The number of women in India’s workforce has fallen so sharply that it has skewed the global numbers, prompting an International Labour Organization investigation.
The study has found that while higher educational enrolment and problems with data explain some of this decline, exclusion of women from fast-growing sectors of India’s economy is a very real problem.
Labour force participation rate (LFPR) refers to the proportion of the working-age population that is either employed or seeking work. Female LFPR generally tends to be lower than male. Overall, female LFPR in India declined by 10% between 2005 and 2010. Out of 131 countries globally, the 2010 numbers place India 11th from the bottom.
“Globally, female labour force participation stands at 51.1%, going up to 66.4% in East Asia but falling to 31.8% in South Asia,” says SherVerick, senior employment specialist at the ILO, New Delhi. “Only Pakistan is worse off than India in South Asia,” adds Verick.
Economists Steven Kapsos and Andrea Silberman of the ILO’s Employment Trends Unit began their investigation after India’s 2010 numbers for women in the labour force fell so sharply that global LFPR for both men and women diverged from ILO predictions. As reported earlier by TOI, female LFPR declined from an already low 33.3% for rural women in 2004-05 to 26.5% in 2009-10, and from 17.8% to 14.6% for urban women over the same p eriod.
Kapsos and Silberman looked at four major reasons that economists have put forward over the last few years to explain India’s falling female LFPR and calculated how much of the decline each of these factors accounted for. The first was increased female enrolment in education, an explanation that the Planning Commission subscribes to. Kapsos and Silberman found that this explained 1% of the 10% decline. The second, increased household incomes, explained another 1%.
The third explanation is one that former chief statistician Pronab Sen has frequently written about: problems with labour data measurement in the 2009-10 round of the National Sample Survey, which he says understated female LFPR. Kapsos and Silberman found problems not just with the 2009-10 NSS round, but also with the 2004-05 round which they say mistakenly overstated female LFPR. “Taken together, these measurement errors explain around 5% of the 10% decline between 2005 and 2010,” Kapsos explained.
Kapsos and Silberman say that the remaining nearly 3% of the 10% decline is because of women simply not being able to find the right employment opportunities. Moreover, when the data is seen over a 10 or 15-year period, measurement errors contribute far less, and the absence of economic opportunities is the major factor, Kapsos said.
While job opportunities are shrinking for both men and women because of changes in the Indian economy, women are hit far worse because they tend to be concentrated in sectors of the economy that are simply not growing, points out Kapsos. “So in India’s 10 fastest growing occupations between 1994 and 2010, women accounted for less than 40% of the employment growth in nine out of 10 occupations (the exception being teaching associate professionals, where they had a 43.8% share of the employment growth). They accounted for less than 30% of the employment growth in eight out of the 10 occupations,” Kapsos explains. Mining, construction, manufacturing and transport are the fastest-growing sectors, followed by agriculture and fisheries.
“The big question going forward for India as the Economic Survey identifies as well is where will the jobs come from? Added to this is the question: where are the jobs for women going to come from?” says Verick.
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