Vulnerable Jobs: Women Participation In Workforce At Risk in India

It’s a hard juggling between the two – a baby who needs to be fed, cleaned and amused every other hour and a computer screen where messages and instructions pop up at regular intervals, demanding her continuous attention.

As her firm expanded business after the Covid lockdown, it gave options to many support staff to resign and rejoin as part-time consultants, working out of homes, on a fixed package without medical and retirement benefits.

“It seemed like a good idea then. My baby was on the way ... What I lost was the social security benefits of a regular salaried job and the ability to work in an atmosphere where I could give undivided attention to my job,” said Tiwari as she breast-fed her child.

“My job quality and quality of life was compromised,” she mused.

In a country where participation of women in labour force is just 37 per cent, the percentage of regular salary earners among women has been declining – from 55 per cent in July-September 2022 to 52.8 per cent in the same period in 2023, according to the National Sample Survey Organisation’s latest periodic labour force survey.

Analysts feel this trend has emerged as more and more women find themselves pushed out of a regular job to casual employment.

At the same time the number of self-employed women, including those who do the kind of work that Tiwari now does, increased from 37.7 per cent in September 2022 to 40.3 per cent in September 2023.

For men, the percentage of salaried people has gone up marginally from 46.9 per cent in September 2022 to 47 per cent in September 2023 as has the number of self-employed from 40.2 per cent to 40.4 per cent.

“Historically there is a trend of women earning less than men, the new emerging trend of women being pushed out of regular employment will simply increase this disparity,” said Samata Biswas, a gender studies expert at Calcutta’s Sanskrit University who also does research on labour migration with the think-tank Calcutta Research Group.

A Bains & Co-Google report, which came out during the pandemic, pointed out that women hold most of the administrative and data processing jobs that “artificial intelligence and other technologies threaten to usurp.”

“This is a future threat to the power balance in society and places women workers at great risk,” agreed Biswas.

Pointed out Prof Biswajit Dhar, formerly of JNU, “salaried women workers have some social benefits which accrue to them. Pushing them out of this status means denial of those benefits. The policy implications of this is that the State will have to create a new social net to capture this large number of people who are being denied simple benefits.”

Dhar said the Arjun Sengupta report on the unorganised sector workers had pointed out some two decades ago that the government needs to design social welfare measures to address the total lack of a safety net for the then 340-million-strong workforce.

“As competitive welfare steps are taken by the federal and state governments, we hope this is also addressed. Politically women form an important part of the population accounting for half our populace even though their participation in the workforce is far lower,” said Dhar.

India’s labour force participation rate for women or the proportion of working-age women who engage regularly in the labour market has declined progressively from 42.7 per cent in 2004-05 to 25.1 per cent in the pandemic year of 2021, although it has risen to 37 per cent in 2023.

Compared to that, China has 61 per cent of its women regularly engaging in the labour force, while the world on an average has 47 per cent of women participating in the labour force.

“When this narrow band of women are hit by less regular or lower quality jobs or by unemployment it means harder times not only for them but also a lowering of their status in society,” said Biswas.

Women tend to have a higher unemployment rate than men in any case in India. For all age groups, the percentage of unemployed women in July-September 2023 was 8.6 per cent compared to 6 per cent for men. In the crucial age group of 15-29, the percentage was far higher for unemployed women at 22.9 per cent compared to men (15.5 per cent).

Till artificial intelligence takes over her work or falling industrial competitiveness of Indian toy-makers vis-à-vis East Asian rivals forces her employers to shut shop, Tiwari will have to continue toiling from her 710-square-foot home which she shares with her baby, husband, mother-in-law and two sister-in-laws.

“At least I have an income … times are tough and they say there are few job openings for women these days,” said the young lady with one eye on the computer screen and another on the tea spilling on her kitchen stove.