Gendering The Workplace: Why Female Employment Matters

This might sound startling but is actually hard fact. A household where the wife earns a regular income can be better off than one with higher total earnings but the woman remaining confined to unpaid work like cooking and childcare.

As economists like Naila Kabeer, Diane Elson and Marilyn Waring agree, a woman's earned income positively impacts society, regardless of the family's total wealth. The reason? A steady income increases her decision-making power, amplifies her voice both at home and in the community, and ultimately strengthens her presence in the social sphere.

When the woman steps out beyond the circle of her unpaid work of cooking and caring to join the workforce for a pay, it – in addition to other benefits – raises the level of household savings, and above all softens the patriarchal straitjackets around her. In short, an empowered woman – as far as her milieu is concerned – is an agent of change.    

But things mostly do not happen on expected lines. Women’s participation in India’s workforce, a recent report by the Government of India’s labour ministry disarmingly admits, is abysmally low:  26.5 per cent in urban areas and 39.3 in the rural sector. The global average is 48.7 per cent The causes for the wide male-female gap in the labour market and its consequences have made the economists think.

“It’s a burning issue,” says development economist Jean Drèze. Women’s extremely low workforce participation, he argues in An Uncertain Glory, coauthored with Amartya Sen, reflects the ‘problem of jobless growth’.  He sees social conservatism as the barrier for women to step out of their stereotypical homemaker role for the workplace. “Gender inequality is a very significant part of the Indian social reality.”            

Sen believes that a gender-just development model would mean real freedom for a people.

Paradoxically the problem is as seemingly intractable as exciting are the promises of change that higher female participation in the workforce holds out. Economist Gita Gopinath points out that higher gender equality is crucial for a strong and sustainable global economy. The Gregory and Ania Coffey Professor at Harvard calls for sensitizing policies to improve women’s participation in the labour market. One way of achieving this, she says, is by mainstreaming gender in the workplace. This initiative, along with equitable wages and advancing women to leadership positions, she explains, is not just moral imperative but sound economics.

Even the government is not the insensitive leviathan it appears in popular perception. “Female participation in the labour force and access to decent work is very much essential for an inclusive and sustainable development of the country,” the 2023 labour ministry document says.  

Since that premise is winning greater acceptability emerging out of the hidebound sanctions of orthodoxy, there is an urgency to explore immense possibilities of women being in the workforce and what impedes that from happening.

My own research shows that a larger women’s presence in the job market has been resisted by factors like cultural insularity and practical compulsions.  Even in many urban homes in the third decade of the 21st century, cooking and childcare are considered the avowed duty of the woman. Caste injunctions play into the perception of the kitchen’s sanctity, effectively barring the entry of a hired cook. Also, for a new mother the child is a greater priority than work. Unable to cope, she quits.

The survey I conducted reveals that even in upwardly mobile, professional social segment, patriarchy still makes its uneasy presence felt. Well-educated women in high-paid jobs are expected by their in-laws and husbands to cook for the family. A young woman with a master’s degree was bluntly told by the groom’s family during negotiations for arranged marriage that her entire salary needed to be handed over to her mother-in-law after she became part of their family. The matriarch in turn would allocate her some money for spending. 

In a 2024 report, the International Labour Organisation confirmed the disturbing trend of patriarchal imposition of retrograde values. The ILO identifies ‘care responsibilities’ as the main barrier preventing women’s participation in the workforce, insisting that ‘urgent action is needed to ensure decent work in the care economy.’

Employers, particularly in the private sector, need to appreciate that very little investment is required to set up a creche as part of the work establishment. But a cost-and-return calculation will favour them heavily both financially and in terms of employee commitments. “Care work is a public good, care work is not women’s work,” says UN Women eloquently.

The labour ministry report corroborates the global pattern of women not taking up jobs because of ‘childcare and personal commitments in homemaking’. At least that’s the response of 44.5 per cent of women. Interestingly, for 71.7 per cent of men withdrawing from the job market, the reason is their decision to ‘continue studying’.

With every woman coming home putting in the papers or not exploring the labour market at all to spend their most productive years in the kitchen or childrearing, the collective impact on the global economy and workplace environment is quite significant.   

Look at this mindboggling figure: just by taking those women back to the labour market to close the gender gap, 28 trillion dollars or approximately 26 per cent could be added to the annual global GDP.  This McKinsey Global Institute estimate is a clear eye-opener to the serious imbalance in the labour force. Other estimates project a likely boost of about 7 trillion dollars to the world economy by ending the gender pay dichotomy.   

That a stronger women’s presence in the workforce deters and seeks to dismantle patriarchy is a major tenet of the feminist school of economists. In terms of social value, the female footsteps in the workforce – when increased manifolds – would be enormous assets for transforming everything around us.

In her 1989 book, The Second Shift, feminist scholar Arlie Hoschild explains how women’s economic participation challenges the age-old family norms. She claims that while a mother working for pay outside home is a radical change with a transformational message, the unpaid job she is already stuck in and the man she returns to have not changed. At least not in proportion to the new ground she has stepped on. If she is the ‘revolution’, Hoschild succinctly argues, then the stasis at home is ‘stall’. She traces deep linkages between a couple’s division of labour and their underlying ‘economy of gratitude’. The sociologist wryly wonders who is grateful to whom and for what.

Since patriarchal propositions have long been built into the social psyche by orthodoxy as culturally-upheld tradition and therefore cannot be wiped out overnight, an initiative is feasible to address the more immediate issue of care.  The Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Goldin pithily points out the crucible of the problem: the widening gender pay gap after birthing children due to the absence of workplace flexibility and the bitter cost of career interruptions.

An easy doable answer to this mammoth standoff with macroeconomic dimensions is creating workplace childcare facilities compulsorily in both the government sector and private establishments. The rule should make it obligatory for every employer to either provide creche facilities or pay for it if the employee chooses some other arrangements.  

If care is no longer the woman’s fulltime responsibility, she can go to work less unencumbered and with a clearer conscience.

Dr Manimala Roy is an economist working in the areas of gender and migration. She is the author of From Shanties to School.