwise this book is beyond categorization as it spans millions of years of how we became human, unwrapping the male-dominated history we have read and heard over and over again and replacing it with the possibility of how the female body led our evolutionary journey to who we are today.
⏳Throwback
This month’s throwback looks at the life and career of physicist Thayyoor K. Radha, one of the earliest particle physicists in India, but also around the world. Despite her awe-inspiring career, one finds little about her on the internet, but this interview with the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) offers a rare glimpse into her life and career. It’s an inspiring and delightful read – to learn about how a young girl from Kerala found the opportunity to study further because her parents did not want a third unmarried daughter sitting at home, how she had to move to a different city because she wanted to study physics, and who eventually found an opportunity to move to the Institute for Advanced Study in the USA – one of the world’s leading centres for theoretical research, thanks to support from none other than J. Robert Oppenheimer!
And then, our heart breaks, because we also discover the impact of marriage and childbirth on her very promising career. An excerpt from Radha’s own recollection:
“After my marriage I arrived in Edmonton too late in the year (1966) for the start of the academic term, but the University of Alberta asked me to instruct a course on Feynman quantum electrodynamics. In December, they offered me an assistant professorship, but, by that time, I was pregnant. There was no adequate child care then, and no day care. Smoking was not prohibited, and I could not find a babysitter who did not smoke. I decided that I would have to take a leave of absence to care for my child. I gave a seminar on June 7, and three weeks later my child was born. By September, I started going back to work whenever I could. I would spend the afternoons there reading to try to keep myself in touch with the field in the hopes that I could return. But then I had a difficult second pregnancy.
Eventually, I realized it was too much. I had missed three or four years of the latest research. I tried to go back and ask for my job once again. However, at that time, the university was having difficulties. Even men could not keep their jobs and the university felt they could not afford to hire women, especially women whose husbands were already provided for.”
Read the full interview here. This throwback was discovered thanks to a post by Nirmalya Kajuri 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