IWWAGE-Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality
Women’s Workforce Participation in India: Statewise Trends
West Bengal, home to 99 million people, is the fourth most populous state in India. With a primarily rural population and agriculture as the main source of employment, women’s work participation rates remain low. Many women in rural areas engage in unpaid agricultural labor, particularly in paddy fields, leading to underreporting of their contributions. The state’s female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) is 17.5%, below the national average. Despite challenges, West Bengal shows strong performance in indicators like maternal mortality and sex ratio, though issues like gender inequality in the labour market and high rates of under-nutrition persist.
Home production, Technology and Women’s Time Allocation in Rural India
Access to clean cooking fuel is not only a matter of health but also a crucial factor in advancing gender equality. In rural India, traditional gender roles place the burden of cooking and fuel collection squarely on women, constraining their time and limiting their participation in the labour market. The use of solid fuels like firewood has severe health repercussions, particularly for women, who face significantly higher exposure levels than men.
This study, based on a cluster-randomised controlled trial in rural Madhya Pradesh, explores the potential of switching to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) through targeted information campaigns highlighting the health benefits of clean fuels and existing government subsidies. Building on the Government of India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which has extended subsidised LPG access to over 80 million households since 2016, the project aims to understand whether efficient home production technologies like LPG can free up women’s time and improve their well-being.
Despite the policy’s wide reach, many rural households underuse LPG due to a lack of awareness about subsidies or the perceived cost of refills. The study aims to address these gaps, with the broader goal of enhancing female labour force participation and reducing time poverty through improved access to clean energy.
Global Policy Summary: Childcare Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the global childcare crisis, exposing deep inequalities in how care work is valued and distributed. With school closures and limited access to childcare services, unpaid care burdens surged—falling disproportionately on women and girls. This not only undermined progress on gender equality but also strained families, reduced women’s economic participation, and weakened childcare systems globally.
To ensure a just, resilient recovery, childcare must be placed at the centre of economic and social policy. Governments, donors, and the private sector must work together to support care systems that enable women’s full participation in the workforce and recognise care as essential to economic growth and social well-being. Guided by the ILO’s 5Rs of Care Framework, the policy summary outlines a roadmap for action for pathways to a stronger, more equitable future.
Global Executive Summary: Childcare Crisis
A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Despite being key to human well-being and to the functioning of the economy, care work remains unrecognised, undervalued, and predominantly performed by women and girls the world over. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for care work and exacerbated entrenched gender inequalities. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and IWWAGE at LEAD have collaborated to undertake an evidence review of the current childcare crisis and the road for post-COVID recovery and resilience. This brief based on the paper released on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021 outlines the different pathways in which COVID-19 is impacting women’s care burden, with recommendations for policy solutions and measures that could be explored in different contexts by governments, the private sector, and other key development actors, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Covid childcare crisis reversing decades of women’s economic progress – report
The childcare crisis is at a “tipping point”, threatening to reverse decades of women’s economic progress, according to a new report published on Monday.
The report warned that the female-dominated childcare sector risked collapse, as coronavirus lockdowns and rising poverty levels had led to a “steep drop” in demand for formal and informal services.
Balancing paid and unpaid care was particularly hard for poorer women working in the informal sector, which offered no paid leave, social protection, or the chance to work remotely, said the report, published by the International Development Research Centre, the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women East Africa initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, FemDev and the Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy.
The Covid pandemic had exposed the extent to which childcare falls on women, who are on average now spending more than 30 hours a week looking after children, it said.
“A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. The devastating impact that Covid-19 has had on women’s livelihoods cannot be overstated,” it said.
“The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Childcare must be addressed within our Covid-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.”
Anita Zaidi, president of the Gates foundation’s gender equality division, said poverty levels among women had been expected to drop by 2.7% between 2019 and 2021. “But actually now it looks like poverty for women will go up by 9%. That’s almost 50 million more women globally in poverty,” she said.
The closure of childcare centres could be devastating. “Women who want to come back into the labour force cannot, because those childcare centres don’t exist. Many women have to go to work, otherwise they have nothing to eat and they don’t have shelter, so what they are then doing out of desperation is their older girls are not going back to school and have to look after the younger kids so mum can work,” she said.
Childcare provider Kidogo estimates that about 60% of families in Kenya who were previously using its centres have shifted care responsibility to girls as young as eight.
Zaidi said childcare should be subsidised and needed to be regarded as a societal issue, not a problem for women to solve. “Childcare is a critical barrier to women’s labour force participation and with women not participating in the labour force economies will not progress,” she said.
Last week, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) called for the “immediate introduction” of a temporary basic income to ensure women who face the harshest economic impacts of Covid-19 are able to survive the pandemic. A monthly investment of between 0.07% and 0.31% of developing countries’ GDP could lessen the impact of the pandemic for up to 2 billion women, it said.
