THE CHALLENGES FACED BY WOMEN AT WORK VIJAYALAKSHMI RAJU LAW CRITIQUE Mon, May 27, 2019, at ,12:48 PM Last week, UK charity Oxfam released a report on income inequality at the World Economic Forum. According to the report, inequality has a “female face” in India. Firstly, women miss out on opportunities for paid work due to the disproportionate burden of unpaid work. Where an average Indian woman puts in about five hours in unpaid care work every day, an average man puts in only 30 minutes, says the report. This keeps women poor and unable to invest in their own well-being. Secondly, even when women engage in paid employment, they are likely to get paid less than men. According to the report, the gender pay gap in India is at 34 percent. This corroborates a report by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in May, which found that even with the same qualifications, women earned 30 percent less than men. Thirdly, and consequently, women are pushed into a position of social disadvantage where their needs, including those of schooling and health, are neglected first when resources are scarce. Likewise, when the government reduces spending on essential services, women are the first ones to lose out. Hence, gender-based income inequality in India is rooted in significant proportion to women being economically inactive, given the gendered division of roles, and social barriers like restrictions on mobility. The national data on female labor force participation rate (FLFPR) suggests the issue of female labor participation is aggravating, instead of improving. According to NSS data, the FLFPR, which was 33 percent in 2005, fell to 23.7 percent in 2011-12 (still the latest available official estimate). This is much lower than the figures of neighboring countries such as Bangladesh (29 percent), Nepal (52 percent) and Sri Lanka (34 percent) and way below economic behemoths such as China (51 percent) and the US (56 percent). Although the FLFPR - calculated as the number of women in the labor force per 1,000 persons - has declined in both urban and rural areas, this drop is much steeper in rural areas. Between 1993 and 2011, the FLFPR declined from 165 to 155 per 1,000 persons in urban areas, whereas it declined from 330 to 253 in rural areas during the same period. Intergenerational division of landholdings to smaller sizes, decreasing opportunities in farm-related work and the lack of formal sector opportunities have been cited as some of the reasons for this decline in rural areas. Counterintuitively, this FLFPR is poorer in lower income slabs and does not increase with education. Major urban centers such as Delhi and Mumbai have only 196 and 188 female workers per 1,000 workers, respectively. In contrast, matrilineal states in the Northeast have many more female workers. Moreover, a high proportion of economically active women work in the informal sector, bereft of any benefits or rightful wages. Even in the formal sector, occupational disaggregation shows that women are concentrated in a few sectors such as education, healthcare, and miscellaneous services. Workplaces are more often than not marked by stereotypical perceptions on abilities and lack of basic infrastructure and facilities. Take, for instance, the country’s two largest employers - Indian Railways and the Indian Army. Both are public sector organizations and committed to non-discriminatory equal chances of employment. The railways have more than 1.3 million staff, of which only 2-3 percent are female employees. Earlier this month, the railways officially sought permission from the Department of Personnel and Training to exclude women from some of its field jobs such as drivers, porters, guards, and track inspectors. Its argument was that these are ‘tough’ jobs for women. As some of these jobs require night-time availability and female employees reportedly complained of unsafe working environments, the railways opted to seek such permission instead of building infrastructure and taking responsibility. According to a recent report by Outlook magazine, while the railways have about 500 female train drivers, about 80 percent of them are engaged ‘voluntarily’ in desk jobs. Instead of the required 70,000 km a year, female drivers log in only about 500 km, found an RTI reply as women are given short-distance trips due to lack of toilets in the drivers’ cabin. Similarly, last month, Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat spoke extensively about difficulties in putting women in frontline combat roles. His concerns included readiness of the army (constituted mostly from men belonging to rural areas) to accept commands from a woman and the country to accept bodies of mothers as a war casualty. He also spoke about difficulties in providing women-centric facilities, which is insufficient, may trigger complaints of someone “peeping” while changing and some women may “create a ruckus” if denied maternity leave. Notably, a female lieutenant colonel had to file a petition in the Supreme Court against getting posted in an area with no child care facilities when her appeal to the army authorities fell on deaf ears. However, policy concerns appear to be fraught with numbers, not the women they represent. Putting the onus on women, Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar stated at a recent CII meet that women should not be counted as unemployed as they “do not work by choice”. By not counting them, the numbers of those unemployed would go down, he argued. The recently released NITI Aayog’s strategy for a new India @ 75 sets a target to achieve an FLFPR of at least 30 percent by 2022. If more women were to work in the organized sector, the country’s GDP would increase by 1.4 percent, says the strategy document. It discusses several approaches to it - facilities such as safe transport, residential hostels, crèches, and flexible work arrangements. However, in its utilitarian and single-minded concern with GDP numbers, the report fails to offer any policy perspective on the social aspects of women’s labor. Some of the serious omissions include the failure to refer to paternity leave to challenge stereotypical gender roles and the issue of equal inheritance rights, which could provide women with essential capital for entrepreneurship. The Oxfam report, however, estimates that unpaid work done by women is already worth about 3.1 percent of the national GDP. In the ultimate analysis, women’s participation in the economy is not about a monetary gender dividend that must be tapped into, but about rights that must be freely exercised by women as citizens. One that is crucial to eliminating poverty and improving their social status.