Abstract
Based on primary data from India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying women’s low labour force participation. In developing countries, women engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers. Women are involved in expenditure-saving activities, i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work which leads to mismeasurement of women’s work. Religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work, but the social norm that matters as a major constraint is that of being primarily responsible for domestic chores. We demonstrate the existence of ‘virtuous cycles’ within families: a history of working women in the family increases the probability of being in paid work by between 18 and 21 percentage points.
Highlights
Background and motivation for the study does India have one of the lowest female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) in the world but it has been declining steadily since 2004
Given that the primary responsibility for domestic chores falls on women, we argue that the conventional definition of cultural norms needs to be revised and shifted to focus on the real culprit, i.e. the cultural norm which places the burden of domestic chores almost exclusively on women
Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analysed the reasons underlying the low rates of labour force participation of women
Summary
Does India have one of the lowest female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) in the world but it has been declining steadily since 2004. In better understanding what explains women’s historically low participation rates, a phenomenon which predates the present decline and which has persisted despite the classic preconditions for women’s increased participation in the labour force: high rates of growth, rising levels of female education, and lower rates of fertility. For reasons which we explain below, we believe that we still do not understand the longer-standing constraints that have curtailed women’s ability to participate in the labour force, regardless of current trends. Our main findings are that, as women are primarily responsible for routine domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and household maintenance, (over and above the standard explanations in the literature—age, location, education, and so on), as well as for elderly care, this lowers their probability of working. We show that ‘good’ family traditions, i.e. a history of older women (mothers or mothers-in-law) having worked, increases the probability of women being in paid work by between 18 and 21 percentage points, over and above standard controls
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