Women’s Work in India: Has anything changed? – C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

There has already been much discussion about the low rates of employment growth in India that are reflected in the latest large sample round to the NSSO surveys. One of the features that has contributed to this decline in employment growth in the most recent five year period is the slump in female employment, which can be considered as one of the more important elements in the overall deceleration of employment generation.

As was shown in a previous article (”The Latest Employment Trends from the NSSO”), applying the participation rates of the NSSO survey of 2009-10 to interpolated population figures from Censuses 2001 and 2011 shows that total female employment actually declined at an annual rate of 1.72 per cent between 2004-05 and 2009-10, while male employment (mostly in casual work) showed a slight increase, albeit much lower than in the previous period, at the rate of 1.72 per cent.

Clearly, this is a significant and potentially very disturbing result, especially given that women’s work participation rates are already quite low in India compared to most other parts of the developing world. It should be borne in mind, of course, that work participation rates as described by official surveys are not really good indicators of the productive contributions of women.

This is particularly so in large parts of India, where much of the economic activity of women, whether in the home or outside, is simply not recognised as such by other household members and even by the women themselves. A significant part of women’s work is not just unpaid, therefore: it is also socially unrecognised. This is true of not just social reproduction, but other economic activity where women’s work is rendered invisible by social perceptions.

That is why many social scientists take women’s work participation rate as one of the proxy indicators of women’s overall status in society and of gender empowerment. It is not just because paid work provides income individually to women rather than to male members of the household. It is also because the productive contribution of women is typically less recognised in societies where women are undervalued in general.

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