TNI Bureau: Gender inequality is still present in India, as seen by the most recent data on women’s employment. The percentage of women in paid positions in urban India fell from 54 per cent in the first quarter of this fiscal year to 52.8% in the second, as more businesses went back to hiring just people for office work following the epidemic.
This is concerning since, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, employment of urban wages was at its lowest point in the previous six years during the most recent quarter. Women who work for themselves made up 40.3% of the workforce, up from 39.2% in the same time frame. Hence, women who earned a fixed income—a euphemism for unpaid labour in the home and on farms—were passed over in favour of self-employed women, who worked at modest businesses.
According to a February 2018 study by IIM Ahmedabad, women perform unpaid domestic work for 7.2 hours each week, while males do so for 2.8 hours. In March 2023, an SBI analysis stated that if all women received compensation for their domestic work and other responsibilities, it would equal 7.5% of India’s GDP. These findings were corroborated by a research from Azim Premji University, which also revealed that between June 2018 and December 2022, the percentage of self-employed workers increased from 14% to about 65%. A similar picture is painted by a few additional indicators.
The country’s female labour force participation rate increased from 30% to slightly under 33% following the pandemic—lower than in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and other countries. Women earned 76% of what males did in equivalent employment at the end of 2022, despite the wage difference being less than it was in the early 2000s.
The corporate world’s higher echelons are no better. Just 24.7% of independent directors are women, and this percentage drops to 19.7% when it comes to directorships held by businesses that are incorporated under the Companies Act of 2013. The two biggest things preventing women from working are long-standing patriarchal stereotypes and security worries.
We’ve seen that the strain of lengthy, unpaid family duties shifts their chances of landing a regular job. In addition to approving policies and initiating advertising efforts, both the public and private sectors need to support their claims with tangible actions. They ought to launch a hiring campaign with the goal of guaranteeing a more diverse workplace.