Women & Work - All the noteworthy updates from June 2023
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
June has been abuzz with some important conversations and analysis on women’s work in India, and we have tried to squeeze in as much as we could in this edition. We hope you will find it an insightful read!
To everyone who is new here: At the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), we are working on an ambitious project to understand and find ways to overcome the demand-side barriers that are keeping women out of the workforce.
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. You can access previous editions of this newsletter here.
Please do share this edition on your social media, and with your friends, family and colleagues. Thank you!
🗞️In The News
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) released its annual report for FY 2023 earlier this month. The report noted that the company had seen higher attrition rates for women than for men in the financial year, a rare development for a company that has typically seen lower or similar attrition rates for women. So, what happened in FY23? This is what Milind Lakkad, the CHRO, had to say:
“There might be other reasons but intuitively, I would think working from home during the pandemic reset the domestic arrangements for some women, keeping them from returning to office even after everything normalised. The higher attrition among women in FY 2023 is a setback to our efforts to promote gender diversity but we are doubling down on it.”
TCS is, of course, not alone. As companies push for a return to work-from-office post the pandemic, attrition rates for women in tech jobs are soaring. In fact, they are almost double that of men, The Economic Times reported. Attrition rates for women have reached 30-40 percent in recent months, compared to the average industry rates of 15 percent, the report said, citing data from a recruitment service provider.
Our take: The issue of costs versus benefits of working from office versus working from home is complicated. On the one hand, working from an office space with teammates promotes social interactions, friendships, partnerships, and brainstorming that can fuel productivity. On the other hand, the flexibility of being able to work from home is important if the work requires concentration and being away from distractions.
The gender angle to this conundrum is that women are overburdened with domestic responsibilities and can continue being in paid employment only if they have the flexibility. Employers need to be mindful of that. When Covid-19 hit, many were hopeful that this flexibility will remain long after the pandemic is over, as it will benefit women. It now appears that the initial optimism was premature.The other big development dominating the news (and social media!) has been the launch of free travel for women in the public buses in Karnataka. On June 11, the newly-elected government of the state launched the initiative - the Shakti scheme. With this Karnataka joins Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Punjab among the states that have earlier launched similar initiatives.
Women make up about 41 percent of beneficiaries of the government’s loan scheme for street vendors – PM-SVANidhi (PM Street Vendors’ AtmaNirbhar Nidhi), an analysis by The Indian Express shows. However, their share is much higher in states in the southern part of the country. In Andhra Pradesh, the share of women beneficiaries was as high as 70 percent, while in Telangana and Tamil Nadu this share was 66 and 64 percent respectively. Read the analysis here.
Only four percent of Chief Financial Officers in Indian unicorns are women, an analysis by WalkWater Talent Advisors has shown. This study was based on their analysis of 100 such unicorns (a term used for start-ups that are valued at USD 1 billion or more) in India. Read more here.
Here’s a reminder of how workplaces often remain insensitive to the needs of their women employees. Women lawyers practising in Tamil Nadu’s Udhagamandalam (Ooty) court have been fighting a long and frustrating fight for a surprisingly simple request: that there be a toilet within the court complex that they can use.
Even as a new court complex was inaugurated in October last year, it did not have a separate washroom for women. Around 60 women lawyers practise in the court. The women have had to protest, go on hunger strike, form a separate association, and the matter has gone on to the Supreme Court of India but remains unresolved. After a Bar & Bench report highlighted the matter earlier this month, they were allotted a separate room and washroom for now. The matter will be heard further in the Supreme Court next month. Read the full report from Bar & Bench here.
Our take: Women-friendly workspaces are an essential ingredient of the set of measures that will promote women’s participation in the paid workforce. It is shocking that in the year 2023, we – that too, lawyers, no less – are still fighting for a basic facility like a toilet for women. A glaring example of travesty of justice. The World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Report for this year. India’s overall rank on the index improved from 135 in 2022 to 127 this year.
To measure the gap, the forum looks at four areas: Health and Survival, Educational Attainment, Economic Participation and Opportunity gap and Political Empowerment gap and gives scores on a 0 to 100 scale. The scores can be interpreted as the distance covered towards parity (i.e. the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed).
At the global level, there was a small improvement in scores on three of the four themes, but when it came to economic participation and opportunity gap, the global gender gap widened marginally, from 60.0 percent in 2022 to 59.8 percent in 2023. (This is true for the 102 countries that have been covered in all editions of the report).
Read more on this year's global gap here. And to explore and understand India’s ranking in previous years, read our Data Narrative by Ashwini Deshpande.
💡Research Spotlight
If you spend too much time on LinkedIn, you’d know there is a growing conversation about the need for pay transparency in job ads. It’s not only social media - there have been policy mandates for the same in several countries in recent years.
Such transparency is good for everyone, and it could also help reduce gender wage gaps, suggests research by Frimmel et al (2023) published by the Institute of Labour Economics earlier this month.
The authors base their research on data stemming from a reform of Austria’s Equal Treatment Law that mandated pay transparency w.e.f. March 01, 2011. All posted vacancies by public and private sector employment agencies were required to include information about the wage, and also if the firm was willing to overpay (such as in cases of higher qualifications/experience).
Such information, argue the authors, “is likely to be positive and large for workers with inaccurate beliefs about wages and their labour market options, such as those in lower paying jobs and women”. Further, they note that as more information becomes available, “workers with inaccurate beliefs about their labour market options update their beliefs. As a consequence, they are also more motivated to negotiate or look for better jobs elsewhere”.
These are some important findings of the study:
Introduction of such pay transparency did lead to a reduction in the gender gap. This overall reduction, however, was small and statistically insignificant.
However, reductions in the gender wage gap were larger in situations where firms either specified their willingness to bargain over wages or when women likely had to make the job acceptance decision under (time) pressure.
How does the latter work? Citing other research on the matter, the authors explain that women often end up accepting job offers sooner as compared to men, both because they tend to be more risk-averse, and because they may not be confident about future job offers. In such situations, when they have information on pay, they are able to make better decisions.
The reduction is driven by an improvement in women’s earnings even as men’s earnings remain largely constant, the research indicates.
Lastly, the researchers argue that external pay transparency may work better than internal pay transparency (where pay information is made transparent within the company).
Read the full IZA discussion paper here.
📊Datapoint
India is all set to overtake China and become the most populous country on the planet by July 2023. But would it have a larger labour force? The short answer is - no, it will not.
We looked at population estimates and labour force participation rates for the two countries for 2021, the most recent year for which comparable data is available, and calculated the size of the labour force for both countries.
While there were 986.5 million people in China aged 15-64 in 2021, there were 747.9 million people who were employed or looking for employment. In India, on the other hand, there were 950.2 million people aged 15-64 in 2021, but only 487.9 million were part of the labour force.
Given the wider gap in FLFPR, this difference was starker for the female population. In 2021, China had an estimated 478.3 million women aged 15-64, and its female labour force was an estimated 338.6 million in size. In India, the female labour force was only 112.8 million in comparison even though it had 458.2 million women in that age group.
Read our full analysis on this here.
🧑💼Perspectives
Read this personal and stirring account by Aparajita Rai, Superintendent of Police, Kalimpong, West Bengal where she describes her often painful experience wearing the police uniform - particularly the shoes - which were designed with the assumption of the able-bodied man as the default:
“Women have been part of the police service for over 50 years, but uniforms items mostly remain gender-blind. We are often celebrated for having “broken the mould”, yet the mould for some of our shoes does not even exist. As more women and others with non-standard bodies enter public service, it is time for our institutions to catch up. We don’t want to think about our shoes; we just want to put our best foot forward”, she writes.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Sabyasachi Das, Assistant Professor of Economics at 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?
Sabyasachi Das: I am not a gender expert. So, let me suggest something at the intersection of women's work and politics (my forte), specifically, war. Goldin (1991) writes about how World War II contributed to the rise of female employment in the US (see Brodeur and Kattan (2022) for a more recent take on this debate). Dube and Harish (2020) show, rather convincingly, how queens in mediaeval Europe engaged in more wars than kings, complicating the narrative that women leaders are good for peace.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
The blog post titled "Dangerous Paternalism" by
discusses an interesting and potentially research-worthy issue of banning women in various Indian states from working in certain "risky" occupations and its potential adverse impacts.
Is there a film that you can recommend which, in your opinion, does a good job of portraying the world of work?
Unorthodox is a terrifying portrayal of how social norms and expectations can inhibit the dreams and aspirations of women even in one of the most liberating and cosmopolitan cities, New York. My Brilliant Friend (2018) is a beautiful adaptation of Elana Ferrante's novels and depicts the complexities of women's friendship and solidarity in a working class neighbourhood of post-war Naples, Italy.
And a book that did the same?
I have an odd recommendation: AIDS Sutra, a book project commissioned by the Gates Foundation with a forward written by Amartya Sen, selected the who's who from the literary firmament in India and sent them out to different parts of the country to write about the communities affected by the malady. Salman Rushdie writes about the transgender community in Mumbai, Aman Sethi writes about truck drivers, Kiran Desai about sex workers in Andhra Pradesh, William Dalrymple about devdasis etc. The book depicts, with great literary fervour, the myriad lives and works of Indians who deal in the market for desire.
⏳Throwback
“A woman who works over eight hours a day stitching garments or rolling bidis in her home is often not counted a worker, she is viewed as a housewife doing a little something in her ‘leisure-time’. A street vendor selling vegetables or cutlery is also not a worker, he is a ‘nuisance’ to be removed by the police as soon as possible. A woman who spends the entire day looking after her cattle, weeding her farm, collecting firewood and caring for the family is a rural ‘housewife’.
Is a worker then only a man working in a factory or an office? What is the idea of work that downgrades most forms of work and only recognises certain limited forms?”
So begins an essay by Ela Bhatt and Renana Jhabvala published in the Economic and Political Weekly in November 2004. Titled ‘The Idea of Work’, Bhatt and Jhabvala explore different concepts and approaches and try to unravel what is work. It is a remarkably provocative essay that challenges us to question our own understanding of what is labour, employment and work, and in the process sheds light on the many layers of women’s labour.
Towards the end, the authors quote Puriben Ahir, a woman who does several types of work often involving hard manual labour. She says, “My whole life has been a search for getting enough to eat for my family, having enough water, sending my children to school and just being able to live a decent life. I have never been afraid to work, in fact for us work is life.” Read the essay here.
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 ceda@ashoka.edu.in.
Curated by: Akshi Chawla for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian