Context:
A recent report by the International Labour Organisation, titled “The Impact of Care Responsibilities on Women’s Labour Participation,” identifies low female labor force participation in India as a major challenge, primarily because women shoulder the extensive caregiving responsibilities. The report suggests that more investment in early childhood care and education is required to enable gender equality at work, which could prove helpful in lightening the burden of care that so often weighs down women’s economic engagement.
Relevance:
GS III: Indian Economy
Dimensions of the Article:
- Women’s Labor Force Participation in India
- International Perspectives on Care Duties and Workforce Activity
- Barriers to Women’s Workforce Inclusion
- Way ahead
Women’s Labor Force Participation in India
- Labor Force Participation:
- India has a huge labor force gap: 53 percent of women are out of the labor force, primarily because of unpaid care work. For men, the figure is 1.1 percent out of the labor force for the same reasons.
- Unpaid Domestic Work:
- According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2023-24, 36.7 percent of women worked and engaged in unpaid household activities, which was equivalent to about 19.4 percent of the total workforce.
- Domestic Work Variation:
- 81 percent of Indian females 6 years and above spend more than five hours daily on unpaid domestic work. This has been indicated in the National Statistical Office Time Use Survey of 2019.
- Caregiving Burden:
- In the population aged 6 years and above in India, while 26.2 percent of females take more than two hours of their daily time for caregiving reasons, males are only 12.4 percent, indicating the gender difference in care.
International Perspectives on Care Duties and Workforce Activity
Global Summary:
- According to the international level, a total of 748 million people do not work for the reason that they have to care for another. Among them, 708 million are women; this is a substantial indication of the global gender gap on care.
Regional View:
- Regions like North Africa, Arab states and the Asia-Pacific region show that women have the largest percent not in the workforce primarily due to care giving functions with differences in culture as well as structure.
Comparative Analysis:
- In contrast, countries such as Belarus, Bulgaria, and Sweden report significantly lower percentages of women outside the workforce. These nations invest approximately 1% of their GDP in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), facilitating higher female workforce participation.
Barriers to Women’s Workforce Inclusion
- Low educational achievements, limited job opportunities, and poor infrastructure remain the most significant factors which keep women away from working, according to ILO report.
- Cultural norms on caring activities strongly limit access for women to the labor market, especially in the countryside; gender inequalities are thus reproduced
Way ahead:
- A lot of investment in the care economy will be required to reduce the share of women outside India’s workforce that is assigned to care responsibility, such as early childhood and childcare education
- These are initiatives that would promote gender equality but can also unlock economic potential in the form of increased engagement and productivity in the workplace from larger numbers of women.
-Source: Indian Express
