October 13, 2011

Why Women in India Dipping Out of Workforce?

Modern Indian woman take up study, then take up jobs and live an equal life like that of a man. Or does that equality really exist in our culture? Looking through the superficial level, women today are at par with their male counterparts. But if we give a closer look it is actually a different case.

equal

The woman at junior and middle level workforce is still at a better position, but a radical dropout from workplace has come into notice as they move high up the ladder.Therefore it raises an important question, that despite India's swift economic growth, why woman are opting out of the workforce?

A latest study has highlighted this disturbing development in the Indian labour market. The "Gender Diversity Benchmark for Asia 2011" by Community Business surveyed 21 large multinational companies in six countries in Asia namely China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore; to observe how women are doing at junior, middle and senior levels of management.

The woman workforce in India totals to less than 25 percent, which is below the national female labour-force participation ratio of 29 percent as calculated in 2010. Women are excellent representatives at junior level, not that great at middle level and least impressive at the senior level. India is rated as the worst performer among all the Asian countries in regard to percentage of woman at junior and middle level, whereas Hong Kong and China is the best performer of the lot. But at senior level, India is slightly better than Japan, though below Malaysia, the top performer.

drop out

Therefore, India tops the chart with biggest percentage of woman dropping out of workforce, recognized as "leaking pipeline" amid junior and middle levels. Merely 29 percent of the junior level workforce in Indian companies is women which fell down to 15 percent at middle level and under 10 percent of the workforce at the senior level.

Since India has been stagnant in employment creation and shrunken labour force is discouraging workers, both men and woman are withdrawing from the workplace. Noticeably, amid 2004-05 and 2009-10, less than a million new jobs were created regardless of the nation's speedy economic expansion. Thus, India may be distinctive amongst developing countries and features U.S. approach of "jobless growth". Certainly, these statistics do not detain work in the informal sector or unpaid work, such as at home, which is predictable to use a large proportion of women's time in India.

One of the most significant causes for this dropout is the reality that women have more responsibilities on them, to be concerned of the household even if she has a job. Further reason is that their roles as the daughter, wife or the mother are much more important than their ambition or career

 burden

Women, who are working and earning is considered useless if a male earner in the family earns enough to sustain all the requirements of the family. They have a perception: Why obtain all the pain of two jobs? - One at home and the other being the actual job.The weight of "daughterly guilt" is faced by women, which forces them into the family and social pressure to take care of elderly parents or in-laws

In a country like India, marital help and comprehensive family typically help with child care and institutional options for elder care are measured culturally intolerable, thus mounting the anxiety on women. Yet, career-minded women who've wedged around counter to the incentives that the higher income and greater responsibilities afford.

women at work

The existence of such a leaky pipeline in India suggests a breakdown of gender equality, in meticulously when one considers that India performs so much more disappointingly than the other countries in the study. It might just be that at India's existing intensity of economic development, which is up till now to catch up to China's, allow only wealthy developed countries, the economic and social revolution will authorize women have yet to be unleashed

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