Women & Work - what caught our attention in March 2024
Women & Work - what caught our attention in March 2024
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
In this month’s edition, we bring you some encouraging initiatives, worrying findings on the state of legal equality for women in the workforce, research on how female leadership impacts workplace cultures, and of course, a bunch of recommendations on all things women and work. We hope you will find these useful.
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
Around the world, women enjoy only 64 percent of legal protections related to workforce participation that men do, the latest edition of the World Bank’s flagship report ‘Women, Business and the Law’ has found. Further, in 37 countries, women are granted less than half of the legal rights of men. The gap widens in practice – in addition to granting women fewer rights, economies have, on average, established less than 40 percent of the systems needed for full implementation of those laws, the report notes further. This year, the report in its tenth edition, includes two additional indicators – violence and childcare - and consequently, the global gender gap for women in the workplace is found to be wider than previously estimated. Read the full report here.
An Akka Cafe (“Akka” means elder sister in Kannada) opened in Bengaluru on the occasion of women’s day. Over 200 such cafes are set to be established across Karnataka as part of an initiative of the state’s National Livelihood Mission under the Department of Skill Development, Entrepreneurship and Livelihood. The cafes will be run by members of various self-help groups and the aim is to empower women entrepreneurs. Read more here.
In possibly an industry-first initiative of the kind, fast-moving consumer goods company Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) has introduced a Foster and Kinship Caregiver leave policy. The policy will offer up to four weeks of leave to employees who opt for pre-adoption foster care or become legal guardians of children within the extended family. The policy is an acknowledgement of “diverse familial arrangements”, the company said in a press release. Read more about the initiative in this report in The Economic Times.
In a press release, automobile manufacturing group Renault Group has said that it has closed the gender wage gap within the organisation. In fact, the group said it had managed to do so ahead of its internal target of 2025. Read more here.
How did the world mark International Women’s Day 2024? ICYMI: Here’s a visual round-up of rallies, protests and celebrations from across the globe in The Guardian.
💡Research Spotlight
Having more women in workplaces across the hierarchy and pipeline is essential by itself. Representation matters, and equitable representation of different groups in workplaces and other aspects of public life is a good in itself.
But does having women in leadership roles also impact workplace culture?
New research from Turkey by Sule Alan, Gozde Corekcioglu, Mustafa Kaba, and Matthias Sutter suggests that it does.
The researchers use a variety of data covering over 2,000 white-collar professionals from 24 large corporations in Turkey with the aim to understand the role of female leadership in shaping the relational culture in the workplace. The data includes responses to cognitive tests, behavioural tasks, surveys as well as administrative data on promotions and attrition.
What do the authors find? Essentially two things:
Male and female leaders are not similar in their skill-sets and cognitive abilities: Leaders across both genders are similar when it comes to “fluid IQ” (or abstract reasoning ability - and also the strongest predictor of being in a leadership position), verbal creativity, and altruism. But female leaders were less competitive, more “risk averse”** and less cooperative than male leaders. On the other hand, the women leaders had higher cognitive empathy and held more “modern gender role beliefs” as compared to their male counterparts. The authors argue that these differences illustrate “that progression into leadership positions does not require women to possess male-like attributes”.
The gender of the leader makes a difference to the team culture: The researchers find that women subordinates working under a female leader were more likely to receive professional and personal support than those reporting to male leaders. For male employees, there was no difference in support - they were equally likely to receive support from male and female leaders.
Further, those reporting to female leaders were more likely to form support ties with other female colleagues (this was true of both male and female employees), but teams/departments led by men were more likely to exhibit male homophily. Women employees reporting to female leaders were slightly less likely to quit their jobs versus those reporting to male leaders.
And yet, despite these differences, more than half the employees in the dataset expressed a preference to work under men, and those working under female leaders were likely to report lower workplace satisfaction (with female employees more likely to exhibit these negative perceptions). The researchers speculate that this is likely due to female leaders being judged more harshly than their male counterparts.
(**We use risk-averse only because it is the term used by the study authors. Whether women are more risk-averse or risk-aware remains a moot point for us).
📊Datapoint
The use of contraceptive methods in India has seen a steady increase in the past three decades, data from various rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows. While in 1992-93, 40.7 percent of women (aged 15-49) reported that they (or their partners) were using some form of contraception, by 2019-21, this share had increased to 66.7 percent.
But #didyouknow? Much of the increase in contraception use in India in the past three decades can be attributed to the increase in the adoption of one particular method: female sterilisation. Read more in our analysis here.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Lalit Contractor, 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?
Lalit Contractor: I would recommend the comprehensive survey by Matthias Doepke and Michelle Tertilt, which considers decisions made within a family, such as labour supply, fertility choices, human capital investment etc. from a macroeconomic perspective.
I would also like to highlight one paper among the many discussed in that survey that I found deeply rewarding, titled 'Yours, Mine, and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?' by Alessandra Voena (AER 2015). Voena sets up and estimates a structural model of decision making within a household in an environment where divorce can be either unilaterally chosen or mutually agreed upon, and the household's assets upon divorce could be distributed either equitably or to the title-holders. She then considers the impact of alternative divorce law and property division regimes on the saving and labour supply choices of spouses, and uses her setup to conduct counterfactual analyses in a display that marries theoretical rigour and computational virtuosity.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
At the conclusion of the men's singles final of the Indian Wells tennis tournament last weekend, the broadcasters mentioned that Indian Wells remains unusual among the non-Grand Slam tournaments in offering equal prize money to male and female players. An article in the New York Times chronicles the progress made and challenges remaining in the battle for pay parity in tennis; which has greater relevance with the recent decisions of the cricket boards in India, England and Australia to offer pay parity, and the struggles of women footballers in achieving a similar outcome.
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?
The Italian television series, 'My Brilliant Friend', based on the Neapolitan quartet of novels by Elena Ferrante, is a wonderful portrait of the challenges faced by the two young female protagonists as they seek to leave behind the grubby, conservative neighbourhood they grew up in and actively shape their destinies in the rapidly changing Italian society of the late twentieth century. The third season, which adapts the third novel in the series, is particularly resonant about the daily struggles of female workers in blue and white collar jobs.
And a book that did the same?
'Outline' by Rachel Cusk is at once a clever experiment in form and an utterly absorbing novel. Structured as a series of conversations between Faye, a writer visiting Athens to teach a creative writing course, and a range of people she meets during her stay there, the character Faye is gradually illuminated on the basis of her thoughtful, often striking responses to the near monologues of her interlocutors covering a range of concerns, personal and professional.
⏳Throwback
In 1945, workers working in Ireland’s laundries went on strike to protest the harsh working conditions and to demand more paid holidays. Laundry work at the time largely employed women workers who worked from morning to night, and often earned less than workers in other industries. The strike began in July of 1945 and lasted over 13 weeks (hospital laundry workers were exempt from the strike). Over 1,500 workers from 14 laundries struck work. The strike impacted Ireland’s hotel industry significantly.
The workers won the right to two weeks of paid leave, and this was eventually extended to all workers in the country.
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