Only 13% of Indian women work outside the home

[Guest guest]

Reality byte: Only 13% of Indian women work

7 Mar, 2008

The Economic Times

 

Visual imageries have changed. Perceptions have

dramatically altered. Newspaper headlines, TV grabs, ad

campaigns and Bollywood - virtually every media

platform has been feeding to create a very progressive

and modern face of India's women workers.

 

The reality, unfortunately, hasn't changed much.

 

Barely 13% of the Indian women (18 to 59 years) work.

Close to nine out of 10 of these women work in the

unorganised sector in difficult job environment.

 

And it's in the rural, poorer, more conservative India

where more women work as against the urban India

implying that job is a necessity not a choice for most.

 

In fact a large percentage of women workers (over 35%)

work in farms. Most of them earn incomes at the bottom

of the value chain - 45% of the women workers earn

less than Rs 50,000 a year. And if all that was not

enough, only 26% of these women can take independent

financial decisions about their incomes.

 

" Women haven't traveled the distance that we typically

perceive them to have covered, " says Gautam Bhardwaj,

director, Invest India Economic Foundation.

 

The data on women workers has been revealed by Invest

India Incomes and Savings Survey, 2007 one of the

largest ever surveys done in India (see methodology).

 

And the picture it throws up isn't very encouraging.

" Clearly what we thought was some dramatic shifts in

the making (among Indian women) wasn't that dramatic.

The survey reveals that the changes have been very

incremental, " says Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands.

 

On the face of it the data looks rather conservative,

barely keeping pace with the cheery mood of a nation

making rapid strides. Two things could be responsible.

 

One, that the perception of change was largely a

minority urban-centric view that somewhat ignored

close to 60% of India's workforce who still work in the

agriculture sector.

 

Second, more optimistic and more likely explanation

could be that " we see images that we want to see, " says

Desai. So every success story gets magnified.

 

Every new frontier that has been achieved gets written

about. And every step forward - from the first woman

rickshaw driver getting behind the wheels to petrol

pumps being manned by women - gets celebrated. This

isn't so much about reflecting the real world - it is

picking up threads of new hopes.

 

" Reality isn't an absolute - it comes packaged with

possibilities of hope today, " says sociologist Shiv

Visvanathan. It is this sense of possibilities - where a

poor can dream of getting rich, a dalit can aspire to

move up the social ladder and where a small town girl

can dream to find freedom and work in a big city - that

has made the big difference and brought flickers of

change.

 

On the ground though, the hard numbers are depressing.

Close to 80% of women workers come from rural India.

And poorer the family better the chances of women

working.

 

Survey data shows that relatively well-off families in

both rural and urban India prefer not to let their women

work. In urban households with annual income between

Rs 2-5 lakh, women work only in 13% of the

households. The percentage drops to 9% with income

above Rs 5 lakh.

 

It is the same story in rural India. In households with

annual income ranging between Rs 50,000-Rs 5 lakh,

the percentage in which women work ranges between

16-19%. But in households with income above Rs 5

lakh, it drops to 4.9%.

 

" Evidently, it's a compulsion rather than a choice for the

women workers, " says Sandeep Ghosh, executive

director of IIMS Dataworks, the firm that conducted the

survey.

 

The state-level data validates some of these national

level findings and reveals interesting dichotomy

between the north and the south.

 

The well-off states in the north have low percentages of

women working - Punjab (4.7%), Haryana (3.6%),

Delhi (4.3%), UP (5.4%). The relatively backward states

like Bihar (16.3%), Orissa (26%) have higher levels of

women workers.

 

 

Additionally, the northeastern (20%) and southern states

(Tamil Nadu 39%, AP 30.5%, Karnataka 23.7% have

larger percentage of women workers, perhaps aided by a

matriarchal society in the first and relatively liberal

mindset (vis-a-vis north) in the second.

 

But high percentage of women workers in these states

rich and poor tells different stories when the data is split

into urban and rural workers.

 

Better off states have a relatively higher percentage of

urban women workers as against poorer states where

rural women dominate. For example, in Tamil Nadu

(31%), Kerala (25%), Karnataka (21%) of the women

workers come from the urban areas. But in Orissa

(5.5%) and Bihar (4.8%), a very small percentage of the

women workers come from urban centres.

 

As if all that wasn't enough. Of the few women who

work and earn, fewer barely 26% have control over

where and how they spend it. We are still far behind that

tipping point, " says Desai - a tipping point that will

give Indian women the real freedom to take up jobs and

pursue careers in a very modern sense.

 

But flickers of hope, undercurrents of change are visible

- never mind the grim macro realities.

 

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