Bridgital Nation

by N Chandrasekaran

  Talent is universal, but opportunities are not. Correcting this can lend a tremendous boost to growth. We have seen this take place in a global context. The Economist expressed the importance of women’s work participation best, back in 2006: ‘. . . the employment of extra women . . . has chipped in [to global GDP growth] more than either capital investment or increased productivity . . . Over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.’ Just imagine: If all of India’s states resembled the country’s best performer—Karnataka—in terms of female to male ratios in managerial positions, India’s economy over the 1961–91 period would have been higher by more than a third. 7

  The case for more women in the workforce is resounding, and India in particular has scope for a large boost to the economy from strategies that raise women’s participation in paid work. The last decade of experience and research has brought this opportunity to light. We now need to shift gears and understand better how to make paid work a worthwhile option for women. There are no simple solutions. Bringing about effective change will require India to navigate a complicated web of poorly understood barriers. But it can and must be done, if India is to effectively deal with the immense jobs challenge that is already at its doorstep.

  14

  The Spark

  After they were married, Jasleen made it clear to her husband, Manbir, that she wasn’t about to do what everyone before her had done. She wanted to work. He told her that he wanted her to achieve her dreams.

  Luck was on Jasleen’s side. After the wedding, her father-in-law, Hardeep Singh, asked her if she wanted to continue studying. She told him that she did, and wanted to be a teacher. Hardeep dug deep for his daughter-in-law. The ₹9,500 ($136) pension he received every month made up the bulk of the family’s earnings, and never seemed enough to manage its expenses. Somehow, he stretched it just enough to help Jasleen graduate with a degree of Bachelor of Education (BEd) from Punjab University. When Jasleen was studying, villagers came by with unsolicited advice for the family: You shouldn’t let your noo, your daughter-in-law, get an education.

  But Hardeep said what her friends said, what almost anyone who has met Jasleen, says: ‘I knew she had a spark.’

  After completing her BEd, she tried to qualify as a teacher, but was shattered when she failed the Teacher Eligibility Test by two marks. It was Manbir, then, who asked her what she thought of joining the police. ‘My husband was a major support and kept counselling me,’ Jasleen said. ‘He said that since I could not clear the examination, I could work hard to become a police officer. He had always thought of me joining the police.’

  There were other things on Manbir’s mind. Poverty and the caste system prevented people from moving above the lowest rung of society. With money and status, those shackles could be broken. ‘If you are rich, or have power in your hand, everyone will come to you and your caste will not matter.’ Being in the police offered this possibility.

  It seemed an impossible dream. When vacancies for the post of sub-inspector in the Punjab Police opened up, Jasleen wondered if she was right for the job.

  Her son, Vikram, was only four months old when she filled the form. She left his care to the family, and began working on improving her physical strength, which would be tested during a physical endurance examination. For this, she joined a private academy that trained police and army aspirants, with a focus on both physical training and building mental endurance. ‘By filling the form, I had stepped into a new arena and I wanted to carve my future all by myself and not depend on my family. It was this decision that made me stronger.’

  When Vikram cried for food, Jasleen would feed him on the training grounds. The other women there didn’t understand why her husband and child had to visit. Most of them were single, and in their early twenties. Jasleen was in her late twenties, and subjected to frequent asides that a woman with young children could not become a police officer. She shrugged it off and kept training.

  In 2014, Jasleen passed her physical test and her written test, and readied herself for the final hurdle, an interview. She fretted about the repercussions of failure. ‘I knew that this was probably my first and last chance. I kept remembering how much trust my family, especially my father-in-law and husband, had in me.’

  The interview took place at the state capital, Chandigarh. The interviewers asked Jasleen how she planned to make sure that justice was delivered to the victims whose cases she would handle. It was a question whose answer she had carried within her all her life. She had seen tough days, she told them, and could empathize with others who faced injustice. She would ensure that no one was left disgruntled. They offered her the job. Her village went crazy.

  ‘It was like Diwali.’

  15

  Twice-Hit Economy

  ‘More girls are being educated than boys. You have to ask, “Where are they going and what are they doing?”’

  —Dr Pronab Sen, Country Director, International Growth Centre’s (IGC) India Central Programme

  In looking at different aspects of women’s participation in the labour force, two trends stand out: the pattern of women’s participation by education and by age.

  At every level of education, one thing is clear: Women have dramatically lower participation rates than men. More curiously, the shape of the participation curve by education resembles a ‘U’. Women with very low and very high levels of education tend to participate more than other women in the workforce. There’s a missing middle of women with intermediate levels of education, who do not have a presence in the workforce. 1 For women, having more than a basic education doesn’t necessarily translate to a boost in their participation in paid work. It could, surprisingly, even lead to a dip.

  This is, in part, thanks to something known as the income effect. As households start to become marginally richer, the pressure to do paid work eases and attention turns to domestic duties. More often than not, women end up becoming secondary earners and primary carers. Still, the income effect is only a partial explanation. Indian women’s labour participation rates are markedly lower than other countries at similar levels of incomes.

  The U-Curve: India’s Workforce Is Missing Out on Its Educated Women

  When it comes to age, if the pattern of women’s participation in the labour force in developed countries is plotted on a graph, the up-down-up-down curve it forms resembles an ‘M’ (at least in recent history). 2 This is the M-curve, and its utility is in providing an immediate glimpse of the ages women work, and the ages they don’t. On a typical M-curve, the percentage of women’s participation rises significantly for women in their twenties, then falls in the years when they typically marry or have children. It rises again as women gradually resume work thereafter, and dips at retirement.

  In India, of course, women’s participation rates are dramatically lower across the board. They rise gradually until around the age of forty, and then more and more women drop out of the workforce permanently. India’s M-curve resembles the head of an A-curve. (The incline and decline are so gentle that it would be more accurate to call it an ‘a-curve’.) India doesn’t just have a problem of bringing women into the workforce, but of ensuring that they stay the course.

  It is important to keep in mind that half of Indian women are married by the age of nineteen. One in three women have had a child before the age of twenty. 3 In developed economies, anywhere between 50 and 80 per cent of women in the age group 25-35 join the workforce. India charts its own path: In that age group, only one in four women engage in paid work.

  The M-Curve

  Why is the shape for India different when it comes to the U- and M-curves? During the course of our research, we came across diverse forces that play a major role in women not working. These forces are not unique to India, but the extent to which they play out is significant. Largely, they fall into three categories:

  Unpaid Work

  Women work, but
aren’t paid for their efforts. Data shows that Indian women are responsible for 87 per cent of unpaid care work—one of the highest shares in the world, far higher than China (at 72 per cent) and the US (at 61 per cent). This is the work of caring for children and elders, of managing a household. The magnitude of work cannot be overstated. In India, women perform 9.8 times as much care work as men. That is, for every hour of housework that men put in—cleaning, nurturing, cooking, teaching, advising, managing—women put in ten hours. This is another kind of a shadow economy; it demands work and sacrifice, but there’s no pay cheque at the end of the month. If all this unpaid work were valued and compensated in the same way as paid work, it would contribute $300 billion to India’s economic output. 4

  Safety and Mobility

  More often than not, when Indian women decide to take up work, the calculation includes an additional item: The cost of safe travel. The habit starts even before work. College-going women in Delhi are willing to spend ₹18,000 ($257) more than men on safer commuting options annually. Women prefer attending less prestigious colleges if they can travel via a safer route. When it comes to work, one survey shows, a large number are willing to migrate for work, but they are outnumbered by those who feel unsafe being away from home. 5 According to the World Bank economist Girija Borker, ‘women’s willingness to pay for safety translates into a 20 per cent decline’ in the salaries they could have earned after graduating college.

  A typical educated, urban working woman with a child loses over 15 per cent of salary to the gender pay gap and about one-sixth to childcare. Her commute is more expensive than her male counterparts, because she chooses safer options like grabbing a taxi at night from the train station to her home, rather than walking.

  For a woman, the act of working is an expensive one.

  For Women, Work Is Expensive: A Stylized Example 6

  Underlying Gender Norms

  Gender expectations start early and can be borne out in census numbers: Between 2001 and 2011, India’s child sex ratio further deteriorated from 927 girls to 919 girls for every thousand boys, reflecting a preference for sons. 7

  The reasons for son preference are far from uniform, and shift dramatically across regions and cultures. In some areas, traditions and norms leading to son preference include keeping property in the family, avoiding paying dowry, having support close at hand in parents’ old age (daughters typically marry and move away), and because sons perform last rites. Even in matrilineal societies across the country, evidence for son preference can be found.

  Expectations about gender roles play into routine daily activities. In a nationwide survey, 80 per cent of women said they needed permission from a family member to visit a health centre and 58 per cent needed permission to visit the local kirana (grocery) store. 8 Without the freedom of movement to conduct everyday tasks, discussing the opportunities of doing paid work away from home takes on new heights.

  These three broad sets of interwoven issues—unpaid work, safety and mobility, and underlying gender norms—have deep roots, but sometimes it takes just one outlier, like a determined woman in Punjab, to upend notions of what seems possible.

  16

  Waiting for a Role Model

  It took a while for Manbir to convince his mother, who initially had reservations about her daughter-in-law working. A woman working outside her home goes against tradition in Punjab’s rural areas. ‘While my father had no problem with Jasleen working in the formal sector, many neighbours and relatives raised a problem. I had to make my mother understand that with Jasleen working as a government employee, it would not only help us financially, but would also help our children and family on the whole, and raise our standard in society,’ he said.

  His conviction bore fruit. Because of Jasleen’s work, their household income had grown to more than ₹50,000 ($714) every month. Their kitchen had an electric chimney and a blender, tea was served in elegant bone china, the floor was tiled in marble, and the house was undergoing an expansion for the children.

  When Jasleen joined the police, Manbir said, the news came as a shock to the villagers. ‘They said, “She’s in such a big job? Because of her education?” They came to congratulate us.’ The sweetest outcome of Jasleen’s success was that villagers decided to educate their own daughters and daughters-in-law. Following Jasleen’s lead, between fifteen and twenty girls from the village started to attend college. The school’s principal sought her out to speak to students. And young women constantly asked her for career advice.

  Jasleen’s daughter had watched her work, and decided that she too would work one day. Hardeep, Jasleen’s father-in-law, took care of the children, while his wife cooked breakfast and lunch. Manbir said that Jasleen’s long hours meant there was little time to catch up. ‘You know these police personnel can be called away at any time. They work twenty-four hours a day. And she’s doing a very big job at such a young age.’

  Jasleen planned to educate her children without worrying about where the money would come from. Whatever their education cost them, she and Manbir decided, they wouldn’t compromise. ‘I will let them study and even send them for higher professional education if they wish, when the time comes,’ she said.

  The circle was virtuous. She wanted the children to move outside the state for their higher education. Achieving dreams required the kind of exposure found only in top colleges and universities. ‘I will ensure that my children get quality education and do not suffer like I did due to poverty. Education is the most important aspect of life where one not only becomes literate, but also finds friends and well-wishers, and understands what life actually is,’ Jasleen said. Manbir Singh nodded in agreement.

  17

  Releasing the Talent Gridlock

  In a dusty corner of the country, a woman in a village quietly slips out of her home to attend digital literacy classes because her father or husband have forbidden it. When she learns to send messages and take pictures, the phone is declared a corrupting influence. In Delhi, a college student moves to a new home to avoid bus 544 and the men it contains. During a job interview, an executive from human resources asks a candidate when she intends on getting pregnant. Elsewhere, marriage bureaus reassure families that their daughter’s degree qualifies them for a discount on dowry payments. After work, women share stories about certain men. Phone manufacturers advertise a new feature for women: Emergency buttons. In earnest, a business report’s researcher declares that men are biologically incapable of maintaining relationships the way women can, and declares that is why companies must value women. The simple act of walking on a busy street is as stressful at forty-two as it is at twelve.

  To understand the problem of women’s participation in the workforce, we spoke to cooperatives, start-ups, politicians, students, some of India’s largest companies, businesses which run women-only shop floors, firms that struggled to hire any women at all, women running hiring platforms, rural men and women engaged in informal work, Ivy-League-educated women who are out of work, researchers, women in the south, north, east, west, north-east and abroad.

  There’s no simple playbook to ease the tall, invisible barriers that keep women from work. Countries around the world are grappling with these questions in different ways. The US, for example, has witnessed declining rates of work participation by women after generations of improvement. 1

  Many policy examples abound. Austria lowered the income tax on second earners to encourage women’s participation in the labour force; Belgium mandated organizations (with over fifty employees) to conduct a gender pay gap analysis every two years and produce an action plan to tackle pay inequality; the Philippines directed a minimum of 5 per cent of the national budget to gender and development initiatives. In Rwanda, investment in clean water provision freed up time for girls to go to school instead of spending substantial amounts of time fetching water. The country also has the most female parliamentarians in the world, after passing laws to ensure women’s representation at all levels
of governance.

  We can take inspiration from a wealth of successful interventions that have taken place globally, as well as within India. Three focus areas address the issues that matter most.

  Context is key. No other country is like India. Implementing these ideas will need to account for the vast diversity of roles and experiences women face. This will take time. But given what’s at stake, the case for starting this journey today could not be clearer.

  SOLUTION 1: BUILD A LEADING-EDGE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CARE ECONOMY

  In a central Mumbai skyscraper, a highly qualified group of women settled in at the building’s private clubhouse to share what had stopped them from working. Several of them had an Ivy League education. Most of them were no longer part of the workforce. One, a chartered accountant, had a supportive husband, but her in-laws disapproved of her returning to work after the birth of her first child. Another said, ‘Flexibility at the workplace is only in writing—nobody truly encourages it.’ At one job interview, she was asked outright if she planned on having a second child. ‘There is a reason why there are more male CXOs in the world,’ she shrugged.

  A third—a former management consultant—thought she would return to work three months after having a baby. But plans changed. ‘I looked for a long time, but I just couldn’t find a competent and consistent nanny.’