Why Indian women don’t want to work
Equal work sharing at home for a two-income household will not come without a struggle and it is far easier to drop out than fight. Photo: iStockphoto
A long time ago when I was in my first job as a trainee researcher in a magazine, I would take the chartered bus (a working people’s school bus that collects people from a residential area and drops them in an office hub) from home to office. The art of eavesdropping on conversations must be ingrained because I still remember some of the chatter around. One particular conversation thread was between two women in their 40s. They looked like junior bank staff. The women were discussing how their friends who married men who could support them financially made a better deal. “We now have two jobs—at work and at home.” Indian men, it seems, get so tired at work that they have no strength for housework in a double income home.
Data on women participation in the Indian labour force shows that Indian women are preferring to stay at home rather than come out to work. In an excellent piece, Farzana Afridi and Kanika Mahajan deep dive into the National Sample Survey 2011-12 to show that it is actually married women that show a dramatic fall in workforce participation. Instead of joining the workforce as the Indian economy grew from $284.3 billion to $1.8 trillion and per capita income grew from $340 to $1,480, women’s participation in the labour force fell from 47% to 37% over a 20-year period ending 2011-12. While unmarried women in the age group of 15 to 60 saw a rise in workforce participation from 37% to 50%, the number of married women has remained stagnant for 30 years at 20%, they write. Their analysis shows that young unmarried women show an increase in workforce numbers, older unmarried women continue to work, but married women pay the “marriage penalty” on financial independence and workforce participation by dropping out.
Credit: livemint.com