Women in the labour market: We’ll make progress if we address India’s ageing

The Nobel economics prize to Claudia Goldin filled me with elation, and not just because she studied economics at Cornell University, where she was inspired as I was by the legendary Alfred Kahn.

Her 200-year series on women’s labour force participation rates (LFPR) in the US innovatively used a variety of data sources, since official labour market statistics for a long time were collected only on men. She found that the LFPR graph was U-shaped, showing high initial levels in predominantly agrarian settings, a down-slide with the spread of industrialization, followed by a rise as the sectoral mix turned towards services.

She found that gender wage disparities persisted within occupation categories, not because of deficient skill or education, but starting with the birth of a woman’s first child. She also gave a name to “greedy jobs,” where promotion was contingent on people being ready to work very long hours, and travel incessantly (this has gone down post-covid), in exchange for astronomical remuneration. Dizzy corporate pay in turn has spurred climate-destructive consumption practices.

Claudia Goldin’s work is restricted to the country she knows, and uncovers the barriers women are up against even when they have surpassed men in skills and education, as in the US. But the U-shaped curve has been validated against cross-country data sufficiently for it to have become a universal template against which to compare the historical movement of participation rates over time in any particular country.

We have estimates of the female LFPR in India from the National Sample Survey (NSS), of 33% for 2004-05, falling to 28% for 2009-10. The Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS), which replaced the NSS employment surveys, showed a further fall subsequently before a rise back up to the 2004-05 level by the latest reading. Whatever the measurement questions surrounding these fluctuations, the issue is whether the Indian FLFP will rise going forward, or stay where it is, like a flat-bottomed boat.

Unlike the US, India has always had paid maternity leave in the formal sector, with the rules substantially liberalized in recent years. In the informal sector, there is no paid maternity leave, but no career graph which penalizes discontinuity. The availability of child-care in a variety of forms within and outside the home has made children less of an obstructive factor, at least as compared to the US.

It is (unpaid) care of the elderly even more than care of the young that keeps women out of the labour force. The sharp rise in urban India of paid care for the elderly typically substitutes for children in the diaspora, and does not actually release women residing in India from unpaid elder care.

India is ageing. Senior citizens, defined as those above age 60, are projected to more than double from present levels to 300 million by 2050. Unpaid care within the home, typically by a daughter or daughter-in-law, is considered the proud hallmark of a caring Indian home, as distinct from what is seen as the execrable Western practice of outsourcing care of the elderly.

Child care has a predictable time-profile, whereas elder care does not and can extend into a decade, sometimes two. Paediatrics as a medical specialization equips doctors to impart knowledge of child psychology to parents. By contrast, there is an acute scarcity of geriatric psychologists to advise women looking after the elderly. The medical profession treats the physical diseases to which the elderly are prey, but not the mental condition consequent upon decline due to age and disease, and the strain this imposes on care-givers.

There is very little written material on the mental states of the geriatric population in India. An exception is the brilliant Hindi novel Ret Samadhi by Geetanjali Shree (translated into English as Tomb of Sand). The story line is about an elderly woman who, after a life of perfectly compliant care of her children and husband, morphs into an utterly non-compliant and capricious elder. Her hapless daughter becomes the default care-giver, compelled to shape her life to the whims of her mother. The mother wanders without a visa into Pakistan, daughter in tow, searching for the remnants of her childhood before Partition, and gets killed for her transgression. Geetanjali Shree’s protagonist is an outlier, but that kind of risky behaviour is all too common a feature of the geriatric state.

There are a few institutions which train geriatric psychologists and counsellors, such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). But the supply is pathetically small. Skill India has no provision for training in geriatric psychology (it is not an easy portal to navigate). For low-income families, even physical correctives that could lighten the load of both elder and care-giver, such as cataract operations or hearing aids or dentures, are beyond reach.

Women caring for the elderly with physical or mental impairments are left to cope on their own. Unlike a child care break, an elder-care break can wear out the young care-giver enough to render her unfit for re-entry into the labour force. At the very least, we need spatially dispersed help centres, akin to anganwadis, offering day care for the elderly.

Claudia Goldin’s award forces us to think about these issues.