A thriving economy of care centres for children as well as older people, crèches, and domestic helpers can offer options for women who want and need to pursue careers. It also creates millions of new jobs.
There are as many models of the care economy as there are countries. Sweden’s childcare system offers affordable day care and paid leave which parents can choose to share. Much of the system’s success is because Sweden subsidizes costs and rewards quality. Private care providers receive public funding only if they follow national quality guidelines. This has increased and standardized the quality of services offered by providers throughout the country. No household has to pay more than 3 per cent of its income as childcare fees, raising low-income families’ access to care. Single mothers from low-income backgrounds now do 16.5 per cent more paid work as a result. It turns out that kids who go to day care display better cognitive skills and psychological health. 2
Mexico’s Day Care Support for Working Mothers programme has community-based care providers and covers up to 90 per cent of the cost of childcare for women who work, want to work, or are studying. By 2018, nearly 10,000 centres served about 330,000 children. The programme increased the proportion of beneficiary mothers who were employed by 18 per cent and the average number of hours they worked each week increased by six. It also generated more than 40,000 paid jobs for providers and aides, most of whom were women. 3
India can be even more ambitious. Examples of high-quality affordable care services within the country already abound. Mobile Creches, an NGO started in 1969, provides childcare facilities to communities underserved by government. The facilities are established on construction sites for migrant workers, whose assignments tend to be transient. They also serve residents of the area. In 2017–18, the organization provided childcare services to almost 11,000 children through its day-care programme and trained about 400 childcare workers. Among the testimonies they cite is one by the mother of a three-year-old child. It is filled with relief: ‘Earlier, my attention was divided, [but now] I am able to focus on my sewing and doubling my earnings.’ 4
The benefits trickle down from mothers. When children were enrolled in community day-care centres (Balwadis) in Rajasthan for prolonged periods, they showed gains in nutrition, hygiene, cognition and school readiness skills. 5
There are countless stories and testimonies, one more powerful than the next, but they only reaffirm what has been plain to see for years. When reassuring caregiving options are made available, everybody benefits. The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in Japan saw this first-hand with more than a fourfold increase in the retention of new mothers and saving an estimated $45 million in employee turnover after it offered childcare and extended maternity leave. 6
Why should India invest heavily in the care sector? Because the interest is compounded. The work of the Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman shows that early childhood care leads to some of the highest returns on any investments governments can make. It has immediate and long-term benefits through reductions in the need for special education and remediation; better health outcomes; reduced need for social services; lower criminal justice costs; and increased self-sufficiency and productivity among families. Conversely, a lack of investments in childcare during early years ends up creating deficits in skills and abilities, and inevitably drives down overall productivity, adding heavy financial costs to countries in the long run. 7
By some estimates, the combined senior and childcare market in India is currently worth just $8 billion—less than a fifth of the size of the US market for day care alone. Yet India has four times the size of the US’s dependent population. Its need for formal care support is greater. If India focused on childcare alone, it could create up to four million new jobs in the care industry—of which the vast majority would go to women—and help up to 10 million additional women participate in the workforce. 8
In Europe, Women’s Employment Rates Are Higher in Countries Where Family-Friendly Policies Are in Place
The bigger challenge is to end the stigma of outsourcing care. Despite the advantages, the number of Indian families who use childcare is insignificant. One of the big reasons for this is the guilt associated with outsourcing care. Women would like to work, but are reluctant to outsource care out of fear that children and elders might feel isolated or estranged, and that, in general, it’s not a good look. 9
There are ways to work around this. In Japan—where, like in India, people are expected to care for their parents into older age—community-based or home-based day-care services for seniors are popular alternatives to full-time residential care. Karnataka has its Grama Hiriyara Kendras, care-centres that feed and look after senior citizens four hours a day, with helpers trained in geriatric care. There are early indications of growing social acceptance of the Kendras. 10
It will take generations to undo the stigma around using carers outside the home. To speed this up, there needs to be clear evidence that the solution works in practice.
Users want quality. Professionalizing the sector will help. Families will want to know that their children and elderly parents are looked after by qualified staff in safe, high-quality facilities. Industry-wide accredited training and professional standards can help do this. Sweden’s example also shows how the government can step in to further encourage private providers to deliver quality services. If the care economy is to grow sustainably into a dynamic and productive sector, the four million jobs that could be created need to be good jobs, where employees are protected and can carry out their work with dignity.
Bridgital solutions can signal a professional approach, which in turn would help undo the stigma associated with outsourcing care. For instance, childcare workers—whether attached to a care-centre or standalone—could be integrated into a cloud-based management system which allows them to do administrative tasks like reporting attendance, health and safety records, and also to undergo training. This would also enable real-time check-ins and scheduling, and offer a source of collaboration amongst parents. Moreover, individuals can also create a transferable professional history by adopting this platform-based approach, deepening their integration into the formal economy.
SOLUTION 2: ADDRESS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES THROUGH SMART GENDER POLICY
Well-intentioned policies can have unintentional outcomes. When India addressed women’s safety concerns by restricting them from working at night in mines and beedi factories, all this did was reduce the number of hours women could work. 11 There could have been other ways to address safety risks: requiring companies to provide better and safer transportation, constant monitoring, and other infrastructure. Instead, for a factory owner deciding between hiring a man and a woman, the choice was a simple one: men could work at night, while women couldn’t.
Policy intent also needs to translate into outcomes on the ground. A case in point is gender budgeting—a ‘gender lens’ in the process of budgeting for planning, formulation and implementation stages of nationwide policies. The Indian government adopted gender budgeting in 2005, yet there remains a gap between budgetary outlay and utilization of the allocated funds. A recent example is the low use (less than 20 per cent) by states of the budget allocated to them under the Nirbhaya Fund for women’s safety between 2015 and 2018. 12 Earmarking certain funds is one thing, but making sure those funds are put to proper use is another.
India’s Maternity Bill. When India introduced the Maternity Bill in 2017, it was hailed as one of the most progressive legislations of its kind anywhere. The Bill gives expectant and new mothers paid leave for six months. It also mandated that all workplaces of more than fifty employees provide access to crèche facilities.
But the Bill is complicated.
First, by providing working mothers with six months maternity leave but fathers with none, it reinforces the norm that raising children is women’s work. (Countries sensitive to such policy signalling—mostly Nordic countries and Asian countries like South Korea and Japan—strongly encourag
e working fathers to take time off, even making it mandatory in some cases.)
Second, employers in India end up bearing the costs of implementing the Bill’s provisions—providing paid leave, as well as crèche facilities. This discourages them from hiring women. Small and medium enterprises, in particular, struggle with this. The director of an instruments manufacturing firm told us that his company’s head of human resources recommended hiring men and ‘keeping down female headcount’ after the Bill was introduced. ‘She recommended we recruit only women who were past a certain age,’ he said. This way the company could limit the Bill’s cost implications.
The interpretation of the Bill is itself a source of confusion. The same firm had to seek legal advice to understand whether it had to provide crèche facilities on exceeding fifty women employees, or fifty employees, irrespective of gender. Well-meaning laws that don’t account for the cost of their implementation encourage dismal creativity.
We could consider how the costs can be subsidized, especially considering that different financing models for maternity and parental leave have yielded positive results across the world. Employers solely pay for maternity benefits in a quarter of 185 countries, and combinations of funds from employers and the government finance maternity benefits in 16 per cent of countries. 13
Aside from this, the scope of the law arguably could be wider. The law currently covers formal employers, and the crèche provision applies to firms with more than fifty employees. Many Indians still lack access to decent childcare options, such as parents working at employers of less than fifty people, as well as the many more informal workers. Laws supporting primary caregivers for elderly parents or in-laws could be introduced too. 14
On average, high-income countries offer working mothers about four months’ leave, but in some cases this is as high as twelve. In most of these countries, they receive at least two-thirds of full-time pay while on leave. The most progressive country policies have placed more emphasis on the question of which parent should get leave. Iceland offers nine months—three each for the mother and father and a further three for the parents to divide as they choose. In Sweden, if parents share time off, they receive tax credits. The combination of financial incentives, creative approaches to flexible work options, and tax and pension credits more than doubled the amount of paternity leave Swedish men took. And every month they take off boosts their partner’s salary four years later by 7 per cent. 15
Revisiting the Equal Remuneration Act. Both the UK and India have legislations which mandate equal pay for equal work. In 2017, the UK went a step further to correct for gender bias by requiring a disclosure of pay gaps from large employers (250 or more employees). In the second year of its implementation, about 44 per cent of employers noted an improvement in the pay gap from the previous year. 16 India can also look at ways to deepen and sharpen the implementation of the Equal Remuneration Act, its own equal pay for equal work legislation, introduced way back in 1976.
SOLUTION 3: AMPLIFY THE COUNTER-NARRATIVE
The opportunities Indian women have are limited by widespread notions of what men and women are better at. These distinctions are deeply ingrained across every strata of society, and they turn up in surprising ways.
Some years ago, a renowned architect known for his use of natural materials was working on a commission east of Mumbai. He decided to pay men and women onsite the same wage. In his opinion, both the men and women were equally contributing to the overall project. The workers were locals and mostly married couples. For women, this meant an increase in their earnings.
However, the architect and the firm did not bargain for opposition. The workers, both men and women, were outraged and protested against the proposed hike. Then the local panchayat, headed by a woman, also joined the protest. Years later, the architect was still confounded by what had happened. He said the protests were called off only when the old wages were reinstated.
But there was more to the episode. The women workers were under the impression that equal pay meant taking on more physically taxing work. It didn’t occur to them that their existing work merited better pay. Contractors and workers said that although the hike was well-intentioned, it could have led to ‘uprisings’ across construction sites nearby because ‘rates were pre-decided’ and any move to change existing practices was unthinkable.
There are ways to move past this.
Start early. The younger they are, greater the opportunity to change attitudes. NGOs like Breakthrough, which focus on women’s and children’s rights, have already shown that gender equality classes in school can make a bigger difference than other women’s empowerment schemes, such as cash transfers. Girls exposed to these types of gender equality classes are likely to have more bargaining power in household decisions and delay marriage and childbirth. Boys who attended these classes helped out more with cooking and cleaning at home. 17
In Haryana, school interventions by Breakthrough led to the start of a virtuous cycle. Filled with confidence, girls from one school formed collectives. They successfully convinced reluctant neighbours to send their daughters to school. The girls enlisted the village leader, who reassured parents that a school-going daughter was in their best interest. To the parents’ initial horror and eventual delight, their daughters began playing sports traditionally considered male-oriented, such as kabaddi.
Also, education boards can remove content from textbooks that reinforces negative stereotypes. School textbooks in India are riddled with stories and pictures that paint men as breadwinners and women in passive roles, or depictions of gender roles at home like that of a mother cutting vegetables in the kitchen, while the father reads a newspaper. One textbook went further, stating that women’s employment was ‘a cause of rising unemployment’ in the country. A small number of states are waking up to this issue. Education boards in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu now have textbooks that depict women with careers and all family members sharing in housework.
What’s needed, at all levels, is nuance and imagination. ‘You may have learned one thing at school in terms of gender justice, but may have to completely go against that at home because of social conditioning,’ Arti Nair, a teacher, says. ‘That’s why it’s essential for students to know that they are all part of the same system and must find ways of engaging with it in their own individualized ways.’
Magnify experiences that break the mould. Such stories involve women like Supriya Tambe, the first woman to obtain an assistant electrician diploma at a pan-India vocational skills initiative. 18 Supriya found the experience alienating at first, but as she persevered and grew in confidence, her fellow classmates became her biggest cheerleaders. The idea of a woman electrician didn’t seem unusual to her or her peers any more. There are now more women in the same certification programme. Sneha, the head of a women’s self-help group in Mumbai, said, ‘Women at the grass-roots level need relatable role models. They don’t care about a woman chief of a global bank. They don’t relate to that. But if we succeed in drawing one woman from her own community, out of her home and into a profession, she serves as a role model for so many others. That helps in changing mindsets towards women working.’
If we can make a wider range of viable jobs both aspirational and accessible to women, and foster role models in sectors where they are under-represented, it will go a long way in opening up more avenues for gainful work.
Industry-level collaboration and targeted platforms can help prepare the ground for gender-balance. Slowly but steadily, we have seen employers devising new ways to address gender issues at work. For instance, upon entering India, IKEA publicly pledged to build an equitable workplace for everyone. They started by ensuring that more women operated warehouse forklifts. 19 Industry and CEO forums could also enable firms to make the commitment to gender equality more concrete, if top leadership pushes for practical steps towards rethinking talent, and redesigning work and workplaces accordingly.
Second, we can strengthen and scale digital pl
atforms that help create a marketplace for women seeking jobs. These platforms can promote better targeting and matching of jobs, based on job preferences expressed by women. These steps would induce and support greater formalization of work.
We can’t overstate the importance of these measures, led by firms and industries in the formal sector. While women have been leaving the workforce in aggregate, formal sector jobs are the exception. Over the period between 2011 and 2017, the share of women (versus men) in formal jobs rose to 26 per cent from 19 per cent, against a drop in women’s share of informal work from 28 per cent to 22 per cent. 20 Building on this momentum, and better understanding the link between formal jobs and women’s participation in India is key.
Entrepreneurship could also prove a fruitful bridge to paid work. Indonesia is an Asian success story: Women own more than half of all micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). In India, this figure is lower than 14 per cent. Digital platforms expand possibilities even further, allowing quick and low-cost access to global markets for small-scale and growing ventures. In Indonesia, the share of women-owned MSMEs in e-commerce revenue is 35 per cent compared with only 15 per cent offline. 21
The Bridgital approach, coupled with an enabling ecosystem for entrepreneurship, would not just create more jobs, but better jobs.
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The Easiest Fix
We have what it takes to get started today—a huge store of untapped talent and skill, from potential electricians to skyscrapers filled with women with highly specialized qualifications who dream of finding a way back to a career. Twenty-six per cent of women with medical graduate degrees and 46 per cent of those with diplomas or vocational training degrees are out of the workforce—far higher than the figures for men. 1 Making work work for Indian women is paramount; this is a rare chance for India to go beyond statements of intent and prove that it truly wants more inclusive growth.
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