Missing Labour Force or ‘De-Feminization’ of Labour Force In India ?

Abstract

Reported as ‘Missing labour force in India’ the recent fluctuations in the labour participation are probably due to the short-term shifts in activities of women responding to favorable economic conditions. Such fluctuations need to be placed in the context of structural change in labour participation wherein the share of women in labour force, as well as labour participation rate of women had been declining for the last quarter of a century; while women had been increasingly confined to unpaid household domestic activities with improvement in economic well being of the household. Apparently, the gendered division of household labour, stigma attached to paid labour and status production has precipitated withdrawal from paid work as a strategy to reduce the double burden of women. Upward social mobility in the Indian patriarchal society in the wake of growing incomes is probably symbolized by women’s withdrawal from paid labour. Female participation in school education has increased substantially, yet women’s withdrawal from the labour market is positively associated with levels of education. This may indicate that patriarchal norms are probably modernized, internalized and mediated through women themselves. It also signals discouraged worker effect probably attributable to gender discrimination in the labour market and gendered progression in education. Even under such adverse conditions employment growth of women is not stagnant. Those who do enter and remain in the labour market are women from the most vulnerable households, as marginalized informal paid labour, thus feminizing the most precarious forms of labour in the country.