To understand why job quotas for women don't go far enough, take a ride on a Mumbai train

January 22, 2016 in Scroll.in

Employers should recognise that women start working long before they get to the office – and continue when they get home.

 

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 04:30 pm

Photo Credit: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

“Why aren’t India’s women working?” This was the headline of an article in the August 23 edition of The New York Times. The headline writers ought to have known better. Indian women work hard, and all the time. Yet, their work is largely not considered “work”. Only work for which you are paid is counted. And much of the work that women do is unpaid.

The premise that bringing more women into the paid workforce will help women and the Indian economy is behind policies, such as the one announced on Tuesday by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, to reserve 35% of all government jobs for women.
Kumar is not the first to take this step. Madhya Pradesh already has 30% reservation for women in government jobs, as does Gujarat at 33%. In addition, the Union home ministry sent out an advisory to all state government and union territories on August 26, 2014 on increasing women in the police to 33% of the total force.

While 33% of positions in the constable rank are reserved for women in the Central Reserve Police Force and the Central Industrial Security Force, 15% are reserved in the Border Security Force, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. As the local police come under the state government, they are expected to fall in line and work towards increasing the number of women recruits – currently in short supply as evidenced by the Delhi Police, a force in which women comprise only 9.27%.

Discouraging factors

But while quotas are well-intentioned, they are clearly not enough. The Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women, which looked specifically at the question of increasing women’s presence in the police force, underlined the simple and rather obvious problems that need to be addressed even as the number of women recruited for these jobs increases.

In its December 17, 2014 report, the committee emphasises the need to improve the facilities available to women when it writes, “despite a spate of efforts from the Government, lack of basic amenities/rest rooms/mobile toilets is still a major problem for the women in police in many States.”
In other words, it is not enough to just recruit more women. Both government and the private sector need to ensure that the conditions at work do not dehumanise women or place an additional stress on their lives. Apart from toilets, provisions of crèches and benefits such as maternity leave should not be seen as special favours. Women enter the paid workforce on unequal terms. A paid job is in addition to the unpaid “work” that they do every day – child care, elderly care, domestic chores, among them.

There will be those who will argue against quotas for women in government jobs. Such people ought to travel by the women’s special trains at peak hour from Churchgate station in Mumbai. Here you meet women, many of them employed by the state government, who wake up at the crack of dawn every day, prepare food for their families, and then set off on their long commute to work.

At the end of the day, they use the train ride to prepare for the tasks that wait exclusively for them once they get home: cook, clean, wash and at some point sleep before the day begins again. Government jobs, with all their security and benefits, are not exactly a gravy ride if you are a lower-middle-class woman.

The other important component to increase women’s presence in the paid workforce is safety. From sexual harassment to sexual assault, women face these dangers every day as they step out to earn a living. The recent distressing case of an Accredited Social Health Activist worker in Uttar Pradesh, who committed suicide because the man who raped her threatened to release the video of the act, brings home the dangers that even those women part of government programmes face. Just having a paid job does not protect them from sexual predators.

A matter of perception

In any case, even if every state government follows the lead of Nitish Kumar and others by reserving government jobs for women, it is unlikely to make more than a tiny dent in the larger problem of getting more women in paid employment. India is close to the bottom in the list of countries when it comes to the percentage of women in paid employment or “female labour force participation” (termed FLFP). While the global average is 50%, which means every other woman is in the labour
force, in India it was 33% in 2012 and has now slipped further.

Why do we need to increase the number of women in paid employment? Is it just tokenism if employment means a double burden on them?

The most obvious significance is that a woman contributing to family income has a better chance of being treated more decently than one who does not. That, of course, is an assumption that is not always born out with the statistics which reveal that even well-educated women in good jobs are at the receiving end of domestic violence. Also, in many cases, they do not have control over the money they earn. Yet, there is change, especially in urban areas where the cost of living is inducing more women into some form of paid employment.

The larger significance of more women in the workforce is that of perception. In the last several decades, women have entered many fields that remained closed to their mothers. Rabia Futtehally, for instance, was one of the first women pilots in India. Today, out of 5,100 commercial pilots in India, 11.7% are women (the average worldwide is 3%). This has been achieved without quotas but illustrates how the opening up of new avenues for employment for women encourages more women to consider these options. And even if entrenched attitudes, which will not accept that women have capabilities and rights, do not evaporate, they are challenged.

Reserving jobs for women is one way to increase the percentage of women in paid jobs. But in the long run, neither more money, nor job security, will make a difference to women’s status unless we recognise and value the real “work” that millions of women do every day, all day.

Why do women work so hard?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Sept 13, 2015

The Hindu

Ahead of the International Woman's Day , Proctor and Gamble launched iconic couple Manchu Lakshmi and husband Anand Srinivasan do the laundry with Ariel -His and Her pack detergent powder in Hyderabad. Photo: P.V. Sivakumar

 

 

Two recent television advertisements have provoked some discussion. One, for a washing detergent, has the catchline, “Share the load”, hinting that men should share the work load that usually falls on the shoulders of women. The other is for a washing machine. Its unique selling proposition is that it is so simple to operate that even a man can do it – suggesting, of course, that men too should consider washing clothes (or rather, letting the machine wash them).

Both ads are interesting and are attempting to be different. But are they really touching on the basic problem? Men or women should be able to operate appliances like washing machines that are designed to make domestic work less of a drudgery. Yet, does that happen? Do a random check in your neighbourhood and find out how many men, in households with washing machines, wash the clothes. I can guarantee that in the majority it will be the woman of the house, or the woman domestic help, and not the man who does this. Despite technology, certain tasks remain a woman’s work and washing clothes is one of them.

Kalpana Sharma

By setting boundaries for what women can and cannot do and what they must do, our society is increasing the burden that the majority of women already carry. What they must do are the so-called “women’s tasks” that include cleaning, caring, cooking as well as fetching — water and firewood, for instance. In rural areas, some of the most back-breaking tasks in the field are assigned to women. Yet, even as women do all this, their contribution is not counted as “work” at all.

You read headlines, like this one that I spotted in The New York Times recently asking, “Why aren’t India’s women working?” The article was only looking at paid work, and here India’s record is abysmal. In fact, according to the International Labour Organisation, in the ranking of nations, India stands 11th from the bottom in terms of female labour participation. Although the Indian economy grew steadily between 2004-11, the percentage of women in paid employment fell from 31 per cent to 24 per cent.

So, we have to worry not just about why India’s women are working so hard, but also why they cannot find work for which they are paid.

These are two sides of the same coin. Women are pushed into a relentless cycle of work because certain jobs are designated as theirs to do, irrespective of age, ill health, pregnancy or other problems.

One of these is collecting fuel to light the stove in the home. Despite all the progress our country is touted to have made, it is distressing to know that 67 per cent of India’s rural households still depend on firewood and wood chips as cooking fuel. The burden of this unfortunate statistic falls squarely on the shoulders of women. Not only do they have to fetch the firewood, they suffer the health consequences of cooking on stoves using this inefficient and polluting fuel.

In cities, poor women might not fetch firewood but collecting water is their job, apart from cleaning, caring and cooking. In addition, given the cost of living, poor women do all this in other people’s homes, as domestic help, while their middle-class sisters commute long distances to do a variety of paid jobs. But at the end of the day, the poor and not-so-poor women return to their homes and continue working.

What needs to change is this assumption that only women can do certain jobs. Why? Men cook but mostly if it is a paid job. When they come home, it is the woman who will cook. Men also work as domestics. But in their homes, the women will do all those chores. And in educated households, where both husband and wife have paid jobs and can afford domestic help and appliances that reduce the burden of housework, it is still the woman who ends up doing certain tasks.

As for the limits placed on what women can and cannot do outside their homes, some of these are crumbling. But not fast enough. For instance, while India can boast of a higher percentage of women pilots (11.7 per cent of the total of 5,100 compared to just 3 per cent in the rest of the world), the gender gap is vast in the majority of professions.

So, even if a washing machine is made simple enough for a man to use — and that indeed is funny given that men are always projected as better at handling anything mechanical — the day has yet to dawn when a man tells his wife, “Let me wash the clothes”.

inShare

Invisible women

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 17, 2014

At a garment factory. Photo: K. Pichumani

Should women ‘work’ after they get married? I put the word work in inverted commas deliberately because women work all the time but only when they do paid work is it considered ‘work’.

One imagines that this question need not be asked anymore because India is changing. But is it? Going by recent reports and studies, it is evident that some things never change, or change so slowly as to be imperceptible. And the one equation that does not change is the expectation from women once they get married. Their priority has to be ‘the family’ and all else, including jobs that could be something they enjoy doing, must be set aside.

An advertisement that is being passionately analysed and discussed on social media depicts a woman boss instructing her junior, who turns out to be her husband, to work over-time to complete a project. Meantime, she heads home and instead of putting up her feet and relaxing, proceeds to cook up a gourmet meal for the husband. She then sends him the pictures through her phone to tempt him to come home for the meal.

So is this depiction of woman as the boss ‘progressive’ or is it ‘regressive’ because ultimately she conforms to the stereotype of the wife who must please her husband? If the roles had been reversed, would the husband boss have done something similar? At most, he might have ordered in a great meal, or asked the domestic help to cook something special. Incidentally, where was the domestic help when the woman ‘boss’ was slaving in the kitchen? It stretches credulity to believe that a woman at the top in the corporate sector would not have domestic help.

Perhaps we are making too much of this but the advertisement raises other, more important, questions about the ability of women to continue doing paid work after marriage. This paper carried an interesting analysis on this subject on August 11 (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/marriage-driving-urban-women-out-of-jobs/article6301574.ece). The article reported research that showed that women dropped out of paid work once they got married or/and had children. The exceptions were women in the upper income bracket and the poorest, who had no option but to continue some form of wage work. Poor women in villages also had no choice although their work was often unpaid as it was part of agricultural tasks that they were expected to do in the family.

What the advertisement represents is the exception to the rule. For the majority of women who are poor, whether in city or village, there is really no choice. Speak to any woman who works as a domestic. You hear identical stories. There is not enough in the house to make ends meet. The man either has no work, or cannot work due to addiction, or is in a low-paid insecure job. Often, the woman’s salary is the only steady amount coming into the family kitty. As a result, these women — come rain or shine, illness or family tragedy — are forced to continue to work. What is interesting is that despite the drudgery of domestic work, many of them persist because it gives them a chance to escape the greater drudgery of the work they must still do in their own homes.

The article in The Hindu, however, does touch upon a group of urban women who are neither so poor that they must work for survival nor so well-off that they can continue to work outside their homes because they have help at home. It is the women in the middle who get caught. For them, paid work is ‘permitted’ so to speak, only until they get married. And then it has to stop. Unless the family into which they marry ‘allow’ them to continue. So the little bit of autonomy they gain through earning something through their own labour is snatched away from them the day they get married. Apart from the blow to their own self-esteem, this is a waste because these women could be productively employed.

We do not read enough about this class of women. They are all around us in our cities — working in garment factories, in offices, as saleswomen in the growing retail sector, in call centres etc. Yet, they are virtually invisible. What are their stories?

Perhaps it is time the camera focused on these lives. 

(To read the original, click here.)