What Does Recovery Depend On? Just About Everything.
The analysis beyond the numbers suggests that marital status, education, caste, and religion were strongly related to the likelihood of recovery in women employment.
Abraham explained that the recovery analysis found contrasting effects between men and women, with married women less likely to return to work and married men more likely to return to work. Religion and gender intersected to result in a disproportionate impact for Muslim women, who were more unlikely to return to work, unlike in case of Muslim men where religion had no significant impact, Abraham said.
Even when controlled for demographic and employment categories, such as age, education, caste, marital status, type of employment, and industry of work, the analysis by Abraham, Basole and Kesar showed that women were still less likely to return to work compared to men in the post-Covid era.
Moreover, a large share of men in the workforce moved to self-employment or daily wage work, in agriculture, trade or construction. For women, mobility and movement into alternate employment arrangements were limited, instead they were observed to move out of the workforce altogether. This suggests that typical fallback options for employment do not exist for women, Abraham said.
While the analysis based on the CMIE’s Consumer Pyramid Household Survey is the most extensive, other smaller surveys have thrown up similar findings. Not surprisingly, the increase in housework emerged as another key factor behind women not returning to work even as the economy opened up.
A telephonic survey conducted by the New Delhi-based Institute of Social Studies Trust covered a small sample of 316 women working in the informal sector during the October-November 2020 period. That survey showed that about 60% of those surveyed reported an increase in domestic work inside the home, while 9% of women reported an increase in outside household domestic work like fetching water. About 66% of women respondents said that since the schools and anganwadi centres were closed, they have to spend more time with children.
Four out of every 10 women said they got no help in sharing household work, while another four said they received help from other women members of the house, Shiney Chakraborty, a research analyst at the institute. Among those who did return to work, more found employment in the informal sector and in the gig economy, with no social security or maternity leave, Chakraborty added.
The Absence Of The ‘Care Economy’
In many ways, the Covid crisis worsened existing factors that has kept India’s female labour force participation rate low at about 23.6%. The labour force participation rate is calculated as the labour force divided by the total working-age population.
In the absence of a care economy infrastructure, it is tough for the female labour force participation rate to increase, said Lekha Chakraborty, professor at NIPFP.
