 "Gender parity to add Rs 46 lakh cr to India's GDP: McKinsey report")
The report said about 70 per cent increase in GDP would come from raising India’s women labour-force participation rate from 31 per cent now to 41 per cent in 2025.
The report, The power of parity: Advancing Women’s Equality in India, released during the CII HR Summit on Monday, said a full-potential scenario in which women played an identical role in labour markets as men would add as much as Rs 1,836.5 lakh crore (as on Monday close at Rs 65.59), or 26 per cent, to global annual GDP in 2025. India would gain the most with Rs 190.2 lakh crore (as on Monday close at Rs 65.59) added to annual GDP in 2025, 60 per cent higher than business-as-usual, it said.
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The economic boost would translate to 1.4 per cent a year incremental GDP growth for India. This would bring 68 million more women into the economy over this period, the report said.
MGI has developed a gender parity score (GPS) that uses 15 indicators to measure each country’s progress on gender parity in society and the economy. GPS establishes a strong link between gender equality in society, attitudes and beliefs about the role of women, and gender equality in work.
The report said gender inequality in India was high or extremely high on three dimensions in MGI’s framework — gender equality in work, legal protection and political voice, and physical security and autonomy — and medium to high on the fourth dimension of essential services and enablers of economic opportunity.
Rajat Gupta, Director, McKinsey & Company India, said, “India’s share of women’s contribution to GDP is at 17 per cent, much lower than the global average of 37 per cent, and the lowest among all 10 regions in the world analysed by MGI. Twenty-six countries in our dataset of 95 have a lower per capita GDP and Human Development Index than India. However, many of these countries have higher levels of gender parity.”
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The report found a huge variation in gender equality among India’s 32 states. The average Femdex score of the top-five states closest to gender parity — Mizoram, Kerala, Meghalaya, Goa and Sikkim — stood at 0.67, which is comparable with a modified GPS (considering only the 10 indicators included in the Femdex) for Argentina, China and Indonesia. The average Femdex of India’s bottom-five states on gender parity — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh — was 0.46, comparable to the modified GPS of Chad and Yemen.
Anu Madgavkar, a senior MGI fellow based in Mumbai, said Femdex scores varied significantly across Indian states, ranging from 0.42 in Bihar to 0.70 in Mizoram. “While the top-5 states on Femdex account for a mere four per cent of India’s female working-age population, the bottom-five account for as much as 32 per cent. Focusing efforts here represents a large opportunity for improving India’s national position on gender equality.”
The research also highlighted unequal sharing of household responsibilities between men and women. Women’s contribution to India’s GDP, measured by their share of paid work, was much less than their share of unpaid work such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children and older members of the family.
Globally, women spend roughly three times the amount of time spent by men on unpaid work. In India, women performed 10 times the amount of unpaid care work than men. If this unpaid work could be valued and compensated, it would contribute $0.3 trillion (about Rs 20 lakh crore) to India’s economic output, it added.