IWWAGE-Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality
Women’s Workforce Participation In India: Statewise Trends
Bihar has the lowest female workforce participation rate (FWPR) among all states at 2.8 percent. The decline in FWPR has been shaper in rural areas as compared to urban areas, pushing a large number of women out of the workforce since 2007-08. With the decline in women workforce, there has been a substantial increase in the share of women in regular employment, in line with the national trend, and a significant decline in the share of self-employed, which is greater than the decline observed at the all India level. Women’s self-employment in Bihar is characterised by high incidence of own account work and low share of unpaid work, in contrast with all India figures.
Women’s Workforce Participation In India: Statewise Trends
Women’s labourforce participation rates (LFPR) reveals some interesting trends for Maharashtra. As per the figures from the labourforce surveys, the LFPR is significantly higher than the all-India figures, largely driven by higher than average rural employment. The state also shares a decline in self-employment and casual employment and a shift towards regular wage work for both rural and urban women. In Maharashtra the urban areas witnessed a consistent rise in regular wage work of women since 2004-05. More than 60 percent of women are employed as regular workers – 70 percent of which is concentrated in the services sector such as education, health and retail. In rural areas, the share of casual workers is considerably higher at around 42 percent, followed by 52 percent in self-employment. The incidence of unpaid family workers among self-employed women exceed 80 percent. While the urban areas show considerable diversity of women workers across occupations and sectors, women in the rural areas remain concentrated as manual workers in agriculture or within construction work.
Digital Solutions to Unlock the Potential of SHGs and their Federations
Digital tools hold the promise of accelerating women’s empowerment, enhancing the effectiveness and efficacy of existing initiatives, providing new tools to improve knowledge, and creating new opportunities for women to connect and share information. Most of these initiatives revolve around Self Help Groups (SHGs) and federations, which are social support groups known for empowering women through social mobilisation and financial inclusion. To understand the varied digitization initiatives within the SHG ecosystem in India, IWWAGE undertook a detailed landscape assessment of such initiatives. The study, undertaken in 2018, covered various state chapters of NRLM and SHPAs across states like Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, to understand the level of digitisation undertaken in each. This brief discusses the observations and findings from the study for Chhattisgarh, and identifies challenges and potential opportunities to implement digital solutions to support SHGs.
Accelerating Women’s Access to Entitlements through Digital Solutions
Digital innovation presents exciting opportunities for women who are part of collectives or Self Help Groups (SHGs). Technology can be used to link women within SHGs to each other and other existing l networks, and layer other services and use cases to promote their social and economic empowerment. More specifically, SHGs can use digital platforms to request and receive information and services, so as to enable their members access these services. Moreover, innovative digital solutions can address mobility, cost and literacy barriers and significantly increase the penetration of these benefits. Haqdarshak is an innovative mobile application developed by Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Ltd (HESPL), in collaboration with Save the Children and Nokia. The app provides a ready reference of more than 200 central and state government welfare schemes and programmes, and the benefits promised, eligibility criteria, documents required, and application process for each. The brief brings a snapshot of the model.
IWWAGE- ISST Briefs
The series of research brief presented below identifies the barriers to women’s labourforce participation and highlights each issue in a separate brief based on available evidence. This is a collaborative series between IWWAGE and ISST. The briefs have been prepared by IWWAGE and ISST team members and reviewed by an internal team comprising of Ratna Sudarshan, Aasha Kapur Mehta, Sona Mitra and Soumya Kapoor Mehta.
Mobility and Safety of Women: Interlinkages with Labour Force Participation
One of the major factors limiting the participation of women in the labour force is concern for their safety. These include fear of sexual violence in streets, in and around public transportation, schools, workplaces and other public and private spaces. This reality decreases women’s and girls’ freedom of mobility by impacting their ability to participate in school, work and public life; access to essential services; and enjoyment of cultural and recreational opportunities. In particular, ensuring a safe city and a safe workplace by investing in safe and affordable modes of public transportation, infrastructural additions to make cities more accessible for women, and inclusive legal provisions for safety at work can be important enablers of female LFPR. This policy brief attempts to describe the issues underpinning women’s safety as a barrier to their participation in the labour force; and shares recommendations to ensure that safety does not act as a barrier to mobility and the ability to access services that might improve life prospects and opportunities for women and girls.
Women’s Entrepreneurship in India: Harnessing the Gender Dividend
India’s economic growth story has eluded a large section of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs)—in fact the smallest of the enterprises led by women. This is evident in the fact that, despite the growing number of MSMEs in India, as of 2018–19, only one in every five enterprises was owned by women (21.5 per cent). Not only is women’s representation across sectors low, the growth of existing enterprises also seems to have stagnated over time. This brief seeks to highlight the key challenges to women’s entrepreneurship in India, including social norms and biases, lack of education, unequal opportunities for affordable financing, and limited networking opportunities which prevent them from exploring their full entrepreneurial potential. It also seeks to document some of the key recommendations to address these social, economic and technological constraints.
Financial Inclusion and Female Labour Force Participation
The rapid growth in India over the past decade has been coupled with a steady decline in female labour force participation. Despite rising GDPs, improvements in higher education attainment as well as fall in fertility rates, India’s female labour force participation rate (LFPR) has continued to drop. This has been further aggravated by job stagnation and high unemployment rates in recent years which have impacted women disproportionately and may worsen due to the ongoing pandemic. In India, existing societal norms, low literacy levels as well as lack of access to fixed assets further excludes women from the formal financial structure, thereby hampering their socio-economic growth. The brief analyses the barriers faced by women while accessing financial services and products, the lack of gender- specific policies, discrimination towards women entrepreneurs and geographic distance to financial institutions. Attempt is also made to look at policy interventions, and schemes designed to address some of the supply side barriers.
Barriers for Women in Public Employment
Despite high economic growth and improved health and economic outcomes since the 1990s, female labour force participation (FLFP) has stagnated or declined in India, falling to 17.5 per cent in 2017–18 according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). For working women, the public sector is the largest provider of formal or regular salaried jobs in the Indian economy. Given stagnating FLFP according to official data, the severe impacts of COVID-19 on unemployment, and the necessity to boost economic growth and recovery, removing barriers to women’s opportunities in public employment is more important than ever. The brief looks at the role of women’s public employment prospects in not only creating needed jobs, but delivering indirect benefits such as improved public service delivery, greater social protection for women, and boosts to consumption from increased household incomes. Addressing them will help guarantee the right to safe working conditions, adequate compensation, and deserved social protections that will benefit women workers and the economy at large.
Women in the Indian Informal Economy
Globally, two billion of population aged 15 years and above works in the informal economy, representing 61.2 per cent of world employment. Informal employment is a greater source of employment for men (63 per cent) than women (58.1 per cent). In India, although the absolute numbers are lower, a slightly higher percentage of women workers are in informal employment as compared to men. In India, women are almost always involved in some kind of productive and/or reproductive activity, but much of their work is invisible, and they are largely employed in low skilled, low paid informal work with little or no social security, with a consolidation of caste or religion-based disadvantages, even within a larger context of women’s marginalisation. Within this informal workforce with its persistent gender-based occupational segregation, the COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection. The brief analyses gender dimension of informality, its implications and captures the gendered experiences of informal workers during the lockdown and the post-lockdown period.
Women and Unpaid Work
Women’s workforce participation rates (WPR) in India, as measured by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), have been low and consistently declining over the last 15 years or so. An important part of the reason for this is women’s unpaid and unaccounted work. Time is spent on activities which remain excluded from the radar of large sample surveys on employment. Feminist scholars have been arguing for recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid activities to be able to move towards gender equality. With the transformation of the household into the site of work and livelihood due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, power relations are seen manifesting both within and outside the household, forcing women to spend hours in backbreaking work, often not even recognised as work in surveys or discourses. The brief assesses the impact of the pandemic and the consequent lockdown on women workers in informal sectors and shares recommendations to recognise and redistribute unpaid work.
