With the participation of women in the workforce telling a sobering story, the journey toward true equality in India remains unfinished. Palak Singh and Paritosh Sinha discuss the magnitude of this ongoing plight.

- Palak Singh and Paritosh Sinha

The critically-acclaimed Prime Video web-series Panchayat (2020-present)—which charts the life of an engineering graduate who joins the panchayat of a fictional village in Uttar Pradesh—features an intriguing sublot of Manju Devi (Neena Gupta), the pradhan of the village, Phulera. Through the first season of the show, however, it is Manju Devi’s husband Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav) who unofficially calls the shots in Phulera, to the extent that the villagers don't even recognize Manju Devi as their leader. The real ‘Pradhanji’ is Dubey.

This subplot isn’t just a creative device to make the story interesting for consumption, but rather a reflection of the societal marginalization of women. At a broader level, it is also about the plight of women in the workforce of our country.

At the proverbial stroke of the midnight hour when India became independent in 1947, one of the key decisions taken by the constitution-makers in the aftermath was to allow for universal voting rights, by which, any citizen aged 21 or above was free to cast their vote. By doing so, any distinctions among people: of caste, religion, ethnicity, and quite notably, of gender, were disregarded.

The Female Labour Force Participation Rate [FLFPR) for India stands only at 32.8 per cent. For every 100 women of working age (aged 15 or above), barely 33 of them are working. This puts us behind a whole host of countries, including neighbors Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Earlier in world history, it was not common for women to have an unqualified right to vote was not commonplace. But India’s constitution-makers saw little sense in having a democracy with roughly half of the citizens deprived of having a voice in nation-building.

Sadly, this conviction didn’t permeate into other areas affecting the lives of women. The most hapless manifestation of this phenomenon in India is seen in the abysmal participation of women in the workforce.

Take for example the latest data released by the Periodic Labour Force Survey [PLFS] conducted by the National Statistics Office [NSO], which works under the aegis of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation [MoSPI]. The Female Labour Force Participation Rate [FLFPR) for India stands only at 32.8 per cent. For every 100 women of working age (aged 15 or above), barely 33 of them are working. This puts us behind a whole host of countries, including neighbors Bhutan and Bangladesh. Worse still, India is also behind Saudi Arabia on this metric, a country where women had been fighting for the right to drive their cars as recently as in 2018.

If one were to extrapolate the FLFPR data to the level of the total female population of the country, 31.6 crore women of working age in our country don’t work. This is almost equivalent to entire states like Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu not working at all.

Leaving women out of the organized workforce has real costs to the economic output of the country, often measured by its Gross Domestic Product [GDP]. One method to calculate this cost is to take cue from the example of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu given above. The GDP of these two states put together is about ₹45 lakh crores, approximately 17.2 per cent of India’s overall GDP (2022-23 estimates). Imagine these two states populated only by women who don’t work. We would lose out on the entire share of this GDP. That is the value of GDP that these women can potentially create, but are not.

That’s not the only way to compute how a low FLFPR affects the economy, though. Consider the number of women who play the role of homemakers. One could make a reasonable argument that they provide unpaid labour in the form of services like housekeeping, tutoring the kids, nursing elderly parents, etc. If a household were to hire a domestic help for providing all these services, it would cost considerable amount of money. According to an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly, on an aggregate level, the estimated value of such unpaid household work by women in India ranges from 14 per cent to 21 per cent of the GDP. If we were to take the lower estimate, this would amount to ₹37 lakh crores. One could understand this as the opportunity cost our country bears for holding its women back.

All of this begs the question: What are the underlying reasons behind women suffering this fate? The Ministry of Labour and Employment tried to get answers straight from the horse’s mouth. According to its recent report, women cite childcare and personal commitments as the top reason for not being part of the workforce. In contrast, males who are unemployed cite higher studies as their primary reason for not choosing to work. While the latter forgoes the opportunity of employment for another opportunity, the former must let go as they remain shackled by their role of caregivers. So much for equal opportunity.

Another reason is incidental and applies to all countries. According to Claudia Goldin—a 2023 Nobel laureate in economics—there exists a U-shaped relationship between a country’s economic growth and women's labor force participation. In poor, agrarian societies, women often engage in manual labor, including paid work. So, the FLFPR for a country in this phase would look high. As household incomes rise further, women are not expected to work outside the house anymore. As Chandra Bhan Prasad observes, for some Indian households, it’s even a matter of pride that their women don’t work outside home.

Eventually though, as incomes continue to rise and society matures even more, women become more educated and have fewer children, and people gradually become more open to women working outdoors. This is typically coupled with better working conditions for women at the workplace and better safety conditions for women while commuting.

We believe that India is at the cusp of experiencing the inversion from the bottom of the U- shaped curve. While the FLFPR remains dismal, there has been a slight uptick in recent years.

Apart from the U-shaped curve phenomenon, South Asia as a whole, and India especially, has an entrenched problem of patriarchy. All the issues that women cite themselves as reasons for not being able to work lead us back to the suffocating grip of patriarchy. In his book Chhaunk, Nobel winning economist Abhijit Banerjee argues that at the core of the issue of low FLFPR lies the social imperative to control a woman’s sexuality.

Solutions to such deep-rooted problems are never going to come easy. While societal issues like patriarchy will take time to correct, the government can still take some measures to register an improvement.

It would be worthwhile to start with the low hanging fruits. If women aren’t able to venture out of homes, let the jobs reach their homes instead. One of the consequences of COVID-19 was the work-for-home-culture becoming a norm. This presents an opportunity to increase our FLFPR.

Wherever remote work is not feasible, improving safety laws for women at the workplace will help. Also, while government measures to improve safety while commuting such as separate compartments for women in metros/trains have been enablers, eliminating commute wherever possible would also be an option. China has several examples of building dormitories next to workplaces.

Sectors which are more favourable to employing women should be prioritized. The Economic Survey of India 2017-18 noted how textile, apparel and footwear industries employ more women. In this way, Bangladesh has significantly improved its FLFPR.

Women perceive schools and colleges to be safe spaces and hence in India, the education sector is a large employer of women. As the education landscape evolves rapidly, the government must stress upon creating more women-friendly jobs in this sector.

There could be some contention about reservation quotas for women in public institutions and panchayats. One common concern is that women sarpanches are remote controlled by men in the village. But anecdotal evidence suggests that, in some cases, women are able to snatch away actual power and make decisions independently. As more women assume leadership roles in these institutions, they can effect meaningful change, just like Manju Devi ultimately does in season 2 of Panchayat, when she subliminally usurps power from her husband, and becomes the de-facto head of the village thereafter.

There is a lot that we can do to solve the problem of India’s low FLFPR. By not taking any serious measures, however, India is imprisoning its own prospects of becoming a more prosperous nation, monetarily and otherwise. More importantly, we also imprison the lives of more than 31 crore women of India. The women who labour in love to keep their families well, but in return are too loved to be free themselves.

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Palak Singh is a PGP-MT student at Scaler School of Business, with a background in microbiology and a passion for marketing. She has conducted research on active components in plants and animals, gained hands-on marketing experience at Pacmac Solutions Pvt. Ltd. A strategic thinker and communicator, she thrives at the intersection of science and marketing. You can find her on Instagram: @__palak.09.

Paritosh Sinha is presently a student at the Scaler School of Business, prior to which he has held the positions of Territory Sales Officer and Manager - Advertising at Hawkins Cookers Limited. A voracious reader and writer, he has currently undertaken the journey of quenching his insatiable thirst to tell stories about India. Paritosh is an ex-UPSC aspirant. You can find him on Instagram: @nithalla.itihaaskaar.

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