Income inequality and gender inequality are facts of life in India. Ironically, as far as the job market goes, nowhere is income inequality more evident than within the gender paradigm. Economic liberalisation and the dawn of the information age have, on balance, been good for India's middle class women in terms of access to job and income opportunities. Data suggests that it has been less kind to women who seek jobs in the blue-collar world.
As my colleague Ishan Bakshi reported earlier this week, a World Bank study attributes the precipitate fall in women's labour force participation rate - about 12 to 14 percentage points between 2004-05 and 2010-11 - to the scarcity of "suitable job opportunities" outside farming and close to the place of residence. This, in a period that roughly coincided with the fastest economic growth in the new century.
No one has explained convincingly the reason for this drop, which puts India at 120 among 131 countries in women labour participation, according to the International Labour Organisation, trailing Brazil, China and South Asian neighbours (bar Pakistan) by a generous margin. Some guess that rising household income levels, especially agricultural incomes, of the male earner meant that women did not need to work, reinforcing a preference in a patriarchal society; others that many women stayed in school longer.
But these explanations may not be adequate. For one, as the report points out, labour force participation has dropped across all age cohorts, which eliminates the schooling argument. Second, girls' enrolment in schooling is increasing faster in urban areas without a diminution in women's employment. Third, since economic growth has waned and agricultural growth has done so even faster, it follows that womenfolk should have been back in force in the workforce since 2009.
Where is the work? This is the problem. The two classic blue-collar employers of women workers, construction and agriculture, are in a slump. According to a forthcoming study, which Mr Bakshi quotes, by Santosh Mehra and Sharmishtha Sinha of Jawaharlal Nehru University, manufacturing and services, the two relatively faster-growing sectors of the economy, account for just 18 per cent of rural employment for women. Agriculture dominates at 75 per cent. For the 27.3 million women in urban India, the two sectors account for 63 per cent of employment and agriculture three per cent.
Although the data is in no way comparable, it is telling that a National Sample Survey Organisation survey shows that 9.1 million jobs were lost by rural women between 2009-10 and 2011-12, a period when over 3.5 million women were added to the urban workforce. It is unclear whether this number includes white-collar jobs, but if we were to look at the broader universe of women's employment in urban India, it is easy to see the transformation all around us.
Retail, hospitality, e-commerce and IT and IT-enabled services, with all the indirect business opportunities for women the latter creates, are the most visible. But, former male preserves such as accountancy, banking consultancy, engineering, architecture, media and biotechnology have opened their doors to growing numbers of women. Today, there are some jobs that are increasingly seen as female "bastions", human resources development, public relations and marketing prominent among them.
The widening of job choices for urban women does not, however, extend to their rural/moffusil sisters. It is striking, for instance, that women are scarce on the factory floor, unless it is in the electronics or garments sector, which is where countries like Bangladesh and Nepal score in terms of women's workforce participation. This limitation of choice partly reflects the unequal education between genders, but also the prejudice that informs Indian employers in the manufacturing sector.
Consider car or two-wheeler manufacturing. Most of it is automated, almost none of it requires any longer the kind of muscle and brawn that made it exclusively man's work. In any case, given the heavy lifting women do on construction sites, this is no reason to exclude them from automated work. Yet, there are no women to be seen on automobile or almost any engineering company shop floor, not even in supervisory roles, and few to be spotted training at the Industrial Training Institutes.
Rural women account for about 102 million of the 130 million women in the workforce, that too out of a total workforce of about 450 million, so it would be no overstatement to say that this is a sad commentary on gender equality in India. Numbers like these contain a variety of signals for policymakers: On the urgency of fostering urbanisation, women's education and accelerating economic growth.
In that sense, the 'Make in India' policy offers considerable potential if it were to acquire a coherent form, especially in the defence business. The Stinger missiles so beloved of Afghan rebels during the Soviet occupation, for instance, were assembled mostly by women in American factories. This fact may well have horrified Raytheon's conservative Islamic customers, had they but known it, but it certainly reflects one of the more benign aspects of the military-industrial complex.
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