States with gender equality are doing better on new employment index

Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh lead Indian states on the quality and quantity of jobs they provide to their people.

High economic growth does not necessarily lead to better jobs, and states that do better on gender equality performed better on a new employment index.

Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh lead Indian states on the quality and quantity of jobs they provide to their people, while Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh (UP) are last, the index reveals.

“Good quality productive jobs that offer good wages are an impetus for sustainable economic growth,” Sabina Dewan, president and executive director at research organisation JustJobs Network, said at the launch of A Just Jobs Index for India, on June 21, 2019.

Supported by Azim Premji University in partnership with the Centre for Policy Research, a think tank, the Index tracks the performance of states by employment, formality, benefits, income equality, and gender equality, based on a set of equally weighted indicators.

Despite economic growth, the pace of job creation has been slow, the report said. The country faces rising unemployment with 71% of workers employed in the informal sector, and inconsistent job creation across states.

India’s unemployment rate was 6.1%--rural (5.3%) and urban (7.8%)--in 2017-18, according to the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), released on May 31, 2019.

Gujarat, which has “consistently maintained” net state value-added (NSVA) growth rates of 10% or higher during the period 2012-13 to 2016-17, did not do as well in creating quality jobs, ranking 18 on the index.

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana lead the pack, as we said, with 57.3 points, followed by Maharashtra (57.2) and Chhattisgarh (56.39), while UP (32.04) is below Bihar (37.28) and Odisha (37.70) at the bottom of the list.

For each indicator, the index uses a mean of the available values for the period 2010-2018, using data from various government sources, such as surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office, the Labour Bureau, the Annual Survey of Industries, the Reserve Bank of India and the PLFS.

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Conspicuous absence of women in India's labour force in last 30 years

There are a number of ways to boost the number of women working.

India’s rapid economic growth has been accompanied by falling fertility rates and higher educational attainment among women. These advances often lead to an increase in women entering the labour force, but there has been a surprising decline on this front in India. Less than 30% of working-age women are currently in work compared to nearly 80% of men in India.

The conspicuous absence of women in India’s labour force is part of a wider issue the country is facing when it comes to jobs growth. But the fact that it is affecting women more than men is a worrying trend for India, which tends to rank poorly in UN rankings like the Gender Development Index and Gender Inequality Index, and has historically had low shares of women participating in the labour market. Plus, the number of women working has been gradually falling over the last 30 years.

There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from a lack of jobs growth in female-friendly sectors such as manufacturing, to more women staying in education for longer, and persisting stigma surrounding the idea of women working. As India grapples with boosting the number of jobs available to people – and young people especially – it must ensure it does not leave women behind in the process.

Global trends

It is useful to understand India’s experience against the global landscape. According to the latest estimates from the UN’s International Labour Organisation, the worldwide labour force participation rate in 2018 for women aged 15-64 was 53% while it was 80.6% for similarly aged men. Since 1990, participation rates for both groups have shown an overall decline around the world.

There are, however, variations in these global trends. The number of women working in high income countries went up between 1990 and 2018, largely due to policies like better parental leave, subsidised childcare, and flexibility in jobs. But in South Asia’s low and middle income countries, the number of women working has declined.

In India, female labour force participation fell from 35% in 1990 to 27% in 2018. India fares better than its neighbour Pakistan (where the rate increased from 14% to 25% over the same period). But it lags behind Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, and other countries at similar stages of growth and development.

There are regional and demographic differences across the country. Rural women have higher participation rates than their urban counterparts. Married women, less educated women, and women from higher castes are less likely to participate in the labour market.

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Want to empower female executives? Pay up or give extra vacation time

Doing this second-shift labor for free only creates one more burden on women that, ironically, makes it harder for them to advance in their careers.

In 1989, feminist Arlie Russell Hochschild argued that working women go home to work a “second shift,” performing the majority of the labor involved in caring for their homes and children. That’s not the only extra shift working women are doing. Some are also being asked to do a second, unpaid shift at work, where they’re putting in extra time to help boost the careers of other women. This kind of labor — such as mentoring or serving on committees designed to improve corporate policies toward women — is essential to helping women advance, which ultimately redounds to the benefit of their employers. So it should come with compensation.

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One way senior-level women are needed to boost the careers of junior-level women is by serving as mentors. Women in C-suites were more likely to have had a mentor at any stage in their careers, a 2017 survey by consulting firm Egon Zehnder found, suggesting that it’s critical to attaining leadership positions. Although studies of the role gender plays in mentoring relationships have yielded mixed results, there is evidence that women do better when their mentors are other women, because they can see them as role models. But because women hold just 24 percent of senior positions globally, according to the nonprofit Catalyst, each one essentially must mentor more than one woman in order for women and men to ultimately achieve parity in leadership positions.

This puts a significant burden on the women who are being called upon to do all of this unpaid mentoring. As Bloomberg Technology anchor Emily Chang reported in her 2018 book “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley,” when Sequoia, an elite Silicon Valley venture capital firm, launched a mentorship program for women, one woman who was asked to join the program as a mentor “said she felt as if Sequoia was asking her to do free work, while the firm took all the credit."

Women are also often called upon to contribute to the advancement of other women by helping set policy and recruit for their organizations. Like Sequoia’s mentorship program, such initiatives are often implemented by companies seeking to improve their reputations after they’ve faced criticism for their treatment of women or lack of gender diversity. For example, in her recently published book “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” Jill Abramson noted that after allegations surfaced of a “sexist culture and toleration of harassment” at Vice Media, the company “predictably appointed a group of female elders to study the culture and recommend changes.” Similarly, Chang noted that Google — which has also been criticized for its lack of gender diversity — instituted a policy that all candidates for technical jobs must be interviewed by a woman. “Some women felt that participating in so many interviews hurt their performance overall,” Chang wrote. “The more time they spent doing interviews, the less time they spent writing code, which is what reviews and raises were based on.”