India’s Women Workers – Wither?
The CMIE has just released the latest figures for employment for India in their report from September to December 2021. Four graphs speak volumes about the state of employment. First, the Labor Participation Rate (LPR), or the percentage of the workforce actively looking for work stands at a low of 40.3 per cent a drop from 46 per cent in 2017. The majority of India’s workforce (900 million) has stopped looking for work. In real terms out of a labor force of 900 million, only 360 million are looking for work.
The rest, disillusioned by the work available to them are exiting the labor market altogether. One outcome of the impact of the pandemic on employment is that the LPR for urban (37.8) and rural areas (41.7) is almost at par with the rural LPR showing a slight increase. Far more radical is the continuing exit of working-age women from the labor market. The LPR for men is at 67.4 per cent or almost 33 per cent of working-age men who are no longer looking for work. For women, the corresponding figure is 9.4 per cent. Between 2017 and 2022 an additional 21 million working-age women stopped looking for work. Today 90 per cent of working-age Indian women are so disillusioned with their job prospects in the labor market that they have stopped looking for work.
At this rate, India’s demographic dividend for women has turned into a demographic disaster a lost opportunity that the pandemic has further exacerbated. When we look at the gender divide between rural and urban only 7.2 per cent of urban working-age women are looking for work versus 10.5 per cent of rural women. What types of policies will bring Indian working-age women back into the labor market? The government is proposing raising the age of marriage to 21 years. However, this belies data that shows that women are already choosing to get educated and delay marriage. The solution lies in the quality of work, wages, women’s safety, and less hostile work environments.
