The

is rising in most parts of the world so what explains its slide in India?

'No one wants to hire a mid-career mother’

Devayani Shahane-Carvalho, stay-at-home mum

As told to Joeanna Rebello Fernandes

‘My mother didn’t want me riding around on a scooter’

Rupali Giri | recently quit her third job

As told to Sharmila Ganesan Ram

‘They let me study civil engg but work was out’

Jaibunisha Reyaz, housewife to qazi after 10-year battle

As told to Himanshi Dhawan

Why should a woman have a job? Because it makes a dramatic difference to her life. Working and earning, the capacity to control assets, gives her a boost in decision-making, and lowers domestic violence. Why should we care that women have jobs? Because a labour force that fully represents half the population is likely to be more robust.But despite the quiet revolution in women’s employment around the world, India has been an anomaly, with female workforce numbers continuing to slide. A mere 27% of working-age women were working in paid jobs in 2015-16. A decade ago, in 2004-05, this share was 43%, the same as in 1993-94. In rural India, the slide has been much worse as agriculture fails to absorb them. India was ranked 136 among 144 countries on the economic participation and opportunities index in the Global Gender Report 2015. Clearly, something is wrong somewhere in our society that prevents women from working.What about other countries? Apart from parts of the Arab world, everywhere else more women are working. China, with its powerhouse economy, has 64% of its women working, one of the highest rates in the world. In the US, it is over 56%. In the Indian subcontinent, Nepal and Bangladesh are miles ahead of us. Only Pakistan has a lower rate.This doesn’t mean that women are sitting at home doing nothing. They cook, care for the children and elderly, do multiple domestic chores, and in rural areas, tend to animals and gardens. All this is invisible work, unpaid and unrecognised. Census 2011 showed there were nearly 58 million women in the working-age population who said that they were seeking work. So, it is not as if women who are house-bound do not want to work.Economists and women’s issues experts have been puzzling over the riddle of India’s unemployed women and several theories have been floated to explain it. Some say that more young women are studying so they are not looking for jobs. Others believe that families are becoming more prosperous so women are no longer going out for work. Some argue that marriage makes all the difference, while others think caste is the crucial factor.Economist Jayan Jose Thomas of IIT-Delhi, who has extensively researched India’s employment problems told TOI that Chinese society has quite similar patriarchal attitudes as in India, yet they have managed to boost women’s work to such high levels because their economy is creating job opportunities.A recent World Bank policy paper by Luis Andres and his colleagues has reviewed all these theories and found that none can fully explain the phenomenon. Analysing NSSO data they found that between 1993 and 2011, women’s work participation rate dipped by over 13 percentage points in rural areas but the increase in school enrolment was only 5 pct points. Clearly, going to school is not the reason. In urban areas the decrease in working women of 3.2 pct points was more evenly matched by an increase in enrolment of 2.3 pct points.Another popular theory that women stop working as families grow more prosperous is also not validated by the data. Among the poorest 10% population in rural areas, women’s work declined by nearly 16% while among the richest tenth of the population it slid by nearly 8%. Both rich and poor women were getting thrown out of the job market.Similarly, the paper found that whether married or unmarried, whether Dalit, Adivasi or upper caste, whether illiterate or college graduate — women of all kind were increasingly not working. “The key reason for large-scale and increasing joblessness among Indian women is that there are not sufficient jobs. 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 crèches. Patriarchal values too come into play. All these lead to women not getting paid jobs,” said Thomas.Between 2001 and 2011, India saw a dismal 2% growth rate of jobs per year. Between 2011 and 2015, this has further declined to just 1.23% per year. In this situation, it is no surprise that women are unable to find work."I miss the adrenaline rush of working at a newspaper,” says Devayani, a former journalist from Mumbai who left the newsroom seven years ago after the birth of her son. “I miss waking up every morning and heading off to work. I was on a journey with my job, but now, my journey ends when I drop my son off at school, and resumes when I pick him up,” she says. Devayani’s choice to put her career on the back burner is predicated on her concerns for her child’s security. The family moved to Delhi a few years ago, but she wasn’t comfortable with leaving her son at daycare or with a nanny. “I didn’t want security cameras around the house,” she explains. Her career choice was the by-product of her parenting choice, and not one she regrets. “But I do feel the vacuum, the restlessness. And that restlessness has manifested in frustration being vented at the spouse and on the child,” she confesses, “I do want to return to work, but on my terms.” What she would like is a part-time job and a chance to utilise her hard-won skills. “Writing and editing is like cycling...you never forget it, but your skills might diminish without practice,” she feels. Devayani has applied to a few publishing houses and magazines “but no one calls back”.“Perhaps it’s because my resume states plainly that I am a mother looking for a part-time job. With new graduates entering the market every year, the scales are tilted against mid-career mothers. And even though our family is financially comfortable, I I’ve been financially independent all my life, and not earning is now a hard pill to swallow. I sometimes wonder if all that education was for nothing!”At 4 ft 2 inches, Rupali Giri has always felt a bit too short in life. But for six months last year, a job delivering parcels on a two-wheeker made the 25-year-old Mumbai resident feel several inches taller. It was a much better gig than her desk-bound stint as a receptionist at an electronics company that she did for four years during her teens. “I would attend night college then,” recalls the Class XI commerce dropout, whose family’s financial situation clipped her dreams of studying further. Soon, she got married after which she quit her job as a receptionist. She later worked as a cashier at a photo studio for a year which would pay her a measly Rs 4,000 a month. “Also, if I came even a bit late, they would expect me to stay back late so I quit,” says Giri, who later tried for various jobs but in vain.It was a stray pamphlet from a firm that promised to train underprivileged women such as her to ride two-wheelers and become parcel delivery service personnel that ended up giving Giri a decent salary —Rs 10,000 a month — and a purpose. Besides, there were unforeseen perks. “I even delivered to actor Ram Kapoor’s house once,” says Giri.However, the high was short-lived. In January this year, Giri had to reluctantly quit. “My mother was worried about my safety and didn’t want me riding a scooter especially in the monsoon. So she asked my husband to coax me to quit,” says Giri, who misses the happy banter of her fellow riders.The second of five children in her family, Jaibunisha Reyaz chose to study civil engineering after school. It was not a conventional choice for a ‘girl’ but her parents who lived in Tamil Nadu’s Kodaikanal let her have her way. But that’s where their indulgence stopped. At 19, Jaibunisha was married off. And while her husband and in-laws did not ill-treat her, it was clear that going outside to work was out of the question."I was told that keeping house and taking care of the children was my responsibility," she says.It took Jaibunisha 10 years to get her husband, who was an engineer himself and worked in a factory, to change his mind. ‘’I would often tell him that if we both worked, we would have a bit more money for the house and the children but he just wouldn’t budge. It was only after the two sons started school that I was allowed to step out,’’ she recalls.Frustrated at remaining cooped up at home, Jaibunisha began work with a NGO, without telling her husband and in-laws. She even earned a tidy sum. “Then came a trip to Mumbai. I could not hide from the family any more. I worked so hard to convince them and they finally agreed,’’ she says recalling the nervousness with which she took the trip.Today, the 45-year-old Jaibunisha is a trained woman qazi who travels across the country to conduct women empowerment workshops.