Gender, Unpaid Work and Care in India

Ellina Samantroy, Subhalakshmi Nandi

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032425672
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book explores the paradox of women's paid and unpaid work in India. It examines key themes including historical discourses, macroeconomic policies, employment trends, issues of tribal areas, public services and infrastructure, climate change and gendered migration and vulnerability of girl children. It highlights the play of gender norms, resource rights, identities and agency in women's work. Building on feminist theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses from microstudies, the volume offers fresh perspectives for research and policy on women's work in the Global South.

A timely intervention, this multidisciplinary book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political economy, labour studies, women's/gender studies, public policy, economics, development studies, sociology, South Asian studies and Global South studies. It will interest planners, policymakers, gender advocates, civil society organisations, human rights bodies and international organisations working towards ensuring gender equality and women's rights.

PART I
Conceptual and methodological evolution in understanding women’s unpaid work

1 Framing the discourse on women’s unpaid work in India

Ratna M. Sudarshan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003276739-3

Contemporary discussions on gender, unpaid work and care are often framed within an economic growth perspective, linking unpaid work to its implications for women’s participation in the economy. One example of the growth argument is found in the McKinsey Global Institute report (MGI, 2015), which suggested that in a ‘full potential’ scenario in which women played an identical role in labour markets to that of men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26 per cent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025. Time spent on unpaid work and care is seen as a barrier to women’s participation in paid work; the focus on unpaid care within this framework is then primarily based on an assumption that releasing women from care work will inevitably lead to their higher participation in paid work, in turn, leading to women’s economic empowerment. With more nuance, the UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment (UN, 2016) identified seven ‘proven and promising’ drivers to expand women’s economic empowerment. These include ‘recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid work and care’.

While the available evidence can be contested on whether any causality has been proven between the time spent on unpaid work and that on paid work, or between paid work and empowerment, the growth perspective continues to influence analysis of both paid and unpaid work of women. A second perspective is that of gender equality, viewing the redistribution of unpaid work as one of the critical aspects of enabling gender equality overall. The relation between gender equality and growth is uncertain. Esther Duflo finds the evidence between growth and gender equality to be positive (Duflo, 2012). On the other hand, another review of the literature suggests that while greater gender equality has generally contributed positively to growth, the reverse, that is growth contributing to greater gender equality is a less consistent relationship (Kabeer and Natali, 2013).

Taking the level of women’s paid work as the point of departure for a discussion on women’s unpaid work, the nature of the concerns in India have taken on an additional nuance in the past 15 years or so. The concern with low levels of women’s workforce participation in India – as compared to that of men, as well as compared to that of women in other countries – is an old one. In the past decade or so, official statistics show a decline in women’s workforce participation, especially marked in rural areas since 2004–2005. Thus, it is not just low levels, but declining levels, of women’s presence in the paid workforce that becomes the focus. Many different reasons have been advanced for this apparently paradoxical picture in a growing economy, including increased participation in education, absence of ‘suitable’ opportunities, withdrawal due to an income effect, counting and comparability problems (e.g. see Das, 2006; Pradhan et al, 2014; Chatterjee et al, 2015; Kapsos et al, 2016; Mehrotra and Parida, 2017; Fletcher et al, 2018). Decline at younger ages may be partly due to increased participation in education, and along with this, aspirations for ‘better’ work, both in urban and rural areas. There is a decline at older ages too. For example, in the 35–39 years age group, rural women’s LFPR fell from 64.2 in 2004–2005 to 48.1 in 2011–2012, and urban women’s LFPR fell from 34 to 28.4 over the same period. Moreover, data for 2017–2018 from the PLFS suggests that the decline has continued. If less time on unpaid work leads to increased participation in the labour force, it can be queried if the reverse holds true as well, with reduced participation in the labour force being the result of more time spent on unpaid care.

With either the growth or the equality perspective, the actual measurement of work is the starting point. There are some assumptions underlying measurement and analysis of paid work that need to be examined. First, the assumption that women’s paid work is being properly measured. It is well known that women’s work in India is largely informal, and that there has been an increase in informal work even within the organised sector. There is some informal work that is visible and a lot that is relatively invisible; some part of work that is measured and accounted for and another that remains unaccounted for. Many kinds of work from agriculture to home-based work display seasonality. When earnings are low, people engage in multiple types of work and this makes for complicated recording. With informal work that is sub-contracted to home-based workers there is an absence of any clear employer which has implications for the recording of the work and for workers’ entitlements. It has been seen that women working...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Conceptual and methodological evolution in understanding women’s unpaid work
• PART II Labour market trends, informality and women’s unpaid work in India
• PART III Emerging dimensions in the understanding of women’s unpaid work
• Conclusion
• Index