Should Indian men do chores to boost the GDP?

Vandana Shukla

In the daughter-deficit and son-surplus land, greater female participation in the workforce can improve the country’s GDP, says the first woman IMF Chief, Christine Lagarde. India could benefit with a dramatic jump of 27 per cent in its GDP, if the 217 million women still out of the workforce joined in, she claimed. Not that the legislature imposes legal barriers on women, thereby preventing them from exploring their financial potential. Gender inequalities across the social structure are hard to erase from a stubborn patriarchy.  

A developing country, with a demographic dividend and high aspirations, offers all the required permutations for an international body to make such a prediction. However, despite schemes that empower women at the policy level, their participation in the workforce has shown a decline. Universalisation of education and a growing middle class should have brought more women out of their homes to get paid work. Instead, a reverse trend has been growing over the past 30 years.   

The symptoms started to surface in 2004-05. The National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment for 2011-12 confirmed it. The rural female labour force participation rate (LFPR), the proportion of women in the labour market to total women population, has been declining continuously since the first quinquennial National Sample Survey in 1972-73. It fell from 32 per cent to 18.1 per cent in 2011-12. For urban females, the LFPR had been stagnant in the extremely low and narrow range of 12.6 per cent and 13.4 per cent for nearly three decades, starting from 1983. Also, the share of females in the labour market declined from 28 per cent to 24 per cent between 1983 and 2011-12. Countries like Bangladesh have a 34 per cent female workforce, which is expected to grow to 82 per cent over the next decade. 

Of the several factors that work behind de-feminisation of the labour force in India, according to a new study by Mckinsey Global Institute, it is the well-entrenched traditional roles men and women play that cause loss of productivity to the nation. If these are corrected, it could enhance the country’s GDP by 16 per cent by 2025. In simple words, if men shared the burden of domestic chores, women would be able to contribute to the country’s economy. Indian society accepts the gendered division of labour as a norm. The highest placing of India in the global ranking on difference between men and women spending average time on unpaid work at home comes as a shock. India, home to 612 million females, is described by McKinsey as a nation with “extremely high” gender inequality. It scores 0.48 out of 1 on the gender parity index. The index takes into account women’s participation in the labour market, representation in politics, legal rights and equity in access to education, among other things. Compared to the 40 per cent average female labour force worldwide, only 24 per cent female workforce in India, curtails the country’s potential for economic growth. Anu Madgavkar, an author of the report, comments, “Getting more of them into the workforce would generate more output for the economy.”    

Sadly, the report acknowledges, attaining absolute gender parity in the next 10 years is wishful thinking, despite massive campaigns like “Beti Bacho Beti Padhao,” launched by the government.  But, if India were to make women equal to men in a decade, the country could add 60 per cent or $2.9 trillion to the size of its economy. If absolute parity seems unattainable, on a more pragmatic plane, if India could achieve the level of gender parity achieved by other best-performing Asian countries, it could better its GDP by 16 per cent, states the report.   

Unfortunately, self-restraining cultural practices limit the economy too. One big barrier in India, is a deep-seated attitude about the traditional roles assigned to men and women, and a strong belief of women too in such divisions. The McKinsey report analysed responses to the world values survey that includes questions like “If a mother works for pay her children suffer, do you agree or not agree?”  A very high proportion of women and men respondents in India agreed. To be precise,  71 per cent of Indian women agreed with that statement, compared to just about 29 per cent men and women in Australia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain and Sweden. 

Several studies have however established that children whose mothers have complex responsible jobs perform better in verbal, math and reading tests. Working mothers spend on average 19 hours with their children, compared with 22 hours by mothers who work in the home because housework is so “consuming and tiring,” adds a report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) titled “Enabling Women, Energizing Asia,” published last week. The ADB report states that major reasons cited by Indian women for not joining paid work are family responsibilities, including housework and caring for the elderly and children. If men were to take a more equitable role in household tasks, women would have more freedom to take on paid work and attain greater financial independence.

The gender chore gap, or the difference between the amount of time women and men spend on housework and unpaid care giving, is the widest in India. According to the McKinsey report, Indian men spend an average of 53 minutes a day on unpaid work in the home, compared with women who spend 249 minutes on such tasks.

If not for gender equality, would Indian men spend time in kitchen preparing meals, raising kids and cleaning and washing, for the sake of a better economy? Madgavkar feels, it is possible, “Because different countries have done it on different measures.”

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