<b>Rahul Jacob:</b> For want of working women

The widely held belief that India is guaranteed a demographic dividend because it has millions of young people entering the workforce every year has been repeated so often that it has begun to seem like a religious mantra. This notion floats above the messy facts on the ground such as our inability to create large numbers of labour-intensive jobs in factories, arguably the most serious unfinished business of the reforms that started in 1991. An openness to investment in this sector as well as relatively high literacy rates among men and women in China and the rest of East Asia largely explains why these countries were able to cash their dividend in the past 30 years.

Recent reports on the drop in female participation in the workforce to 22.5 per cent, a level that ranks India tenth from the bottom in the world, present yet another indicator that India is unlikely to reap the dividend. Kenya, Ethiopia and Mali score comfortably higher. Iraq and Iran have rates of female participation in the workforce in the mid-teens. We compare very poorly with almost all of developing Asia.

I have spent the past three years reporting on the labour shortages experienced in the export-oriented factories in southern China. These factories, making everything from garments to electronics to toys, have long been accustomed to a predominantly female workforce. Their managers and owners value women as being more diligent and detail-oriented than men.

Nowadays, fewer young Chinese are entering the working-age cohort because of the effects of the one-child policy. Factory owners and human resource managers lament that the shortage, coupled with a preference for jobs in restaurants and retail, has been a calamity, in part because they have to make do with a higher proportion of young men on factory lines. The positive stereotypes attributed to women - along with the fact that they were seen as less likely to strike - ought to work to their advantage in India as well, if only they had a chance to compete for such jobs.

Instead of the low numbers of women working outside their homes in India being regarded as a strident alarm bell, reports on the phenomenon have taken the view that there may be more positive explanations for this drop than simply the lack of opportunities or social strictures that prevent them from working. One is that the sharp rise in rural incomes has meant that women in villages do not have to work because the men earn enough to support them. The other is that increased enrolment of girls in schools and colleges has led to a reduction in their numbers in the rural workforce.

Even accounting for the recent double-digit rise in rural incomes, most of India's villages are characterised by poverty, so it is hard to imagine that so many women would choose not to work if there were adequate opportunities available. I asked Rukmini Banerji, who heads the educational NGO Pratham, if she thought that higher enrolment might explain the drop in their numbers in the workforce. Speaking from Bihar, where she happened to be visiting schools, Ms Banerji made the point that while enrolment is up for girls, their attendance in high schools is low. "Attendance is low because they are likely to be working at home," she said. As to the question of whether there are more opportunities for female teachers, which in any case should show up in larger percentages of women in the workforce, Ms Banerji pointed to a recent Bihar government effort to recruit teachers by the tens of thousands that had reserved 50 per cent of these jobs for women. The government was unable to find enough qualified female candidates for these jobs.

While India still struggles with ensuring more girls - and boys - complete secondary school, data from Catalyst, a non-profit group, reveal that almost half of China's graduate students are women. They outnumber men, 6:4, in taking the GMAT exam. More than 70 per cent of their women between the age of 18 and 64 work, putting China 34th of 135 countries ranked by this yardstick. Ranjan Mahtani, the head of Epic, one of the largest makers of chinos and casual trousers in the world with a total of 20,000 factory employees, reports that women at the company's factories in Vietnam and Bangladesh account for 70 to 80 per cent of the total employees.

Like some of the human resources managers I interviewed in southern China who preferred to hire women, I believe their inclusion in India's offices and factories would bring a breadth of skills they might otherwise lack. The role models in my working life, ranging from my first boss to my literary agent, have almost all been women. Amid all the dreadful stories of the past fortnight about powerful men stalking women or abusing female employees, I found the low participation of women in the workforce the most depressing. Leave alone what their greater inclusion would do for the nation's GDP, India urgently needs more women in the workplace to civilise its men.