INDIA – Women & Marriage - only where you have walked have you been

WOMEN & WORK

Sept 8 2018 Economist
Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune, is the closest thing Hinduism has to an economic deity. How poorly her earthly sisters in present-day India are faring. There, women are less likely to work than they are in any country in the G20, except for Saudi Arabia. They contribute one-sixth of economic output, among the lowest shares in the world and half the global average. The unrealised contribution of women is one reason India remains so poor.
Yet far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35% in 2005 to just 26% now. In that time the economy has more than doubled in size and the number of working-age women has grown by a quarter, to 470m. Yet nearly 10m fewer women are in jobs. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU has of either gender, and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia.
Imagine the repercussions. Were India to rebalance its workforce in this way, the IMF estimates, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer. Its people would be well on their way to middle-income status. Beyond the obvious economic benefits are the incalculable human ones. Women who work are likelier to invest more in their children’s upbringing, and to have more say over how they lead their lives. Given that more Indian women have been beaten up by their husbands than are in work, there is room for improvement.
The first step in reversing the dramatic drop in female employment is understanding it. Some of the fall is a sign of progress. Girls are staying in school, and thus out of the labour force, for longer. But mostly it is the result of two unwelcome trends. As households become richer, they prefer women to stop working outside the home. It is not unusual in developing economies for a family’s social standing to be enhanced by having its women remain at home. But India stands out, as its female labour-force participation rate is well below those of countries at comparable income levels.
Social mores are startlingly conservative. A girl’s first task is to persuade her own family that she should have a job. The in-laws she will typically move in with after marriage are even more likely to yank her out of the workforce and into social isolation. In a survey in 2012, 84% of Indians agreed that men have more right to work than women when jobs are scarce. Men have taken 90% of the 36m additional jobs in industry India has created since 2005. And those who say that women themselves prefer not to work must contend with plenty of counter-evidence. Census data suggest that a third of stay-at-home women would work if jobs were available; government make-work schemes attract more women than men.
That points to the other problem: the lack of employment opportunities. The workforce has shifted from jobs more often done by women—especially farming, where most Indian women work but are being displaced by mechanisation. At the same time, inflexible and unreformed labour markets have hampered the rise of manufacturing and low-level services, the gateway for women in other poor countries. In neighbouring Bangladesh, whose customs are not so different from India’s, a boom in garment manufacturing has increased the number of working women by 50% since 2005. In Vietnam three-quarters of women work. But the mega-factories that boosted female employment there are largely absent in India.
What can be done? Many of the standard answers fall short. Promoting education, a time-tested development strategy, may not succeed. Figures show that the more schooling an Indian woman receives, the less likely she is to work, at least if she has anything less than a university degree. Likewise urbanisation, another familiar way to alleviate poverty: city-dwelling women are half as likely as rural ones to have a job.
Promoting female-friendly workplace policies, such as generous maternity leave, goes only so far in a country where most workers operate outside the formal economy. The most fruitful policy would be to reform India’s labour market so that women can be sucked into jobs en masse. When hiring and firing decisions have to be validated by bureaucrats, few entrepreneurs want to set up large factories.
A huge amount can be achieved in the intimacy of people’s homes without any help from the deskwallahs in Delhi. Indian women do 90% of the housework, the most of any large country. Gentlemen, spending just two hours a week doing the dishes or putting the kids to bed, would translate into a ten percentage point increase in female labour participation, according to a World Bank study. If that raised GDP by $550bn, as the McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank, has suggested, it would surely be the easiest half-trillion-dollar boost available to the global economy—and to one of its poorest countries, too.
An optimist might argue that more women are not working because India is still paying for the sins of the past, when so many of them were illiterate and high fertility rates bound them to the home. Most measures of female welfare are improving. India has many more girls in classrooms and fewer child brides than it once did.
But simply waiting for that progress to trickle down into the labour market ignores India’s dismal recent record. The socially conservative bent of the Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi makes it an unlikely champion of women’s rights. Other countries are trying harder to get women into gainful employment. Unless something changes, it will not be long before Saudi women are more common in the workplace than Indian ones.
In fact, many fear that all that extra schooling was a parental ploy to improve a daughter’s prospects not in the labour market but in the arranged-marriage market, part of the all-important quest to snag a suitable boy. A further push is needed to get Indian women what they really need: a suitable job.

Love (and money) conquer caste – More and more young Indians are choosing their own spouses
Economist Sep 5th 2015

Half a dozen young technology workers are gathered around a table in south Mumbai. In between checking their smartphones, they describe an Indian social revolution of which they are in the vanguard. Marriage, one woman explains, is becoming freer and easier—“less stiff-necked”, as she puts it. All have far more choice when it comes to picking a marriage partner than their parents knew: two of the women have even married men from another religion. The old-fashioned marriages that they see on television and in films seem deeply peculiar. “It’s a different world,” one says.

Marriage is a central institution in all societies. In India it often seems more important than anything else. Witness the extravagant, days-long weddings, the lavish gifts of saris and jewellery, and the columns of spouse-wanted ads in newspapers—or just watch any Bollywood romantic comedy. Yet marriage in India is also changing, in ways that are liberating and exciting but also often confusing.

Nearly all Indian women marry by their late 20s, and births out of wedlock are vanishingly rare. Marriages are almost always arranged. Dowry payments are widespread. About 90-95% of the time Hindus marry within their broad caste group. But if the basic rules of the game are fixed, the style of play is different these days.

Gourav Rakshit, the chief executive of a popular website for seeking marriage partners, Shaadi.com, spies a subtle but momentous change. It used to be that parents and older siblings drove the matchmaking process, he says, lining up potential partners whom the spouse-to-be might veto. These days the offspring tend to be in charge of finding their own partners, but parents may veto them. “What has not changed is that marriage is a family decision,” he explains. “What has changed is who is driving the process.”

Fully 73% of the profiles on Shaadi.com have been put there by people who are seeking partners for themselves, not by their parents or brothers. These days most new users (about 12,000 to 15,000 people sign up each day) access the website via smartphones. Those phones, which are bringing the internet to millions of new users, are themselves changing the matchmaking process. Tech-savvy Indians can now find out all about potential partners by tracking their digital traces through social media, or just by texting and telephoning. Parents need never know.

If small numbers of highly educated urbanites were becoming more individualistic, it would be little more than an interesting wrinkle in Indian life. However, the change is much more widespread than that. To begin with, this group is no longer small. Fully a quarter of young Indians were in tertiary education in 2013, according to the World Bank, up from 11% a decade earlier. Education and control over marriage go together.

And it is not just the wealthy who see marriage differently. The teenagers who live in Dharavi, a long-established slum between two railway lines in Mumbai, feel themselves to be just as culturally distinct from rural Indians as the technology workers do. Young men from Dharavi sometimes marry village women, who come to live with them. Asked about this, one teenage slum girl launches into a wicked impersonation of a rural bride, all namastes and scraping deference to her husband. (A Muslim boy is more equivocal: Mumbai girls know how to handle technology, he says, but rural girls know how to handle mothers-in-law.)

Although caste is still powerful in Dharavi, it is gradually giving way to the money god. Teenage boys insist that good jobs—government jobs especially—are now more important, both for snagging good partners and for asserting control over marriage decisions. One of the boys, an orphan, has a girlfriend and wants to marry her. Her parents object to his caste, but he reckons he can wear down their objections by finishing his education and getting a better job.

Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, says that caste is crumbling as India urbanises. Nearly a third of Indians now live in cities or towns, while villages are tied increasingly to urban economies. The village bosses who enforce caste rules have less power than they did. Some north Indian village elders have chosen to relax the rules anyway, because so many single men are in search of wives—a consequence of sex-selective abortions. Caste is now less an institution than a mess of prejudices about the superiority of one’s own group.

Popular culture is driving change too. In parts of Dharavi the greatest hazard for a pedestrian is not the open sewer beneath your feet but the tangle of wires around your head. Many of these wires carry cable-television signals. They transmit soap operas and movies which often depict the struggle between love and tradition. Though these seem stuffy to the upper middle classes, they can be a revelation to the poor. Nayreen Daruwalla of SNEHA, a Mumbai charity, has heard women complain that their husbands do not sing to them, as men do in Bollywood films.

One big thing stands in the way of further change, says Sonal Desai, another academic. Indian parents still assume they will live with their sons. That explains why they exert so much control over marriage: they are in effect choosing a cook and a future carer. Yet this too is beginning to weaken. Ms Desai led a team from the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland which conducted a huge survey of Indians in 2011-12 and found that 77% of women over 60 lived with their married children—still a big proportion, but lower than the 83% who did so in 2004-05. Small houses and high-rise flats are shooting up in Indian suburbs, suggesting the share is going to fall further.

Indian marriage still looks very different from the Western kind (which is changing too). Yet prosperity and technology are eroding tradition. People Group, which owns Shaadi.com, even invested in a dating app earlier this year. Such apps, which were unimaginable in India until recently, have not taken off yet. “The guys are all keen,” says Mr Rakshit, “but the girls aren’t there yet.”

INDIA – Women & Marriage

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