Abstract
In India, formation of NGO-aided self-help groups (SHGs) for production was seen as an important step to lift women out of economic marginalisation and, thus, for women’s empowerment. With changes in economic policies, challenges of wage employment for women were also assumed to have been addressed. In this context, this article, drawing from the history of empowerment discourse and its obsession with the economic aspect, examines women’s employment and its multiple dimensions The analysis provides insights into the gender-based inequalities in the labour market which are evident in the concentration of women workers in precariat, feminised jobs either under the control of the family or without any recognition or legal protection. The prevalence of regressive gendered ideologies in employment and in the division of housework raises critical questions about the understanding of the two critical pillars of empowerment, namely, choice and agency.
Introduction
Feminist scholarship and activism have appreciated the diversity of experiences of women arising out of their lived realities. There have been many challenges to this position that argued for a differentiated approach, especially with the changes in the larger social, economic and political spheres since the 1990s. The disappearance of structural issues and women’s resistance from the discussions marks these changes. In the new approach, concepts and definitions were developed mostly outside the critical feminist scholarship which tends to simplify the lives of women and thus solutions to them. The NGO-isation of interventions and the predominance of development thinking were part of these shifts, and the history of the women’s empowerment discourse could be located to this phase.
Right from the Beijing Platform for Action, the need to promote women’s economic independence and ensuring equal access to productive resources, including employment, have been highlighted. The World Bank was the first agency that explicitly adopted the concept of women’s economic empowerment in its programmes. The centrality of the market and the belief that the market would be able to address gender inequality are clear from the definition of the term. Economic empowerment to the World Bank is about making markets work for women (at the policy level) and empowering women to compete in markets (at the agency level) (World Bank, 2006). The Millennium Development Goals pushed for women’s empowerment through an increase in the share of women in non-agricultural employment. They also highlighted the need for full employment with decent work for women as part of addressing poverty. An important marker of this thinking was that women’s lives in poor countries could be changed through economic empowerment. This understanding led to many initiatives both at the international and national levels towards promoting economic opportunities for women.
The concept of empowerment, especially economic empowerment, has been widely criticised by feminist scholars for its limited understanding. Most women, like the poor, do not own assets. For women, use of physical or emotional labour is also not mostly at their will but is structurally determined, and they are rarely in a position to negotiate, given the unequal power relations. This lack of acknowledgement of structural aspects of inequality and its multiple dimensions in the conceptualisation of empowerment was the most important critique of the concept. Failure of economic solutions to address social and cultural dimensions of inequality and the interconnected nature of these inequalities, leading to continued marginalisation and oppression of women, were highlighted by many studies (Kabeer, 2011, 2008). These critical engagements could not break the belief in the capacity and possibilities of the market, and thus in the emancipation of women, through economic solutions. However, the concept of empowerment opened its door to accommodate other dimensions, with agency and choice of women gaining acceptance. Thus, many agencies and organisations have tweaked the economistic definition to include other domains of women’s lives, integrating concepts like agency, choice and decision-making, though mostly within the market-oriented framework. This shift has definitely altered the definition of women’s empowerment, incorporating some of the critical components. To quote Kabeer (2019),
empowerment means creating the conditions that will expand the possibilities for the lives we can imagine for ourselves, for the life choices we can make, for the life chances available to us—rather than having to live lives that have been imposed on us by the laws, customs and norms of our society, laws, customs and norms which we did not have a say in.
However, the ways to achieve this remained more or less limited, either through economic interventions or through project-based advocacy programmes for diverse issues, dispersed in terms of location. Most of these interventions were based on the assumption that poor women lack resources and thus lending of credit would help them to take up productive activities, leading to overall development. However, as lending of resources to the poor is a very risky intervention, formation of women’s groups was thought to be the most effective way. The history of self-help groups (SHGs) and micro-credit groups in many developing countries could be located to this phase of development thinking. Marginal gains in select pockets of interventions remained the highlights of the success of the programme, with new interventions and advocacy programmes continuing unabated.
In India, the empowerment discourse has a long history, with economic empowerment being the main focus, as in many other developing economies. One of the most important initiatives during the 1980s, and a policy in the later decades, especially after liberalisation, has been of helping women become self-employed workers. Organisation of micro-credit arrangements and the formation of NGO-aided SHGs for production constituted the agenda of the ‘catch all, do all’ policy approach for lifting women out of economic marginalisation and to strive for their economic ‘empowerment’ (Neetha N., 2010). Skill development and training of women were also taken up extensively to draw more young women constrained by childcare and household responsibilities into production. The shift from a planned economy to a globalised market–based one was also projected to help in addressing some of the challenges of wage employment for women through the feminisation of specific sectors. Education was also an important aspect in framing women’s employment and development in the Indian context, defined through increased opportunities for skilled workforces with economic growth. These changes in the economic position were assumed to unleash women’s empowerment at the social level as well. Many states have achieved or are nearing to achieve gender parity in education, though many other social indicators still remain issues.
The labour market is one space where both education and economic interventions interact and thus an important site for analysing the larger questions of women’s economic empowerment (Elson, 1999). In this context, the article, drawing from the history of the empowerment discourse and its obsession with the economic dimension, examines women’s employment and its dimensions from the perspective of empowerment. The following section analyses two macro trends in employment, namely, work participation rates (WPR) and sectoral dimensions of employment, providing an overview of women’s employment. After highlighting some of the macro dimensions of employment, the article takes up two categories of women workers—self-employed and service sector workers—for specific analysis. These two categories, one for which wage employment is the key and the other that is a target group for most state interventions, provide useful insights into the two critical pillars of empowerment, namely, choice and agency.
Macro Trends in Women’s Employment: Are Women Better Placed?
Women’s workforce participation rates in India have always been low, and the rates have shown a steady decline since 1999–2000, led by a sharp fall in rural areas. 1 The Period Labour Force Survey (2017–2018), like the earlier National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) quinquennial survey Employment and Unemployment Situation in India, 2 has also revealed a perceptible and significant fall in female WPR. This fall in WPR is not merely in terms of proportion of workers to total female population, but is also a decline in the absolute number of workers, which is particularly troubling. In a period of about 12 years, that is, between 2004–2005 and 2017–2018, WPR for rural women fell from 33 per cent to 18 per cent (Table 1), with a fall in the absolute number of women workers of 46.91 million. 3 On the other hand, women’s WPR in urban areas remained stagnant, even with high rates of urbanisation, with a small increase in the absolute number. Though male WPR during the period has also declined, the decline was just 2 per cent, with an increase in the absolute number of male workers. This indicates the ongoing crisis of employment for women, which is a result of the continuing entry restrictions placed on women and the discrimination in the labour market evident in the sectoral concentration of women, as detailed later. Though the decline in WPR is true for all sections, the decline is specifically marked for certain categories, such as Muslim women, women from schedules castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) and the poor, revealing the intersection of gender with other forms of structural inequalities. Unemployment rates among women have also shown an increase, with the urban unemployment rate among women being 9 per cent in 2017–2018.
Workforce Participation Rates (1993–1994 to 2017–2018)
The broad sector-wise distribution (Table 2) shows the predominance of the primary sector, with agriculture accounting for about 73 per cent of all women workers in rural areas, even in 2017–2018. In agriculture, as is well documented, women are mostly unpaid helpers who are part of the family labour. The next section examines this dimension in detail. However, the share of agriculture in total female employment is declining, which is reflective of the larger structural changes in the economy. Manufacturing and construction show some increase, though remaining at a low level in rural areas, with only 8.1 and 5.3 per cent of women in these sectors. The share of services has increased over time, but it is still only 9 per cent. Given the diversity of the service sector, dominated by community and personal services (paid domestic workers and scheme workers), the shift to services does not offer much in terms of women’s empowerment, or even economic empowerment.
Distribution of Women Across Broad Sectors, 1993–1994 to 2017–2018 (rural)
Within construction industry, which has shown an increase since 1990s, women are largely outside large scale construction and are almost exclusively unskilled, casual and manual workers. They perform various unskilled jobs such as cleaning, carrying materials and sometimes cooking for male workers (Kakad, 2002). Irrespective of the number of years they have worked, job mobility from unskilled to skilled work is absent. Many women are also employed as part of family labour, where wages are not paid to them for their work but are given to the male member as a family wage (Mazumdar et al., 2013).
Distribution of Women Across Broad Sectors, 1993–1994 to 2017–2018 (urban)
Distribution of Women Workers Across Categories of the Service Sector
It is striking that it is not the modern and emerging service sectors such as IT, financial and business segment which are important areas of women’s employment. These sectors account for only 8 per cent of the total women workers in the service sector. It is important to note that these are sectors of aspiration for many young women from various segments of the middle class in small towns and cities. Education and domestic work (nannies/cooks) (private households with employed persons) are the two growth sectors that could be noted.
Education is the most important sector for women within services, accounting for about 30 per cent of women workers in total services. Within education, the concentration of women is observed in the lower rungs of the sector, though women’s presence is increasing across all the various segments. Thus, female teachers are concentrated either at the primary level of education and/or in jobs that are contractual. Education is probably the only sector where women may have access to regular income that could possibly alter gender relations. However, field studies have shown that the increased preference of women for employment in education is due to the social perception of this sector as a female-friendly one due to its ability to combine paid work with childcare because of work timings (Fatimah, 2011; Neetha N. & Mazumdar, 2010). Thus, if housework and childcare are central to women’s employment choice, the possibility of empowerment at large through women’s entry into such employment remains an issue.
Though education accounts for the largest segment in terms of growth in services, private households with employed persons, which is mostly paid domestic work, assumes special significance. Within a short period, there has been a phenomenal increase in the share of the latter sector, from 6.7 to 11.9 per cent. Yet another sector that has a concentration of women is health, where women workers are either mostly in nursing or paramedical services, where again the gendered ideology of women as carers is at work (Anand & Fan, 2016).
Thus, the data show that with a decline in WPR there has been a furthering of segregation based on gender. Further, the structural change in women’s employment, declining share of women in agriculture and shift to services did not necessarily mean a movement towards better and decent work, looking at the segregations of women’s employment, especially in the service sector, which makes one question the understanding of empowerment through economic opportunities.
Empowerment Through Self-employment: Of Unpaid Workers and Own-account Workers
Drawing from the assumptions and experiences of poverty programmes initiated in the Fifth Five-Year Plan 1974–1979 where women were target beneficiaries, the need to train and encourage women to take up income generating activities was stressed in all the subsequent five-year plans. The assumption that provision of infrastructural facilities would be of great support and help for women to start non-agricultural income-generating enterprises, thereby help poor households get rid of poverty, underlined many programmes/schemes in the 1970s and 1980s, which took a new direction in the 1990s.
Globalisation and the associated market-oriented economic model were assumed to address the issue of women’s low participation, which had been an issue since long. Implicit in the understanding of feminisation of the workforce were the possibilities of the informal sector as a stimulus to entrepreneurial energies in developing countries, especially for women. Thus, as discussed earlier, one of the most important policy initiatives through the 1990s, and the later decades, was the promotion of women as self-employed workers. This was based on the perception that beneficial effects of the market lay in expanding the relationship between women ‘entrepreneurs’ in the informal sector and wider markets (Neetha N., 2017). The formation of SHGs among poor women (who were unable to access the market individually or own their own assets) also got acceptance during this period for empowering women. Accordingly, the post-liberalisation period saw a boom in programmes initiated under various ministries promoting self-employment for women (Neetha N., 2010). These were, in any case, not universal but targeted in many cases below poverty line (BPL) women in rural areas were largely the focus.
Apart from the promotion of the SHG-based model of women’s empowerment, fostering women entrepreneurship was a key policy goal, as high rates of entrepreneurial activity are assumed to bring job creation and thus economic development. Though there are no well-formed public policies to promote female entrepreneurship, under various schemes there have been a special focus on women, including reservation for women, and an attempt to ensure equal access to finance for women, with some support measures such as provision of training on entrepreneurial skills. There have been many research studies on entrepreneurship and women’s empowerment, and many of these studies tend to promote the idea of an entrepreneurial self, which is resonated in many policy discussions as well. Women, because of their managerial skills, especially in terms of risk aversion and credit management, are often considered better positioned to manage tiny and small business enterprises. However, such assumptions are rarely made in the context of medium or large business enterprises, which makes these assumptions open to critical analysis. Studies have captured the constraints that women entrepreneurs often face, given the larger social and competitive economic context, which explains the larger reality of entrepreneurial challenges (Deshpande & Sharma, 2013).
In the last few years, there have also been attempts to create awareness, especially on entrepreneurship as an attractive career option, involving NGOs and other organisations coordinated by the National Skill Development Mission. The target group has largely been young women who are outside the labour force and are considering getting back into productive work. The support to start-ups, which is part of the Make in India mission, also has provisions for women entrepreneurs. Mudra is another entrepreneurial support scheme for women that is aimed at poor women who are unable to access credit through formal banks. Given all these policy backgrounds, it is imperative to examine the data on self-employment, which are often taken as a marker of self-employment and entrepreneurial activities, be they at the individual or collective level.
Categories of Self-employment
Only 19 per cent of the self-employed in rural areas are own-account workers (who get earnings for their work), while those in urban areas form 24 per cent. The share of women employers, those who employ wage workers, 5 is almost negligible at 1 per cent of the total self-employed, both in urban and rural areas. Much of the own-account work that women undertake is for survival and thus mostly exploitative (Mazumdar, 2005; Roy, 2009). A negligible proportion of women employers could be classified into the profitable category, with the rest falling in between but closer to that of own-account workers (Deshpande & Sharma, 2013).
One change over the years that could be noted is the rise in the share of own-account workers and employers and the fall in the share of unpaid helpers. However, in the context of the larger crisis in women’s employment, whether this could be seen as a positive change is not clear. In the context of the increasing difficulty faced by women in finding wage employment in any form, increased ‘self-employment’ could be the reflection of desperate attempts by women to earn some income through outsourced, piece-rated, home-based work (defined by NSSO as self-employment). Such an interpretation seems truer, given the poor earnings of such workers.
The average earnings 6 of self-employed women are low, the median wage being ₹4,000 in rural areas and ₹5,000 in urban areas, with about 65.5 per cent of all women being self-employed, having monthly earnings of less than ₹5,000 (Mondal et al., 2019). The precariat nature of many self-employed workers has been captured by many studies (Deshpande & Sharma, 2013; Roy, 2009). Many of these self-employed own-account workers are small vendors—selling from the roadside or from the window of their houses. As discussed earlier, a large proportion of self-employed women workers are also engaged in outsourced manufacturing work. As revealed by the macro data, wage rates are very low, whether piece-rate or by the hour. The vulnerability of these workers is high, given their dependency on the contractor for employment, without any form of social protection. Thus, it is clear that even paid self-employment is of a precarious nature and not expressive of any growing employment opportunities for women. However, whether this employment empowers women or not is a question that has multiple dimensions. For some, the familial recognition as a worker may not be present and sometimes they themselves are uncertain how to view their employment. For some, the turn to self-employment—to home-based work—has followed the loss of male wages and support, which is an indication of the worsening material and social conditions of their lives. Because of the harsh conditions of their work, many of these women look forward to a day when they do not have to work for survival (Roy, 2009).
Research in the context of many countries has revealed that fewer women than men say they would prefer to be self-employed (Kabeer, 2012). Self-employment programmes, even if they lead to employment increases in the short run, limit women’s participation in paid work to a supplementary position within the family and to low incomes and less skilled forms of work (Kalpana, 2011; Sharma, 2011). In many such initiatives, if labour costs were accounted, the returns from these schemes would be in question, compared to returns from wage work on the market. Further, an audit of the number of failed micro-enterprises based on loans from commercial banks would uncover the scale of financial losses incurred by poor women because of lack of adequate training and preparation. There are clear limits to how much these schemes can expand unless they are able to operate on the terms of the market. Even when women choose to become entrepreneurs, the reason cited is better work–life balance, whereby they divide their time between work and housework/care. This explains the reason for women’s businesses being small scale and limited to a few sectors/geographical location leading to poor earnings.
It is also important to note that many SHGs that were created for economic and social empowerment have now turned into organisations that collect funds and provide loans. The acceptance of SHGs has paved the way for other private credit agencies to use the women’s group or collective model for trapping women. Many women take these loans to meet the recurring deficits in consumption—buying of consumer durables, paying of education fees of children, purchase of jewellery, house maintenance, etc. Women workers find it difficult to repay the loan, which leads to the charging of exorbitant interest rates. Repeated failure in paying the weekly instalment is met with threats and violence, which many times have the support of powerful local men.
Empowerment Through Precariat Wage Employment
Women’s entry into wage work and its impact on their overall social status are debated issues, especially in the contemporary context. Most of the discussions on autonomy and agency in the context of wage employment have been largely in the context of new forms of service sector employment, such as those of IT, financial services, hospitality, etc. Women employed in the informal sector with low wages do not find much mention in these discourses.
PLFS data 8 show that there exist considerable wage differences across men and women in wage employment. For women regular workers, the average monthly wage rate was roughly ₹8,500 in rural areas which was about ₹5000 less than the wage rate of men in the same category. In the urban areas, the wage difference was still higher—₹7,000—with women’s average monthly wage being as low as ₹12,000. The difference is visible in employment wage rates, wages paid to women being ₹100 less than that paid to men, both in rural and urban areas. The data also show that in the non-agricultural sector, about 66.5 per cent of regular/salaried women workers do not have any contract of employment, 50.6 per cent are not eligible for leave, and 54.4 percent are not eligible for any social security benefit, which is suggestive of the nature of wage work where women are absorbed.
Many women take up waged work either because it gives them a better income compared to the self-employment opportunities that are available, given their assets, skills and networks. As has been evident in the discussions on sectoral employment, women are concentrated in sectors and occupations with lower pay and poor working conditions (Mazumdar, 2005). The economic and social roles of women prior to wage work and the nature of current employment are important parameters in delineating the overall impact on women. Many studies have acknowledged that women are mostly unable to take advantage of the opportunities that are available in the market due to social constraints. The poor WPR of women and wage differences between men and women are indicators of how unsuccessful markets are in addressing these inequalities. Paid domestic work, a sector that has seen unprecedented growth since the mid-1990s, has often figured in these discussions as a case of poor women from rural areas getting into urban informal wage employment. The concentration of women in low-paid precarious jobs such as paid domestic work further proves how markets function when such inequalities are socially accepted.
Studies have shown that the increased share of private households with employed persons is indicative of the lack of employment choices for poor women (Neetha N., 2015). Many of these domestic workers are migrants who are part of the well-documented distress migration of households from rural to urban areas in the event of a rural employment crisis. The conditions of employment and the exploitative nature of domestic work have led it to be among the worst informal sector occupations with a high degree of informality. Since household work and care functions are typically carried out by women and thus are devalued, domestic workers are the lowest paid, in addition to having limited or no opportunity for advancement. This is the sector where wages vary widely, and work conditions too, but where working relations are marked by intense individual control. More than the economic aspect of domestic work, it is the social aspect of this occupation that needs exposition in this context. The nature of work, housework, not only reinforces the gendered division of work but also the social identities of women who are engaged in paid domestic work. Most domestic workers who undertake the degraded task of cleaning work are from scheduled castes.
Migration to the city is often assumed to liberate women from the controls of the patriarchal family in general, which is often extended to this sector. Migration for domestic work cannot provide any direct empowerment to these women, with degraded working conditions at one end and stereotyped and gendered notions of their work at the other. The confinement of women strictly to the realm of reproductive labour (though paid) contributes to the devaluation of women’s economic status. Analyses have shown that the nature of work and working conditions do not indicate any positive change in the lives of women in such degraded employment (Neetha N., 2015).
Though economic reasons may push women into paid work, they are not free to take up any work. For women, unpaid care work and domestic chores are important determinants of their participation in work and the nature of work that they will take up. Many women who are in the lower rungs of the informal sector have to manage their care responsibilities, such as childcare, along with paid work. The disproportionate presence of women in home-based work and in part-time domestic work or seasonal work is due to various constraints that many women face, arising from either issues of mobility or the burden of housework/care work. Studies have shown that women shuttle between construction and domestic work, depending on employment availability and familial responsibilities (Coelho et al., 2013; Chigateri et al., 2015; Neetha N., 2015). Many poor women carry their young children to the workplace or leave them with elder siblings, who may be a year or few years elder to them, or leave them at home all alone. In construction sites, it is very common to see small children who have accompanied their mothers for want of any other carer in their homes.
If new categories of wage employment are based on a regressive, gendered ideology or are extensions of existing social values, the overall impacts of such changes on women are bound to be adverse. The cases of anganwadi and other scheme workers, who are not recognised by the state as workers and are paid only a small honorarium, are evidences of the state’s understanding of women’s employment as secondary, based on the patriarchal ideology. The lack of acknowledgment of the contribution that such ‘volunteer workers’ make to the economy is also reflective of the state’s understanding of women’s empowerment. Further, whether or not entry into wage work helps women bring changes in their lives, questioning discrimination, be it in the labour market or in the family, which is beyond the immediate economic domain, is a question that is critical for empowerment.
Women’s employment decisions are also constrained by existing sociocultural practices. Social and cultural restrictions, though differing across regions and communities and having been redefined over time, are important dimensions for analysing women’s labour market participation. Though households in both rural and urban areas are open to educating their daughters, education is still seen not as an investment for employment but as an engagement till marriage. Women who negotiate and overcome sociocultural barriers are few, and they remain out of employment, unless they are forced to work because of household poverty. Poor responses to initiatives like ‘Skill India’ and ‘Make in India’, where special quotas/provisions for women exist, show how women and their households perceive labour market opportunities for women.
Empowerment Through Employment: Challenges and Policy Implications
The above evidences of gender-based inequalities in the labour market, in terms of both female WPR and sectoral and occupational concentrations, raise questions about the understanding of empowerment through employment. Among the self-employed, high proportions of unpaid workers are notable, especially in rural areas. Though own-account work shows an increase over time, data on earnings suggest that this is due to the desperate entry of women for survival. It is important to note that the International Labour Organization classifies both own-account work and unwaged family labour as ‘vulnerable’ work offering little or no remuneration, characterised by risk and uncertainty and outside the remit of legal and social protection. Women’s location within the family and their always being under the watch of other male members do not offer any scope for other empowerment dimensions.
In this context, to frame poor women’s decision to take up self-employment as a matter of choice, given their low status and earnings, would be stretching the limits of the concept of ‘choice and agency’. On the one hand, women who are self-employed receive wages or income independently of other family members. Even if one assumes that women have more control over this income (which is not always true), it is mostly used to feed themselves and their children, pay school fees, buy medicines, etc. Thus, there could be some possible ‘agency’ in terms of their control over their income, but how much of that is translated into redefining gendered power relations is an important aspect for the understanding of women’s agency and empowerment.
Though wage employment could offer opportunities for women to exercise ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, the concentration of female wage workers in feminised sectors raises questions. Data on women’s work participation across education levels reconfirms the lack of choice for many women but to take up employment that is available. The WPR of illiterate women and that of those with education below primary schooling were about 28 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively, in 2017–2018, whereas the rates for women with secondary and higher secondary education levels were only 14 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively. Given the high correlation between education and economic conditions, this points to the lack of choice for many women but to take up employment that is available, based on the gendered understanding of work. Women in domestic and construction work mostly fall into these categories. Thus, if underpaid domestic work, based on the social understanding of women’s skills, is the only option for many women, can this be taken as women’s choice? Female informal sector workers, owing to the nature of labour relations, are highly unorganised and thus lack a collective voice. Given the gendered power relations in workplaces, individualised system of employment, negotiation and bargaining and absence of unionisation, women are mostly unable to exercise any agency in the workplace, which is reflected in their social life as well.
On the other hand, there are studies to suggest that in many contexts, women’s participation in wage employment has played a positive role in increasing their bargaining power at home and in enabling them to escape the patriarchal controls. It could be true that waged female workers show more positive results in certain dimensions of empowerment than other women, especially in economic terms. Informal wage work may allow women to have control over their own incomes and also over household expenditures. Here also, recognition of work, regularity of wages and social protection have the potential of making this sustainable. However, in the context of most informal sector workers, including paid domestic workers, these are critical concerns, as many are outside the frame of many labour laws.
A much-discussed issue of the continued prevalence of gender inequality is the evidence that women’s entry into paid work has not redefined gender division in housework. Women still remain responsible for all unpaid housework, even when they are in paid work, which includes cooking, cleaning, care for children, care for the sick, etc. There is enough evidence of women being denied employment due to the possibility of them taking leaves to meet life cycle or care demands. In many cases, married women drop out of the workforce when they have children, as they have to shoulder the burden of childcare in the absence of adequate maternity and childcare support for working mothers. If housework is a responsibility of women even when they are in employment and may be contributing equally or more to their family’s survival, what are its implications on women’s work burden and their status? Women often work longer hours compared to men, which is often captured as ‘time poverty’ (Hirway, 2010).
From the discussions above, it is clear the ability of the market to provide increased economic opportunities and to alter structural inequalities seems to be oversimplifying the social realities. On the other hand, markets are found to use the existing inequality and ‘structures of constraint’ (Folbre, 1994) to their advantage, which is evident in the gendered inequalities in the labour market. In this context, greater policy focus is required to ensure that women are able to benefit from the overall growth of the economy.
State policies towards women’s employment have been not only limited but also largely arbitrary. One of the reasons for poor female labour force participation is the lack of suitable employment for women, that is, the disparity between what they can do and what is available to them. Given the U-shaped pattern as regards women’s education and employment, policies are required to address the employment needs of women in different educational and skill cohorts. The assumption that women are looking for self-employment options may be true for some women with specific social and economic contexts. Even when entrepreneurship is the choice, there are specificities to different possibilities, the larger distinction being involvement in production or provision of services. These sectors in themselves are diverse and have specific challenges. Skill-training programmes, entrepreneurial or otherwise, are mostly based on a unified understanding of women’s capacities and requirements and thus offer less or no possibilities for diversity. Apart from providing technical support, policies are required to address the patriarchal character of the institutions that women may have to engage with, as part of their work. The struggle that women have to face when negotiating with such institutions and the uncertainty of the market are important concerns marking women’s low presence as entrepreneurs.
Wage employment options are also limited and highly skewed, given the gendered segmentation of the labour market. ‘Glass ceiling’ is an issue even when female workers have similar or better skills compared to male workers at all levels. It is high time that the state and employers come together on a priority basis to find comprehensive solutions to address issues of women’s mobility. The discouraged labour market effect resulting from low wages, poor conditions of work and lack of upward mobility also needs strict enforcement of labour laws that are meant to protect women. Childcare, domestic work and other care responsibilities are important issues that affect women’s entry into employment and their choices. Labour and social policies covering all aspects of female employment, be it maternity or provisioning of care facilities, are highly important in this context. For long-term changes, interventions for encouraging sharing of housework and care work are also required.
Finally, given the structural nature of gender inequality, an important aspect of the feminist understanding of empowerment is the concept of ‘the power within and power with’, calling for coordinated action beyond individual action. This recognises the importance of women coming together as a group not only for economic reasons but also for a shared understanding of the inequalities they face in different spheres and to collectively address these inequalities, which is important for their empowerment.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
