Where Will All the Women Work?

As expected, the prolonged national lockdown has added significantly to the rolls of the unemployed, with the figure jumping to 27.1 per cent for the week ended 3 May 2020, according to the CMIE database, and adding to the already dismal pre-COVID-19 jobs scene. This unusually high unemployment rate will deflate once the government allows economic activity to restart in phases, but it is a fair bet that it will retain its status as crisis number one as consumers hunker down until a viable COVID-19 vaccine erases the need for social distancing. One related but little noticed casualty of the post-COVID-19 slowdown is the deleterious impact on gender equality.

India has never been a frontrunner in the global rankings on gender equality, but the country’s position has deteriorated sharply since 2006, the year the World Economic Forum began its Global Gender Gap Index. In the latest report of December 2019, India slipped four places to 112 out of 153 countries and altogether 14 places from its 2006 ranking. On the four metrics on which the index is based—health, education, economy and politics—India’s performance deteriorated on the first three.

This underperformance isn’t particularly eye-opening even to a casual observer of the Indian social scene. The worrying point is that India wallowed in the bottom five in the company of such regimes as Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Iraq in terms of economic opportunities for women.

Poor access to economic opportunity is reflected potently in India’s famously poor female labour force participation rates. In 2011–2012, the ratio, at 33.1 per cent, was low enough to attract a barrage of analysis. By 2017–2018, the ratio had slipped 7.8 percentage points to 25.3 per cent; the fall being double the rate for males. Since this slippage coincided with a 45-year high in unemployment when the economy slowed under the successive double whammies of demonetization and a crashed deadline for introducing the Goods and Services Tax, it is safe to say that Indian women bore the brunt of the Modi government’s economic policies.

Now, they will be the bigger victims of the post-COVID-19 slowdown. This trend is hard to spot since women typically melt back into family lives when jobs are lost—one reason, CMIE’s Mahesh Vyas had suggested, for the lack of public protest against widespread joblessness. Taken together with societal conservatism among the poor and lower middle class towards working women, the possibility of narrowing India’s gender gap in the near future appears remote. These attitudes had softened when economic expansion created opportunities for women, and the upsides of an extra income became evident.

The lifting of the lockdown is likely to pause this trend. The first jobs that will be up for grabs will be those traditionally regarded as maleoriented—on construction sites, infrastructure building and in factories. We know there is no reason women cannot do these jobs, nor is the binary attitude towards work a valid one. In Jharkhand, for instance, women masons (the famous rani mistris) helped construct toilets under the Swachh Bharat programme; equally in Lucknow, the delicate zardozi embroiderers are all male. But in a patriarchal society such as India, employers and business owners are mostly men and they habitually make this distinction. Thus, engineering factory floors employ men; electronics and garments are for women. Why Indian women are not considered for work on, say, a car or defence assembly plant (as they do elsewhere in the world) has never been adequately explained.

Now, a possible change in labour laws may militate against women even further. This is an extension of daily shift hours from eight hours six days a week (or 48 hours), mandated under the Section 51 of the Factories Act of 1948 to 12 hours six days a week (or 72 hours a week). Although the notion is prompted by the need to keep supply chains flowing, such extended hours will make it difficult for women, who bear a disproportionate burden of home and childcare, to seek employment. One vital gender-empowering mandate of the first Modi government, that organizations with 50 or more employees must set up day-care facilities and crèche services, has been observed more in the breach.

The innate gender biases of the Indian factory floor have been less in evidence in the services sector—from finance and accountancy to hospitality to IT and even airlines. Unlike Indian manufacturing, which has been stagnating for some years, services has been growing consistently, and economic growth, as we have seen, has the virtue of forcing employers to moderate any innate gender discrimination they may privately harbour. From airline pilots to sommeliers, valet parking services, sports commentators and delivery professionals, Indian women had started making inroads in professions that had traditionally excluded them before. Now these sectors too are likely to see slower growth. As for discretionary services, such as hotels, pubs, gyms, malls and beauty parlours and airlines, which tend to have a relatively high complement of female employees, the outlook is poor. They are likely to be subject to the lockdown for longer than the rest of the economy, and, when they do open, lingering fears of infection will keep the crowds away.

Given the deep-seated prejudices of Indian society, it is possible to predict the resurgence of the pervasive gender bias as the pool of available jobs, whether in manufacturing, construction or in services, shrinks. So next year’s Gender Gap Index will not make for pretty reading.