By Charvi Kathuria
New Delhi, March 26, 2019: More than 50 million rural women have left national job market in India since 2005, according to a report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), a federal government department.
Female participation in the job market has gone down by 7 percent since 2011-2012. As a result, an estimate of 28 million fewer women are looking for jobs, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-2018 of NSSO that function under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
A reason for the drop is because of more women taking up education, according to experts. However, this doesn’t translate to jobs all the time. Many women have quit on realizing that men dominate the job market. Another reason is the stigma associated with women who step out and work.
The Indian Express blames “economic disruptions,” presumably such as demonetization and GST, for the downturn.
Here are the other important findings from the report:
The decline is more visible in the working age group of 15-59 years. In this bracket, the rural female participation rate fell from 49.4 percent in 2004-2005 to 35.8 percent in 2011-12 and further to 24.6 percent in 2017-18. In effect, the participation of rural women of working age has been halved since 2004-05.
Female participation in the urban segment saw growth by 0.4 percent in the six years ending 2017-2018. This resulted in 1.2 million more job seekers.
Also, the share of regular wage/salaried jobs for women registered an increase since 2011-2012. In the urban sector, the jump is by 9.6 percent and, in actual terms, accounts for an additional 2 million jobs. In the rural sector, the segment’s share increased by 4.9 percent and it translated into 1.5 milion more jobs.
Among urban female workers, the share of non-agricultural informal sector – unincorporated proprietary and partnership enterprises in areas such as manufacturing garments, paper, wood and straw products, – came down by 13.6 percent.
The share of non-agricultural informal sector has also seen a decline by 13.4 percent among rural female workers but that has been the trend since 2004-2005. For the urban female workers, the slide is sharp.
According to a report by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) release in January 2019, India saw a major job crunch last year and women were the worst affected people.
According to the CMIE report, rural women lost 6.5 million jobs while urban women lost only 2.3 million jobs.
It goes differently for men as urban men actually gained 5,00,000 jobs while the rural men lost 2.3 million jobs.
“So, the breakdown of employment statistics by the various attributes of respondents discussed above tells us that a person who lost the job in 2018 mostly fits a profile like — is a woman, particularly a woman in rural India, is uneducated and is a wage labourer or a farm laborer or is a small-scale trader and is under 40 years or more than 60 years,” the report said.
“India’s unemployment rate shot up to 7.4 per cent in December 2018. This is the highest unemployment rate we’ve seen in 15 months. The rate has increased sharply from the 6.6 per cent clocked in November,” the report further added.