India’s Chandrayaan-3 Lunar Mission was a super success. India is on the moon. And over the moon as well. Celebrating this success, one of the defining images that sticks in my mind is that of the number of women scientists involved in the mission. More than 100 women played a stellar role in conceptualising, designing, testing and executing Chandrayaan-3. Hats off to them.
On a different note, the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy’s latest data on the involvement of women in the workforce states that 39 million women are employed, as opposed to 361 million men. This points to a gory fact: 9 out of 10 in the workforce are men.
Now is this a reality? When you board a Mumbai local train in the morning during the peak work time, is this what you see? Of the 4,500-odd people on a single train that literally spill onto the platform, do you see 9 out of 10 being men?
Actually, no. A recent study of ours across Mumbai and Delhi indicates that Mumbai trains carry as much as 44% women and Delhi trains 36%. But then local trains are not the only way people get to work. Many walk. Many take the bus.
Look around. Is the proportion of working men versus women overstated in more ways than one?
The argument holds water. Big cities see more women in the workforce and smaller towns and villages see fewer. The national average evens out, highlighting that female labour force participation stands at just 24% in India.
And this includes farm labour. A sector whose precise audit is well-nigh impossible a task. And therefore, we conduct smaller studies and surveys and extrapolate for the entire country. And there lies the primary fault. The moot point to discuss then is women and work. Do women work less than men in India? When I put it in this crude and insensitive manner, the penny drops.
My mother, for one, has always been called a housewife. In today’s lingo, we will refer to her as a “homemaker”. And that she was. And is. As semantics give new respect to the status of a homemaker, the truth remains that my mother and yours work much more than many of us do today.
Raymond was wrong. There is nothing called “the complete man”(as their long-running advertising campaign over decades insisted). If there is a truth to meet, it is the concept of “the complete woman”. A woman in India who handles home, works at home and in office, manages every relationship there is to manage, juggles the medical needs of the in-laws with as much panache as the schoolwork of the kids. Now to leave the emotion aside, let me quickly take you through a journey of available data.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a collective effort of 37 democracies with market-based economies collaborating to develop policy standards to promote sustainable economic growth, has plenty of data to offer. Let me pick just one metric: Time spent doing housework across the world. The US numbers are a shock in itself. Men do housework for 82 minutes
in a day. Women, 135.
Even in a country where men do more housework compared to their counterparts in other countries, the inequity is intact. Slovenia has men working 114 minutes, and women work 212 minutes. Data from India is a super-shocker when it comes to housework. The Indian man works for a princely 19 minutes a day at home and the Indian woman works 298 minutes. When you work for as much as five hours a day at home, where will you get the time to work outside in the formal workforce, as assessed by data gatherers and their ilk?
The fault lies in our attitude to work as usual. We do not view all work as work. The work that women do at home is the most underestimated in the world. A work that does not get enough respect. Work that attracts no income. And thankfully, no income tax as well. Work which attracts nothing at all it seems. Not even eyeballs. And there lies the tragedy.
So, do men work less than women? The numbers at hand seem to say a lot. There are three kinds of people in India. Men who work in the workplace, women who work at home, and women who work in the workplace and at home as well. Data on the third category would suggest that these are really superwomen. They spend as much as eight hours at the workplace, two hours on travel and five hours at home. And that’s a grand total of 15 hours, spent on work and commute. The answer seems to lie
embedded in this data.
Add the farming sector in India to the debate. Those who live in villages will testify that agriculture, primarily micro-agriculture, is progressively getting all about women. Women toil in the field as much
as men do, if not more. Women’s unpaid work in agriculture and their tasks of gathering water and fuel for the house are contributions that go unassessed in almost all data formats. Women’s unpaid work, if monetised, can contribute to as much as 40% of India’s GDP.
The end point is a simple one. If the women in India did not do all the work they do at home, these services would need to be outsourced or bought. The value of these savings is the true, unassessed value of what a woman contributes to the home, the village, the city, society, and the country at large.
There is new respect in my head for sure. Shashikala, who handles my data analytics centre in Chennai, is a superwoman for me. She works 10 hours in the workplace everyday. I don’t know how far she stays from the office. I sure do know she spends three hours on housework.
Roopa, who heads my company’s market research department in Bengaluru, puts in a mean 12 hours at the office for five days every week. Pankaja, who works on our AI initiatives, works four days from my Mumbai office and one day from home. I know she works for 10 hours at the office. I will stop there.
The point is hopefully made. I know we are far from the point when we can really say “Thank you for your service” to the women who work at home and the ones who work both at home and office, but I guess we will get there. Later than sooner.
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)