Where have all the women gone?

Why are Indian women dropping out of the workforce. Only 27% of women in India are working, compared to 79.9% in Nepal, and 57.4% in Bangladesh. Of rich countries, 56% of women work in the US, while 64% work in China. It is not a case of young women who are just coming of age, seems that working women are giving up work since 2005, wrote H Stevens. From 1990 to 2005, proportion of women in the workforce rose from 35% to 37%, but it has gradually dropped to 27% in the last decade. "A World Bank paper by Luis Andres and colleagues found that whether married or unmarried, whether Dalit, Adivasi or from the upper caste, whether illiterate or college graduate -- women from all sections were increasingly not working," wrote S Varma. "Predictable social norms are attributed to women quitting work in India: marriage, motherhood, vexed gender relations and biases, and patriarchy," wrote S Biswas. But surely these biases would have been much more in 1990? A Constitutional Amendment passed in 1992 reserves one third of positions in rural governing bodies for women, wrote economist E Ghani. Women have enthusiastically accepted their responsibilities in these bodies and also turn out to vote in larger numbers than men, but their numbers are small in parliament. Blaming gender discrimination seems a little glib, because "in villages, workforce participation rates of married women has been found to be higher than that of unmarried women - whereas in cities, the situation is reversed." Many women have risen to the level of CEOs in companies, so there is no lack of role models. Feminization U hypothesis, wherein the number of working women falls and then rises as household wealth rises and women get more educated, is a possibility, wrote Prof S Klasen. Every household in India now owns a color television, so women would naturally want a better quality of life. "The jobs that are available are marginal, low paying, insecure and backbreaking, like construction in the recent past. Then, there are issues of safety for women or absence of facilities like creches," said economist JJ Thomas. As poorer women stop working, women higher up the social ladder are unable to find maids to do housework and look after children while they work. Not just women, even men are unable to find good jobs, wrote S Ray. A large number of children study engineering only to get a job, preferably any government job. Hence the desperate demands for reservations in government jobs by upper caste communities. Too many people, too many problems.