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Sustained high economic growth since the early 1990s has led to improved education and health indicators among India’s women. Yet, women accounted for no more than 25% of the labour force in 2011-12, declining from 33% in 2005, according to national sample survey report (2014) on employment, a rate worse than neighbouring Bangladesh (29%), Nepal (52%) and Sri Lanka (34%), IndiaSpend reported on May 4, 2017

But this decline is more marked for rural women, according to data from the ministry of statistics and programme implementation’s National Sample Survey (NSS), 2014.

The aspirations of rural women, increasingly educated and exposed to paid labour opportunities under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (MGNREGS), have shifted away from unpaid agricultural work on family farms toward more formal, paid work.

There are, however, not enough formal sector jobs available in rural areas. MGNREGS, a labour demand-driven programme, is limited to providing only 100 days of paid labour on public works projects per year. The few paid, formal jobs available, besides MGNREGS, tend to go to men and women with degrees, leaving women educated till the secondary school level in limbo–with skills that qualify them for non-agricultural work, but with few such jobs available, according to a 2018 study by the University of Maryland.

This lack of formal jobs, coupled with shrinking availability of agricultural work, has led to declining numbers of women in the rural workforce.

Labour force participation rate (LFPR) is a measure of the number of persons in the labour force per 1,000 persons. The NSS data recording the change in female LFPR in rural and urban areas over 18 years to 2011 show that the female LFPR has declined in both.

However, a closer look at the NSS data shows that the decline is steeper in rural areas. Whereas female LFPR in urban areas has declined from 165 per 1,000 in 1993 to 155 in 2011, in rural areas the female LFPR has fallen from 330 to 253 over the same period.

Fewer agricultural work opportunities are partly responsible for this decline. The size of agricultural landholdings has shrunk with concomitant divisions within families, according to agricultural data.

The average farm size fell from 1.23 hectares in 2000-01 to 1.15 hectares in 2010-11, according to the ministry of agriculture’s Agricultural Census 2011. Increasing mechanisation has also possibly led to a decline in the demand for agricultural wage labour, according to a 2018 joint study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland.

Decline is greater in lower income classes
The decline in labour force participation among rural women is also greater among the lower income sections, NSS data show. The first three income classes–representing the lowest earners in rural India–have the lowest female workforce population ratio (WPR) (defined as the number of people who are currently employed per 1000 of the population), according to NSS data. The lowest representation of 198 per 1,000 females is in the third lowest income class of 20%-30%, while the highest of 288 is in the third highest income class of 70%-80%.

The increasing workforce population ratio is higher income classes in rural India clearly indicates rural women’s changed aspirations towards more formal, paid work. Where alternatives for remunerative employment are provided, such as by MGNREGS, rural women prefer these over unpaid labour, according to a 2015 study conducted by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad for the NITI Aayog. The decline in female WPR in the lower income classes may be attributed to a number of factors, the study said. Increased income may have led to women withdrawing from distress employment, preferring instead to do family farm work. Some formal sector work done by women in lower income rural families is also going unrecorded. For instance, women and girls contribute labour to the recorded wages earned by male relatives, particularly in jobs such as construction work, the study added.  

Better education not leading to increased employment
One of the main factors identified as hindering women’s participation in the workforce is low education.

With education levels improving with incentives for female education, higher levels of literacy (22% in 1983 to 55% in 2011) and primary education (10% in 2005 to 17% in 2011) have been recorded among women in rural areas, according to NSS data.

However, better education is not leading to increased employment for rural women. The NSS data on workforce population rates by education level show a decline in the WPR despite increased education levels among rural women.

Increases in education–from none to completed secondary school (up to class 12)–are associated with a decline in women’s participation in the rural labour force, from 53.3% to 22.4%.

The WPR drops with rise in education levels: From 445 per 1,000 rural women who are not literate to 121 for women who have completed secondary education and above.

While most girls in rural India have received primary education, secondary school enrolment has also increased. This may account for the withdrawal of younger women of secondary school-going age from the rural workforce.

For women beyond this age–from 20-64 years–school enrolment is not a factor in work participation. The decline in WPR for rural women, however, affects women at all ages, the NSS data show. This suggests a deeper problem than that implied by the trade-off between the time spent in school and the time spent working.

For women past secondary school-going age, workforce population has increased for urban women, while it has declined for rural women, reflecting the greater availability of formal jobs in urban areas.

Among rural women, only women with higher educational qualifications are finding non-agricultural jobs. Beyond secondary school-going age, the decline in women’s workforce population ratio is not as much as it is for women with intermediate education.

Up to 28.1% of rural women who are college graduates are employed, according to a 2018  study by the University of Maryland. “Educated women look mainly for better quality jobs, especially salaried work,” said the study. “The inference might be that if all or most available jobs were salaried, Indian women would show the usual positive relationship of higher rates of employment with more education.”

“However, such jobs are limited and are accessible mainly with higher levels of education,” said the study. “If appropriate jobs were available for women with intermediate levels of education, we might expect higher levels of their labor force participation.”

Improved transport infrastructure increases rural women’s work participation
Most salaried jobs are in the cities, towns and big villages. Hence, availability of transport and allied infrastructure has an impact on women’s participation in the workforce, according to a 2017 study by University of Maryland that looked at data from India Human Development Survey (IHDS) rounds of 2004-05 and 2011-12, jointly conducted by the University of Maryland and NCAER.

“The conditions of transportation infrastructure have also changed dramatically during the survey interval, particularly because of the strong push by the central government through the PMGSY [Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana],” the study said. “Many more villages were accessible by kutcha (unpaved) and pucca (paved) roads in 2012 than in 2005. The percentage [of villages] with “no road access” dropped from 6% to 1% during the seven-year interval.”

“Regarding the frequency of bus service, the percentage of villages with no bus services also dropped from 47% in 2005 to 38% in 2012,” said the study. “More villages had bus services one to six times a day in 2012 than in 2005, but slightly fewer villages had bus services seven times or more a day in 2012 compared to 2005.”

The IHDS surveys found that the construction of either a kutcha or a pucca road increased the odds of women’s participation in non-farm work by 1.5 and 1.4 times, respectively. Their gains were higher than that of men, who also benefited from road construction by 1.2 times for kutcha roads and 1.4 times for pucca roads, according to the study, reflecting the long-standing gender gap in employment. With men outnumbering women in the workforce, more women than men stand to gain from improved transport infrastructure.

The non-agricultural employment rate has also increased significantly for both men and women over the seven years to 2012, though the rate has remained much lower among women than among men. Only 10% of women participated in non-agricultural work in 2005, wḣich increased to 17% in 2012. The non-agricultural employment rate for men increased from 47% in 2005 to 55% in 2012.

MGNREGS work increases market wages for men, but not women
Another factor that has had an impact on women’s workforce participation is the MGNREGS. IHDS data suggest that fewer (46%) women reported having ‘no work’ in 2011-12 than in 2004-05 (50%). The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was enacted in 2005.

More women (9%) reported being engaged in non-farm work than the 6% involved in farm work from 2004-05 to 2011-12, according to the IHDS data. This suggests that the expansion of opportunities due to MGNREGS draws those women into paid labour who might have otherwise continued to work only on family farms. Further, research on IHDS data shows that nearly 45% of women MGNREGS workers worked as unpaid labour on family farms during the first wave of IHDS in 2004-05.

Higher allocation of MGNREGS work has been found to raise market wages (for formal work beyond MGNREGS) for male MGNREGS workers, but a similar increase is not statistically significant for women, according to a 2018 study by the NCAER. This underscores the gender bias in access to formal work. Where formal jobs beyond MGNREGS become available in rural areas, these go mostly to male MGNREGS workers, leaving women MGNREGS workers restricted to the informal sector.

(Salve is a senior policy analyst with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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For every £1 men earn per hour, women earn 81.6p. shutterstock

The difference in hourly pay between men and women is 15% in top UK universities and 37% in other universities. What’s more, men have most of the top jobs in UK universities, while women have more of the lower-paid jobs.

And this “gender pay gap” may keep getting wider if women aren’t supported to develop their digital skills. This is because women tend to have less advanced digital skills than men – skills that are increasingly in demand for university lecturer roles. And as universities around rely more extensively on digital technology, they need employees who have creative digital skills – which means women are more likely to miss out on jobs, promotions and pay increases.
 

Wanted: technical talent

The use of technology is now just part of the day job for anyone involved in teaching and learning in universities. Universities use technology to teach and communicate with students online – which can help to improve a student’s learning experience. Staff are also expected to use online learning and mobile learning platforms to teach, assess and talk to students in a virtual environment.

Our research shows there is a wide gap in the way men and women use technology. Shutterstock

Universities also plan to use more advanced technology. Gamification is on the rise in universities. This is where universities personalise a student’s learning, using game design thinking in non-game applications. Wearable devices, such as an Apple Watch or Google Glass, can also encourage learners to get more involved in the subject. This type of technology will most likely be used more in universities over the coming years.

And as women in higher education are generally less likely to be skilled in using these technologies, they may well be left behind – widening the gender pay gap in higher education – while also making it harder for women to progress in their careers.
 

Digital skills divide

Our research which looks at the gender gap in smartphone adoption and use in Arab countries shows there is a wide gap in the way men and women use technology in some parts of the world. And we found similar patterns in the UK. Men have more advanced digital skills than women, and women are underrepresented in the technology sector, specifically in the digital sector in education.

This “digital divide” begins at a very early age in school. It continues into higher education – in the UK there is one of the highest gender gaps in technology-related courses among all university courses in the world.
 

Why the World needs more women In tech.

Technology is advancing quickly, so academics and others working in higher education constantly have to update their skills. Without these skills, women in the sector are at a disadvantage when it comes to promotion and pay rises. So it’s more important than ever for universities to provide training and other programmes that help women develop their digital skills.

Closing the gender gap in digital skills would remove one factor contributing to the gender pay gap in UK universities. It would increase the chances of women being employed in the sector and make it easier for them to develop their careers. Tapping into female talent in technology would bring huge benefits to universities. And above all, it would help to close the digital skills gap – while helping to build a more equal and fairer society.
 

Nisreen Ameen, Lecturer in Information Technology Management, Queen Mary University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A safe workplace for women is a fundamental right
 

A constant and continuous voice has been raised to battle the violence and sexual harassment that takes place against women every day around the globe, whether it be in a workplace, or in public places. Women often do not report such incidents, and sometimes refrain from complaining, thinking of the social stigmas they are likely to encounter. 

The current #metoo movement has stirred the issue — women from different spheres of life have started to speak up about the intimidation they have felt with a colleague, a senior, a teacher, a stranger — making an indelible scar in their lives.

The constitution of Bangladesh has bestowed upon us various rights, which includes equality of opportunity in Article 19, and that women shall have equal rights as men in all spheres of the state under Article 28, right to protection of law under Article 31, protection of right to life and personal liberty under Article 32, and freedom of choice of profession or occupation under Article 40. 

Thus, there is a whole array of fundamental rights that we can exercise, which our constitution has given us, but we are not even fully aware of our rights.

In 2017, a study of ActionAid found that a total of 54.7% women living in cities faced violence, including physical, psychological, financial, and social violence, while a survey conducted by Karmojibi Nari and Care Bangladesh states that about 12.7% of workers face sexual harassment at the workplace. 

Furthermore, according to statistics of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Bangladesh, more than 10% of female police personnel face some form of sexual harassment at the workplace. These facts and figures just give a glimpse of the suffering faced by women in different fields of life.

Though there is no specific law on sexual harassment in the workplace, except a directive in the form of a guideline. In Bangladesh, there are various other laws with comes in aid to protect women. Not only do we have these current laws, we are also signatory to the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.

Hence, it is a basic fundamental human right for women to be able to work in a place free of bullying and harassment, where they can work equally with men, without any fear of being demeaned, or made to suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically, giving way to deteriorating performances in at work, educational institutions, public and private sectors. 

Therefore, organizations and institutions should adopt strict guidelines on sexual harassment.

In 2010, a case reported discusses sexual harassment in workplaces while introducing the liability it creates for such matters, as it says that a person can be liable for torture as well as damages, for wrong done in this matter, and liability may also extend against the organization for failure to prevent sexual harassment and bullying. 

In other words, while there may not be any explicit statutory law determining the matter related to sexual harassment in workplaces, the nation continues to cry for the need of a legal framework, and the appellate division on the above case has defined and explained the void. But it is merely a fragment of what needs to be done, and still requires further scrutiny. 

In light of the movement across the world in minimizing violence and harassment against women, and holding those who are part of the problem accountable for their actions, it is high time the law in our country is passed and implemented, so we may do our part in overcoming one of the worst obstacles in society.

Sabrina Zarin is a Partner in FM Associates and an advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune

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A report on the public talk organised by GATWU, Stree Jagruti Samiti, BBMP Guttige Pourakarmikara Sangha and KBNN Workers Federation

Image Courtesy: Debanjan Chowdhury

The #MeToo movement may have started recently, but it is not new to India. The fight against sexual harassment began when Bhanwari Devi, a saathin in a village in Rajasthan, was raped for doing her job — stopping child marriage. Every working-class woman, like Bhanwari Devi, has a #MeToo story to share. Job insecurity, low wages — upon which her entire family is dependent, no social security benefits, and added to which are caste and class oppression. This silences women workers from speaking about their experiences of sexual harassment. 

The #MeToo movement is not lead by any particular woman. The women participating in it to call out their perpetrators are owning the movement as theirs. This has displayed the exemplary solidarity of women fighting sexual harassment and exposing it for what it is. The movement has also demolished the lies around women when it comes to sexual harassment — that it happened because she was wearing a revealing dress, that she might have seduced him, that her character is questionable, that she asked for it, etc. It has showed us that sexual harassment is shockingly common and universal. It has also broken the myth that a woman loses her and her family’s honour if she is sexually harassed. Women are standing up against their perpetrators against great odds and risks to their personal safety, job security, and mental peace.

Despite the Vishakha Guidelines and the Prevention of Sexual Harassment and Redressal Act of 2013, working class women have been fighting for redressal and justice when it comes to sexual harassment at the workplace. There are areas of workplaces which are diverse, invisible and taut with class, caste and gender prejudices which do not allow the law to penetrate. This is the case with domestic workers, street vendors, pourakarmikas (waste workers), construction workers, and others, where local complaint committees have been formed, but are constituted merely on paper. In such cases, the working-class women have been fighting against sexual harassment through their trade unions.

On the evening of November 03, 2018, the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA), along with the BBMP Guttige Pourakarmikara Sangha, Garment and Textile Workers Union, Domestic Workers Rights Union and the KSRTC/BMTC/ NEKRTC/NWKRTC Workers Federation hosted a public programme called “#MeToo: Working Class Women Share” in Bangalore. Several women workers participated in the event and shared how the nature of their work and the work environments make it vulnerable to sexual harassment. The natural outcome of calling out their perpetrators is to lose their jobs instantly, and in most cases without any pay. Rathna, a pourakarmika, while sharing her experience said, “The supervisor in my ward stripped off his pants in public when we asked him for our wages which we weren’t paid for five months”. Tahira, a domestic worker, said that when her employer’s son molested her and she complained, she was instantly removed from her job. Rajeshwari, who works in a garment factory in Hosur stated how the managers in garment factories abuse them. “I was told that I wasn’t fit to work in the factory and that I should stand on the road to earn money. We are also exposed to physical assault due to the structure of garment factories and the way they are built,” she said. Parveen, a mechanic with the BMTC, said that sexual harassment is not just rampant amongst bus commuters, but it is even more so for women bus conductors. “We have to deal with drunk men sometimes. We have thousands of rupees in our bags from ticket collection. If we create a ruckus about the harassment we face and lose the money in the scuffle, then we will have to pay BMTC from our pockets. This is why most women conductors do not talk about sexual harassment,” she said and added that lack of toilets for women bus conductors at bus depots and bus stands also enable sexual harassment. 

In the programme, members from the transgender community, sex workers and students also spoke of their experiences of sexual harassment. Sana, a transsexual woman, said, “I was sexually violated when I worked for a media company. I was removed from my job as they feared I would create noise about it. Members of our community cannot complain to the police because they also sexually abuse us. They say that we are meant to be harassed and violated. The #MeToo movement has not addressed concerns of sexual minorities or oppressed caste women.” Madhu Bhushan, an activist, stated that one does not think of sexual harassment for sex workers. Parijatha of the Sthree Jagruti Samiti said that when they complained of several sexual abuse cases related to domestic workers, the officials of the Department of Women and Child Development reacted in an extremely insensitive manner. “They too are a prejudiced lot,” she said.

The All India Progressive Women’s Association plans to prepare a report from the experiences shared at the public programme on November 03, which will be submitted to the Kerala government’s Department of Women and Child Development, Karnataka State Commission for Women, the Internal Complaints Committees of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike and Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation.

Lekha graduated from Azim Premji University, Bangalore with a Masters in Development, before which, she worked as a sub-editor with The New Indian Express. She is interested in understanding issues related to informal labour and urban commons.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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A tall, streetwise, and seemingly nervous woman, Kavita had to give up a housekeeping job that paid her more than twice her current income because of her childcare responsibilities. She is the primary caregiver for her four-year-old child and a three-month-old infant and also the primary earner in her household. Her husband, a rickshaw driver, hasn’t held a steady job in months, forcing Kavita to juggle responsibilities.
 
Kavita’s precarious working conditions limit her ability to exclusively breastfeed her infant for six months. Mother’s milk is an important factor in ensuring good health and nutrition among the poorest in a country with a third of the world’s undernourished children under the age of five, according to the Global Nutrition Report 2017.
 
We asked Kavita if she believed three months of exclusive breastfeeding was enough for her infant. “I managed to do it for three months but I will not be able to do it for six months as one must,” she said. “I have to step out to get a job that pays well and it is unthinkable for me to take my three-month-old child to work with me.”
 
Kavita’s dilemma is shared by a majority of working mothers in India–they are unable to exclusively breastfeed their infants though they understand its importance, concluded an exploratory research study conducted by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.
 
The study surveyed 120 working mothers across three informal professions–domestic workers, street vendors, and home-based workers–through in-depth interviews and group discussions. In India, 81% to 86% of working women are engaged in non-agricultural informal jobs, much like the mothers in this study. They lack maternity protection schemes and paid breaks during work to express and store milk, which can safeguard mothers’ and babies’ interests and health.
 
Almost half of the working mothers who participated in our study (47%) returned to work within three months of giving birth, and another 21% would return over the following three months. Of the respondents, 27% could continue to breastfeed exclusively during working hours, while 35% resorted to packaged/powder milk, and 44% fed their infants other fluids as well.
 
 

Exclusive breastfeeding is the most effective way to ensure nutrition for the crucial first six months of a child’s life, studies have shown. Without this, children are likely to be stunted–an irreversible condition, which makes prevention key. As many as 48.2 million children in India grow up stunted because of chronic undernutrition during the most critical periods of growth and development in early life, according to the last National Family Health Survey in 2015-16.
 
Stunting is declining in India with national statistics indicating a decrease of 10 percentage points over the decade to 2016. This is in step with a rise of 8.5 percentage points in exclusive breastfeeding, indicating that still only 55% children are exclusively breastfed for six months.
 
No maternity protection for mothers in informal sector
 
Women in formal employment in India are making significant headway in maternity welfare legislation. They are entitled to six-months’ maternity leave for the first two children and the option to work from home when the nature of work allows such an arrangement. This allows them the time to exclusively breastfeed for the required six months.
 
But informal sector workers have to fend for themselves. For example, they save money to take longer breaks from work after pregnancy, or create care networks using neighbours when there aren’t any creches. But informal sector workers can have their work or earning opportunities taken away from them at short notice, making their work unstable and insecure.
 
It is unlikely that national breastfeeding and child nutrition targets of increasing exclusive breastfeeding rates to 69% by 2025 can be met equitably given the demographic weight of this population of working mothers.
 
Kavita is in a doubly precarious situation because her husband is not a dependable earner. In the third month of her newborn’s life, she was forced to look for a second job because her home-based work earned her less than Rs 50 a day which was not enough to cover domestic expenses. While there are public maternity benefit programmes such as Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (prime minister’s programme for mothers, PMMVY) for pregnant women–previously Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY)–there are few schemes to help women who have to work immediately after childbirth.
 
Thus far, there have been no significant welfare innovations to help mothers working in the informal employment step away from the workforce to adequately breastfeed their children.
 

 
With men in unstable small jobs, women become primary earners
 
The understanding that women’s incomes are supplemental to their husbands’–or are used for non-fixed expenses–is not true for the sampled women. Like Kavita, most women in the study sample are de facto breadwinners or primary earners in dual-earning households. Their income supports household rent, electricity and food costs as well as the costs of education and healthcare. Some women participants reported that they started working to meet the additional costs of having an infant. These women had to go back to work as soon as possible after the delivery because they could not forego the income that supports household subsistence.
 
“The children come to us when they need books for school, new clothes, some biscuits,” said Janvi, a 23-year-old domestic worker. “They know where the money is–with their mother. Even my little baby, not even two, knows that the money is in my shirt and when she wants Frooti [mango drink], she puts her hand there and asks.”
 
Three in every five women in the survey reported that their husband displayed irregularity in finding work. Across the three sampled settlements, women’s husbands were out of work, in search of work or underemployed, often making women the sole stable earners of the household. This irregularity in work and income was due to the lack of daily-wage jobs in construction, the seasonal nature of self-employed work such as catering or electricals management for weddings or disruptions in small vending businesses caused by licensing issues.
 
Despite these disruptions, in our interviews with the women, we found that their husbands were not inclined to acquire new skills that could get them regular or more stable jobs. This meant that women were often the sole stable earners in their households who could not afford to take time off after childbirth.
 
“It’s like they [the husbands] don’t care if they don’t have work for 5-10 days or even two months,” said Renu, a 26-year-old vendor. “I know if I don’t work for five days there will be no milk for tea the next morning, and no roti to eat at night. Even if your body hurts, you have to get up and go to work.”
 
For men, the monetary cost of acquiring new skills or aspiring to better work in a mega city labour market was too high to make it a viable choice, we found.
 
These factors are specific to megacities such as New Delhi which have become uninhabitable for semi-skilled residents forcing them out of any kind of regular work even in the informal sector. This exclusionary urbanisation forces women into gender-segregated work sectors such as domestic work and home-based work to become de facto head earners for their households.
 
Early weaning often led to digestive problems and undernourishment
 
Women in the study did not know how to construct the best nutrition for their infants or find other ways to cope with the challenges of poor working mothers even though they had good access to public and private healthcare options during and after pregnancy. They missed the opportunity to ask healthcare workers, families or community members how to manage breastfeeding, food, and work because they were unable to acknowledge just how much they worked, and how little time they could devote to their infants. Working mothers fashioned feeding patterns with insufficient information, leading to lower nutritional outcomes for their infants.
 
Mothers weaned their infants off breastmilk so that they could get back to work. In most cases, this led to children receiving inadequate feeds as mothers reported that they were unable to afford infant formula as a regular supplement.
 
“Ek baar bachche ko maa ke doodh ki aadat ho jaaye toh bahar ka doodh shuru karna mushkil ho jata hain. Isliye 12-14 din mein hi bahar ka doodh shuru kar deti hu (If a child gets used to only breastmilk it is difficult to get them habituated to other milk, so I start feeding other milk within 12-14 days of birth),” said Devi, a 22-year-old street vendor.
 
Infants were fed buffalo and cow’s milk, along with porridge and pulses, at a time when their digestive systems had not yet fully developed. This caused persistent diarrhoea–another common trend amongst children who were undernourished and at risk of stunting and wasting.
 
Infants being given water, critical source of many infections
 
To counter diarrhoea, mothers often thinned buffalo or cow’s milk, or fed the infants tea or juice using unfiltered and untreated water much against global nutritional guidelines for babies under six months of age. In all these alternate feeding options, water introduced a critical source of infection in infants at an age where the baby’s gut was still forming. With sub-optimal environmental sanitation and lack of clean drinking water in many of the settlements where such informal workers live, the chances of water-induced diarrhoea–the third leading cause of mortality among children under the age of five–are very high as reported in the National Family Health Surveys.
 
“Paani ubaal ke nahi dete, itna dhyaan nahi de paate bachche ko. Jab bohot ganda ho toh ubaalte hain. Kuch alag se banaye bachche ke liye, itna time hi nahi ho pata. (I don’t boil the water I feed my child because I do not have the time to be so careful. If it’s visibly unclean, I do. I don’t have the time to make specific food preparations for my child),” said Lakshmee, a 22-year-old domestic worker.  
 

The open drainage and taps supplying drinking water that line the alleys in one of the informal settlements in north Delhi sampled in the study. Poor hygiene and lack of clean drinking water increase the chances of water-induced diarrhoea–the third leading cause of mortality among children under the age of five.
 
Workplace offers little or no support for breastfeeding
 
Home-based workers like Kavita came the closest to being able to exclusively breastfeed their infants because they did not face the issue of transporting their children to worksites. Street vendors and domestic workers found this extremely challenging for reasons that are specific to their sectors of work.
 
Vending in the open is a physically demanding job requiring vendors be alert and engage the customers for every sale. Working mothers in this sector cannot attend to their infants during peak market hours, and do not easily find safe spaces to keep their infants.
 

Vending in the open is a physically demanding job that needs constant attention and presence, allowing new mothers little time to care for their infants. The women in the photograph was vending within 100 m of her house, allowing her to visit her child frequently. A young girl from the family network takes over when the former takes a break.
 
Domestic workers must seek permission to bring their infants to the houses of employers. Employers often do not give permission because they fear that children will dirty their house, break fragile objects and distract their mothers.
 
When bringing a child to work is not an option, mothers have to make alternative arrangements to balance work and care. Kavita could not retain her job as housekeeping staff because she could neither find a safe place for her infant at work nor a caregiver at home. She could only find an eight-year-old girl in her neigbourhood to babysit her child. Though Kavita lived in a large joint family, all the women in her family worked. Her neighbourhood creche did not accept children younger than 10-12 months of age.
 
The oft-cited solution to breastfeeding while working–expressed breastmilk–wasn’t an option for working mothers in Delhi. There were significant cultural barriers against pumping and expressing milk. Mothers thought breast milk would spoil as soon as it left their breast. They also mentioned having to seek permission from their in-laws or husbands to express milk. The absence of access to a fridge or any cold storage at their home or workplace for storing expressed breastmilk was also a deterrent.
 
Women left to juggle multiple roles with no support systems
 
There is evidence to suggest that women use the flexibility of informal work to manage the triple burden of work, household chores, and caregiving. These conditions still make them vulnerable to exogenous shocks. There is a tension between their need and desire to improve their household’s economic standing and their ability to breastfeed in inadequate workplace and employment conditions.
 
In the face of urgent economic and livelihood responsibilities women such as Kavita face, exclusive breastfeeding isn’t a priority. To expect one to pursue optimal breastfeeding patterns in such circumstances is to forget that the mother is also a worker. It is also asking an individual to fill the gaps for structural issues of lack of social protection, lack of decent work and employment, and inadequate environmental sanitation.
 
As taking off from work seems impossible to the women in the study, they were interested in an improved communication programme around breastfeeding, one that goes beyond the advisory and operational details, and shares more information on the scientific aspects of it. This, they say, may allow them to fashion more informed feeding patterns.
 
(Chowdhury and Surie are part of the academics and research team at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. They work on social protection, the informal economy and urban health.)
 
Courtesy: India Spend
 

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The idea of this 45-minute exercise, said Blesson Joseph of team-building company Dfrens, is to demonstrate the power of cooperation. “If you come together, you can make a difference,” he said.

 
GurgaonMoms, the organiser of this day-long event of talks, competitions, pitches and, yes, drumming, aims to do precisely that: Get women to form a network where they help each other.
 
Launched in 2011 by Neela Kaushik, an MBA with a background in digital marketing, as an online support group for mums with queries–what’s a good school, recommend a reasonably-priced dentist, yoga instructor, and even heated discussions on politics–GurgaonMoms now claims 25,000 members, all of them mothers, most of them professionally qualified and some of them in search of opportunities that will put their qualifications to use.
 
There’s Pooja Sardana, an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, mother of two children–a girl aged seven and a boy aged four–who put in 14 years in various companies including Unilever and GSK before she quit after the birth of her son in 2014 to “explore a different side of myself”.
 
“I needed the time to figure out what I want to do,” she said. For a while she shared stories on her travel blog and by the end of this year, she plans to launch a brand of children’s shoes.
 
Shagun Singh stayed with her sales job at a five-star hotel in Mumbai even two years after the birth of her son in August 2006. Then her husband got a job in Delhi and, so, she took a transfer. But the Delhi office expected her to clock in twice a day before and after going out on calls. “The work culture did not allow for flexibility and I started exploring options to make better use of my time as a mom and a professional,” she said.

 
Singh’s father ran a business that provided security and housekeeping services. “I realised there is a demand for professional housekeeping services,” she said, “So I launched my own firm, HomeWork.” The job gives her flexi-hours and, more crucially, she’s home by 2.30 pm, which is when her son, now 11, gets home from school. “It’s important for me to be around when he gets back,” she said.
 
Smiti Puri completed her MBA from City University New York and landed a job with a bank in New York. When she got married to a Delhi-based businessman, she moved back to India and took a transfer from the bank. But, she said, the work culture here was “totally unprofessional”. For a while she worked for an internet incubator. Then she got pregnant.
 
“That’s when I decided to help my husband’s family business of textiles, shawls and carpets get online,” she said. But when her second child was born, said Puri, it was like being “hit by a train”.
 
“Nothing I have done, not 20-hour days nor impossible deadlines, has been as physically and emotionally challenging as bringing up my children,” she said. As of now, Puri is happy to be a stay-at-home mom, watching over her two boys aged four and one. She has no plans to get back to a job.
 
Corporate’s India’s motherhood bump
 
The motherhood bump is showing in corporate India. “While there are few entry points for women, the exit gates are many – pregnancy, child care, elderly care, lack of family support, and unsupportive work environment,” said an April 2018 study, Predicament of Returning Mothers, conducted jointly by Ashoka University and the Genpact Centre for Women’s Leadership.
 
“Having a young child in the home depresses mothers’ employment, an inverse relationship that has intensified over time,” found a March 2017 World Bank policy paper, The Motherhood Penalty and Female Employment in Urban India, written by Maitreyi Bordia Das and Ieva Zumbyte.
 
India’s low female workforce participation rate, at 24%, according to the 2018 Economic Survey, is amongst the worst in South Asia. Between 2004 and 2011, the year of the last census, nearly 20 million women fell off the labour map, and there are no signs that this slide has stopped.
 
This dwindling participation by women in employment is perplexing because it comes at a time of increased educational attainment, declining fertility and economic growth. Paradoxically, as our September 2017 story showed, it is India’s most educated women who are leaving jobs faster than others.
 
Our nation-wide investigation (links to other parts in this series at the end of this story) found that women are falling off the labour map for various reasons, including the need to get their family’s permission to work, social attitudes about what is appropriate work for women, bearing a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work, safety issues and the lack of infrastructure such as affordable and reliable public transport.
 
And motherhood.
 
A silent but stark effect on mums
 
In most cultures around the world, mothers are the primary caregivers of their children. But in India, motherhood has been elevated to an exalted status.
 
“Socially, mothers are expected to put their children’s needs above all others, and certainly above their own,” said Das, author of the 2017 World Bank paper we referred to earlier. A woman who prioritises her career ahead of, or even alongside, young children being brought up by domestic workers or in daycare “often receives implicit or explicit censure both within and outside the house”, she said.
 
When women get pregnant, the barriers they already face at the workplace just making a name for themselves are amplified, said Sairee Chahal, founder and CEO of Sheroes, which describes itself as the world’s largest online career destination for women with two million members.
 
“For mothers, managing the logistics–daycare, reliable household help, a support system–can become problematic,” Chahal said. The incentive to remain employed thus decreases dramatically as a result. “There is a silent but stark effect on mums.”

 
 
As joint families break down, the burden of child rearing goes up. “Motherhood places a penalty on almost all female workers–unless formal or informal institutions, as well as fathers and husbands, step in to share care responsibilities with women and female wages are high enough to compensate for the monetary and non-monetary costs of childcare,” said Das.
 
“Our own studies have found that having young children constrain women’s employment whereas having an older female relative, say, a mother-in-law, increases her chances of employment,” she said.
 
Globally, mothers of children below the age of five have, at 47.6%, the lowest employment rate compared with 87.9% for fathers and 54.4% for women who had no children, found a June 2018 study of 90 countries by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. 
 

Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.)
 
The report confirms that motherhood definitely and demonstrably impacts women’s employment prospects. But is it alone in keep women away from employment?Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.)
 
Defining women’s work
 
All over the world, it is women who bear a disproportionate burden of not just child care but also other work around the house–cooking, cleaning, looking after the elderly and disabled, fetching firewood, fodder and water.  
 
In no country do men and women equally share unpaid care work. It is women who end up doing over three-quarters of the total global amount of unpaid care work.   
 
This work, needless to say, is unpaid.
 
Of course, it comes at a cost. Gender inequality in household work is reflected in the labour market. Put simply, the more you work (unpaid) in the house, the less time you have to work (paid) in the market.
 
In 2018, found the ILO report authored by Laura Addati and others, 606 million women of working age all over the world declared themselves to be unavailable for employment due to unpaid care work, while only 41 million men were inactive for the same reason.
 
It is unpaid care work that constitutes the “main barrier to women’s participation in labour markets”, noted the report.
 

Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.
Note: ‘Personal’ means education, sickness or disability. ‘Reasons related to labour market’ includes awaiting recall to work, believing no work available and lacking required qualifications. All numbers in percentage.
 
“A high road to care work implies achieving gender equality in labour markets and in households, therefore addressing the motherhood penalty,” said Laura Addati, lead author of the report and maternity protection and work-family specialist, ILO, Geneva. “Since care is a common good, the report calls for the overall and primary responsibility of the State in adopting transformative care policies in five main policy areas: care, macroeconomic, social protection, labour and migration policies,” she said in an email response.  
 
Farzana Afridi, an associate professor with the Indian Statistical Institute, agreed: It is marriage, rather than motherhood, that is the first stumbling block in women’s workforce participation.  
 
In 2011, for instance, half of all unmarried women in the 15-60 age bracket were in the labour force while the comparative rate for married women was 20%–a figure that has remained more or less stagnant for three decades, she said.
 
 
“For most women, there is a very narrow window to join the labour force between the time they complete their education and the time they get married,” she said. With motherhood, the chances of remaining in paid employment do go down–but not as much as they do with marriage, said Afridi.
 
Time-use data also show that whether a woman has one child or three, the time she spends on unpaid care work remains the same, said Afridi. The issue is not so much having children, the issue is unpaid care work. “You cannot address women’s workforce participation without first addressing the amount of unpaid care work they are required to do,” said Afridi. “Motherhood is a penalty but it is not the only one.”
 
Bearing the cost
 
Mandating paid maternity leave is one obvious intervention that governments can make, even though in India it impacts only the roughly 5% of women who work in the organised sector.
 
Yet, found a recent study by human resources services company TeamLease, in the short-term, enhanced maternity leave could lead to as many as 12 million women potentially losing jobs across all sectors in 2018 as a result of the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act of March 2017 that increased maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks.
 
The job loss would typically take place in small and medium-sized enterprises and is “likely to vary from reduced demand for women to unethical behavior of reducing the upfront salary for women”, said the report.
 
However, “large, professionally managed companies–both private and public sector–and medium-sized public sector companies will actively back the amendment and are more likely to hire more women”, it said.
 
Among some companies, there is a recognition that they will have to lean out if they want to retain female talent and pursue employee diversity as a goal.
 
Diversity is not a warm, fuzzy idea for corporates but makes sound business sense with a more heterogeneous group likely to throw up better innovation, said Roopa Wilson, who manages diversity and inclusion at IBM India.
 
Quoting IBM chairman, president and CEO, Virginia M. Rometty, Wilson said: “IBM thinks about diversity the way we think about innovation–both are essential to the success of our business…. When we incorporate diversity into our business, we create better innovations and outcomes.”
 
IBM has several programmes designed specifically for returning mothers–from providing an additional six-months’ unpaid leave post the mandatory six-month maternity leave to providing online learning courses and trainings so that employees, particularly women on long leave, don’t become redundant, said Wilson. 
 
In addition, she said, the company provides for childcare centres in almost all locations across India and even has an elder care programme designed for the parents and parents-in-law of employees (picking up medical reports, sending a nurse for shots etc).
 
Despite these steps, said Wilson, last year the company realised it had not fully factored in women themselves and their desires.
 
“The girl child in India has a strong education identity; we tell them ‘study hard, become a doctor’,” said Wilson. “They even have a sense of job identity and know that once they graduate they will get jobs. But we still have to develop a sense of career identity in our girls.”
 
Up to 51% of all entry-level jobs are filled by women, and these women only start hitting roadblocks after the first three to four years of their jobs, found a 2011 Nasscom survey. That’s when they might get married and have to relocate to where their husbands live and work. When they have children, there is a “social and cultural issue where priorities change”, and this is the challenge that workplaces have to address, said Wilson.
 
But, warned Sairee Chahal, workplaces are becoming leaner and there has, in the past few years, been a lot of “change and churn”. “Our economy is not creating enough jobs. We are creating 1.5 million corporate jobs a year, whereas we need a million jobs every month,” she said. In this straitened situation, “one person out is one person less” and women who choose to opt out of jobs are not going to be anyone’s priority.  
 
Leaning in, leaning out
 
Reams have been written ever since Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg advised professional women to “lean in” and stick it out.    
 
It’s important to stay the course, agreed Paroma Roy Chowdury, vice president, public affairs, Softbank, and mother to a 26-year-old son. “It can get really tough and the greatest attribute a woman at work can have is a thick skin,” she said.  
 
Chowdhury made the switch from journalism to corporate communications, taking three months off when she had her son, and then diving right back to work. What moms want at work, she said, is a certain degree of empathy, when a kid falls ill, for instance. Having more role models and women in mentorship roles would also help. And, of course, she added, there is no over-estimating the value of good support structures at home and at work.  
 
But dads are changing too, and it’s important to recognise this, said Aparna Samuel Balasundaram, an author and psychotherapist who has conducted corporate training sessions with companies such as Wipro and Accenture. Balasundaram said she recently held a parenting workshop that was attended by three times as many men as there were women.
 
“There’s a realisation that if you’re going to remain a two-income family to enable a certain lifestyle, then men are going to have to support their wives,” she said. “Moreover, today’s men just want to be better fathers.”
 
But ultimately there is no getting around the cultural mindset change needed to get more mothers back into the workplace.
 
“Everything goes back to the way we are raising our daughters,” said Deepa Narayan, a former advisor to the World Bank and author of Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women. “We want our daughters to become doctors but her ultimate goal is marriage to be able to ‘adjust’ after marriage. So her inner conditioning is to pull back and be respectful, silent and obedient.”
 
But, “for many women the challenge is not external but internal. They are hitting up against their own guilt all the time. It comes from your own judgment, the judgment of your family, and that of your peers,” said Kachina Chawla, a public health specialist whose portal, GharKamai, connecting women professionals with project-based work recently got acquired by Sheroes.
 
“We were brought up to believe that we could change the world, so does staying at home mean we are letting down the side?”
 
This is the twelfth part in an ongoing nation-wide IndiaSpend investigation into India’s declining female labour force participation.
 
Read other stories in this series:
 
Part 1: Why Indian workplaces are losing women
Part 2: In a Haryana factory, tradition clashes with aspiration
Part 3: Housework keeps India’s women at home (but some are changing that)
Part 4: India’s hospitality sector must first win over the parents of the skilled women it needs
Part 5: Why India’s most educated women are leaving jobs faster than others
Part 6: Why Himachali women work: the answer in a jam factory
Part 7: Judge to Worker: The spread of sexual harassment in India
Part 8: Bihar’s poorest women are changing their lives, with a little help
Part 9: On Delhi’s ragged edges, women bear highest cost of scant transport
Part 10: How scooters are helping Haryana’s women get to work
Part 11: As Indian women leave jobs, single women keep working. Here’s why
 
(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on the gender issues confronting India.)
 

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In urban areas, a woman with a graduate degree gets paid Rs 690.68 per day in the transport and storage sector while a man gets 30% more at Rs 902.45. In agriculture, an illiterate woman worker in rural India receives Rs 88.2 per day while an illiterate man receives Rs 128.52, which is 45% more.
 
However, there are some sectors in which women get paid more than men, although by smaller margins. In the construction sector in rural areas, for instance, women (irrespective of the level of education) are paid Rs 322 on average per day while men are paid Rs 279.15, which is Rs 43 or 13% less.
 
In urban areas, in the transport and storage sector, women are paid Rs 455 on average per day, irrespective of the level of education, while men are paid Rs 443 per day–Rs 12 or 2.7% less.
 
The ‘Men and Women in 2017’ report released by the statistics and programme implementation ministry in May 2018 contains data on average daily wages and salaries for men and women aged 15-59 years, arranged by industry and type of work.
 

Source: Men and Women In 2017, Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation
Note: Figures in rupees. Manufacturing 1 includes Food and Beverages, Tobacco, Textiles, Textile Products, and Leather and Footwear; Manufacturing 2 includes Wood and Cork, Pulp, Paper, Paper Products, Printing and Publishing, Coke, Refined Petroleum and Nuclear Fuel, Chemicals and Chemical Products, Rubber and Plastics, Other Non-Metallic Minerals, Basic Metals and Fabricated Metal Products, Machinery, Electrical and Optical Equipment.
 
A graduate woman earns 5.8 times more than an illiterate woman in rural areas while graduate  men earn 3.6 times more than illiterate men. A graduate woman earns nearly four times more than an illiterate woman in urban areas, while graduate men earn nearly three times more than illiterate men.
 
It is interesting to note that the gender wage gap between men and women remains high even after higher education–a graduate woman is paid Rs 609 on average across sectors while a man with a graduate or higher degree will earn Rs 805. Women with graduate or higher degree earn 24% less than their male counterparts.
 
Construction is the highest paying sector for women in rural areas while mining and quarrying is the highest paying sector for men, the data show.
 
In urban areas, men get paid the most in the mining and quarrying sector while women get paid the most in the public sector (such as in electricity, gas and water utilities).
 
As pointed out before, there are some sectors such as transport in rural areas where women get paid more than men–in urban areas, transport and storage pays Rs 11 more to women than men.
 
The Global Wage Report 2016-17 published by the International Labour Organization in 2016 had raised an alarm with the revelation that the gender pay gap in India, at 30%, was among the highest in the world.
 
Women in top management in India earn 18.8% less than men, this 2016 report by the advisory firm Korn Ferry Hay Group had said, blaming the gap on lesser representation of women in senior roles.
 
More generally across the value chain, women in India earn 67% less than men, and the gap will take more than 100 years to close, the advisory Accenture said in this 2017 report based on a global survey.
 
Meanwhile, fewer women are taking part in the paid labour force. In the first four months of 2017, 2.4 million women fell off the employment map, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a Mumbai-based think-tank, as IndiaSpend reported on August 5, 2017.
 
Among South Asian peers, India in 2013 had the lowest rate of female employment after Pakistan. In roughly two decades preceding 2013, female labour force participation in India fell from 34.8% to 27%, according to an April 2017 report by the World Bank.
 
India ranks 108th among 144 countries on gender equality rankings created by the World Economic Forum for its Global Gender Gap report of 2017. This puts India behind Bangladesh (at 47) and China (at 100).
 
Greater gender equality in a country is associated with better education and health, higher per capita income, faster and more inclusive economic growth, and greater international competitiveness.
 
Closing the gender gap in labour force participation rates would add $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025, a widely cited study by the McKinsey Global Institute had said in 2015.
 
(Salve is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)
 
We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.
 

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K.B.Vasanthi, 48, is a block panchayat member in Thalikulam block, Thrissur. She has been working under MGNREGS since 2008, and says if it weren’t for these wages, she would not have thought of contesting elections.
 
Vasanthi has continued to work under MGNREGS despite being an elected local-government representative, although not as much as before. “My husband has health issues and the money he earns from fishing hasn’t been great for a while. We had loans to pay and three children to take care of. MGNREGS work has been of great help,” she said.
 
Between 2008-09 and 2016-17, 90% of MGNREGS workers in Kerala were women. Nationally, women comprised, on average, 52% of MGNREGS work force, their participation having peaked at 57% in 2016-17.
 
Such high participation of women in manual labour was not always the norm in Kerala. In 2005, just 15.9% of the state’s women worked for a living, when the national average was around 30.7%.
 
“Back then, people thought it strange that we were doing manual labour, and made fun,” Devayani Kuttan, 52, who has been working under MGNREGS since 2008, told IndiaSpend, “They thought it was not worth it.”
 
The role of Kudumbashree, Kerala’s poverty eradication and women’s empowerment mission, has been significant in mobilising women for the unskilled labour opportunities that MGNREGS offers, and ultimately changing old attitudes. The complementarity between Kudumbashree’s self-help groups and the jobs programme has spawned economic and social opportunities that women have been quick to grasp.
 
How Kudumbashree mobilised women workers
 
The role of community-based organisations and self-help groups formed under Kudumbashree in enabling MGNREGS is well-recognised, as this 2012 Kudumbashree report noted.
 
Kudumbashree creates ward- and panchayat-level citizens’ groups that work in tandem with local self-governments to reduce poverty and improve governance.
 
At the ward level, groups play a critical role in registering labourers, preparing annual action plans for MGNREGS, and providing amenities at work sites. An executive decision by the government ensured supervisors for MGNREGS would be chosen from among Kudumbashree groups, and has made Kerala the only state in the country with 100% women supervisors, the report said.
 
“When the number of workers at one site is less than 50, the supervisors are considered as workers and given daily wages for unskilled workers. But when there are more than 50 workers, the supervisors are considered as semi-skilled workers and given wages of semi-skilled workers,” Vinodhini N., joint programme coordinator for MGNREGS in Thrissur district, said.
 
The works identified by Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups are submitted for discussion at village- and ward-level groups. Finally, the Grama Panchayath Committee gives its approval.
 
In this way, Kudumbashree has paved the way for MGNREGS.
 
The preponderance of women in MGNREGS, meanwhile, has resulted from the gender wage gap in the state. Men earn more than women in other jobs, whereas MGNREGS pays men and women the same wage. So men have been less interested in MGNREGS, leaving the field wide open to women.
 
Wage difference
 
Kerala has the widest gender wage gap for casual wage labour (unskilled non-public work)–at Rs 227 per day, men earned Rs 107.3 per day more than women in 2012, according to this MGNREGS Sameeksha (assessment) report.
 
Generally, in places with wide gender pay gap, more women participate in MGNREGS as men prefer other higher-paying jobs, the report said. But there are exceptions such as Punjab and Haryana, which may be explained by limited demand for non-public work, which pushes men to avail MGNREGS employment. Other factors could be non-availability of work suitable for women, or cultural reasons such as non-acceptance of women in the labour force, the report added.
 
Financial security and social ties
 
The Kudumbashree-MGNREGS link, by providing women with a sustained opportunity for work, has created a steady source of income for them. Currently, the wage rate under MGNREGS in Kerala is Rs 268 per day.
 
“Women know that they will get  equal pay for equal work which is not the case elsewhere,” said ward member Vasanthi. “If it was not for MGNREGS, I would not have stood for elections.”
 
Since getting employed under MGNREGS, many of her fellow workers have become vocal and confident, she said, adding, “The access to a source of income has strengthened their self-belief.”
 
Over the years, as more women have registered and shared their experiences, and the government’s mobilisation and awareness campaigns have begun to have an impact, the numbers have increased, MGNREGS worker Kuttan said.
 
Many women workers get offered casual work by other employers due to their MGNREGS experience. Kuttan said she saved money for her daughter’s wedding and bought jewellery from her MGNREGS savings.
 
There has been a four-percentage-point decrease in women’s participation in 2016-17, which an official–speaking on condition of anonymity–said was because more “scientific” methods were being used to assess workers’ performance, which may have discouraged the elderly and some other workers from taking up MGNREGS work.
 

Devayani Kuttan (left), 52, says times have changed since she began working under MGNREGS in 2008. Over the years, the wages have helped her finance her daughter’s wedding and buy jewellery, traditionally considered a moveable asset.
 
Often, workers deposit Rs 30-50 a week into the thrift fund set up by their local Kudumbashree unit. The small regular savings of neighborhood groups are pooled and given out as internal loans to the most deserving in the group, according to the Kudumbashree website. These loans are useful if members face immediate financial shocks. Members’ MGNREGS wages have enlarged this pool.
 
MGNREGS work has also strengthened bonds between workers, enabling elderly women to work, too. “The employment programme gives me a source of income. Who else will employ me at my age?” said 65-year-old Devaki, one such beneficiary in Thalikulam village, who only shared her first name.
 
At 13%, Kerala has the highest proportion of over-60 people in the country, IndiaSpend reported on October 7, 2017. When the work gets cumbersome, the younger workers lend a hand, Vasanthi said, adding, “Our interactions change our social attitude towards the elderly, and allow us to realise the work that goes into maintaining a community.”
 
Series concluded. You can read the first part here and the second part here.
 
(Paliath is an analyst at IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Taking the fall. shutterstock.com

Less well-known, but arguably a more pernicious problem, is the “glass cliff”. Originally recognised by academics Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam back in 2005, this is the phenomenon of women making it to the boardroom but finding themselves disproportionately represented in untenable leadership positions.

Ryan and Haslam presented evidence that women were indeed starting to secure seats at boardroom tables. But the problem was that their positions were inherently unstable. These women would then find themselves in an unsustainable leadership position from which they would be ousted with evidence of apparent failure. The title of their paper sums it up: women are over‐represented in precarious leadership positions.

Subsequent research in an array of environments has demonstrated that this is not an isolated issue, nor is it unique to certain industries or geographical locations. It reveals that women in top leadership positions seem to be routinely handed inherently unsolvable problems.

These are problems that they strive very hard to address – but no matter the effort, these problems cannot be solved. The women in charge are then still held personally accountable for failure, ultimately leading to their resignation or dismissal. This creates a damaging, self-fulfilling prophecy that women are unsuitable for leadership positions. Not only does it knock the confidence of the woman in question, it also makes organisations wary of recruiting women to these positions.
 

A chequered picture

The glass cliff theory and its supporting evidence appears, at face value, to be at odds with evidence from other sources which confirms that more women than ever before are making it to the boardroom.

But the detail of gender representation in large organisations presents a more chequered picture. Plus, the snapshots and headlines of more women in the boardroom tend to lack the granular analysis of boardroom turnover – that women are more likely to be over‐represented on boards of companies that are more precarious.

There is also the more challenging question of why any organisation would actively set out to sabotage someone’s career, which is what the glass cliff situation appears to do. This is where the data gets really interesting.

A wider look at glass cliff scenarios reveals that in most situations the women in question have experience of the organisation when they are recruited into the top position. They are not external hires, they are internal. This means that, in practice, these women are far more likely to have a fundamental understanding of the politics of the organisation, its culture and power brokers.

The evidence seems to suggest that these women find themselves with the choice of accepting a glass cliff position or resigning altogether. Having worked for many years to secure a leadership or executive role, it is perhaps less surprising to understand why these women feel a sense of obligation to take on what appears to be an impossible challenge.
 

Support structures

The size of the step up to a senior executive role should not be understated. Support, in the form of coaching and mentoring for senior executives, is repeatedly shown to be vital if they are to become successful and begin to make a real impact. What appears to be a common characteristic across glass cliff situations is that the women in these roles lack this ongoing support.

What remains unclear is whether this is because the organisation is unwilling to provide it. Or, worse, is blithely unaware that for a woman stepping up to an executive position with no clear role model or social support network, then she is likely to need even more help and likely of a different nature to her male colleagues.

The benign neglect shown by organisations towards female senior executives represents a worrying trend. It is all very well promoting women into the boardroom, but failing to support them when they are there is equally damaging. Arguably it undoes all of the good work, resources and effort to transition women into the boardroom in the first place.

Empirical evidence also demonstrates that women in particular suffer from impostor syndrome. This is the idea that successful people feel that they have become successful through luck, not their own hard work or ability and will be “found out” and fired or demoted.

It is understandable that this is likely to be particularly acute when a woman is the only female around the boardroom table. Impostor syndrome isn’t confined to women, but it is markedly more present, and it would seem that one of the possible explanations for a glass cliff scenario presenting itself is that organisations simply fail to consider that women in this position are likely to need a different kind of support in their new role.

Helping to create gender parity in boardrooms is widely shown to be beneficial on multiple metrics. But if organisations aren’t keeping good people in the boardroom because of a failure to appreciate individual differences, then this last hurdle arguably undoes all of the good work that quotas, all-female shortlists, and gender pay gap reporting strives to achieve.
 

Susanna Whawell, Part-time PhD Researcher, University of Manchester

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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