I wrote in July about India’s low – and falling – female labour force participation rates. The latest numbers from the Labour Bureau had pegged female LFPR at 25 per cent, meaning only one out of every four women of working age in India was either employed or looking for work. Economists and social scientists didn’t know for sure what was driving this crisis in female unemployment.
I have an interesting update on this debate via a poll conducted by Gallup of 20,000 adults in India, and 17,000 adults in China between 2009 and 2012. They confirm the finding that only 25 per cent of Indian women are in the workforce, while for China they find that this proportion is a huge 70 per cent. At the highest level of education, the workforce participation rates are the same for Chinese men and women while in India, men are twice as likely as women to be in the labour force at the highest levels of education.
Despite being far larger as a group, Chinese women in the workforce are more likely to find work, and find steady work, then Indian women who join the workforce, the Gallup poll findings say.
One could speculate that smaller family sizes and better state support help more Chinese women take up jobs than Indian women. Culture also seems to play an important role in women working outside the house – all of south Asia has low female workforce rates, though even Pakistan does better than India.
So what can be done? The World Bank in its World Development Report 2013 on jobs [see page 30] suggests three ways that public policy can help: improve services that free up women’s time from household work (like better crèches or drinking water); help women gain access to productive assets like education; and remove discriminatory practices from the market.
What do you think?