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Why Don’t Indian Women Work and How It Hurts the Economy - FutureIQ

6,963 views Wait, is this logic right? • Mar 07, 2025
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Slog Reference: Why Dont Women Work In India

Description

In this episode, we explore the question, "Why don’t Indian women work?" India has one of the lowest rates of women working, and it’s holding back our economy. Only 30% of women in India are part of the workforce, which is much lower compared to countries like China, Indonesia, or even Bangladesh.

NOTE: A wrong map has been shown at some points in the video. We have shared links to the CORRECT maps in the pinned comment of the video, do check it out for accuracy. Sincerely sorry for the inconvenience caused.
04:01 The World Map referred here is the first map of this study: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ratio-of-female-to-male-labor-force-participation-rates-ilo-wdi
04:54 India’s LFPR referred here is the third map of this study: https://www.ggd.world/p/can-architecture-reveal-the-spread
05:45 India state wise wealth differences referred here is the second map of this study: https://www.ggd.world/p/can-architecture-reveal-the-spread

We talk about why this is happening, what has been tried to fix it, and what might actually work to help more women get jobs. We also discuss why it's so important for women to work, not just for the economy but also for their own well-being and safety. Watch to find out how India can improve and make things better for women in the workforce.

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Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
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Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Sources:
HT article on Claudia Goldin’s work and women in the workforce in India: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/an-acknowledgement-of-women-s-work-in-economics-hits-misses-and-a-long-road-ahead-101696875659892.html
FLFPR India vs comparable countries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locations=IN-BD-CN-ID-LK-PH
OurWorldInData: https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply
Gender Parity could boost India's GDP by 27% (IMF): https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/gender-parity-can-boost-indias-gdp-by-27-wef-co-chairs/articleshow/62589586.cms
McKinsey on Gender Parity in India and its impact: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/bridging-gender-gap-may-add-rs-46-lakh-crore-to-indias-gdp-in-2025-mckinsey/articleshow/49628430.cms
Alice Evans interview in Scroll.in: https://scroll.in/article/984100/interview-alice-evans-on-why-india-s-big-feminist-demand-should-be-labour-intensive-growth
What can Architecture tell us about Gender: https://www.ggd.world/p/can-architecture-reveal-the-spread
Foxconn in India: https://econforeverybody.com/2023/11/29/markets-are-complicated-foxconn-in-tamil-nadu-edition/ and https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-india-iphone-factory/
UNDP Women at Work Report: https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/migration/in/Women-at-Work-Report.pdf
Why do Women in South India have more freedom than North: https://scroll.in/article/975151/why-do-women-in-south-india-have-more-freedom-than-their-northern-sisters
Not Open Access
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41027-023-00468-z


00:00 Why Don't Indian Women Work?
01:02 Why Are Two Men Talking About Women Working?
02:00 Why Is It So Important To Have Women In Labor Force?
03:56 Why Is India So Bad At It?
09:00 The Most Valid Reasons
16:48 Solutions For This Major Problem?
20:00 The Things That Actually Work
22:47 Interventions That Will Increase Our Ratios

#futureiq #indianwomen

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Why Dont Women Work In India

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Transcript

why don't Indian women work by that what I mean is that India has one of the worst rates of participation of women in the labor force we are at about 30 or 35% okay and most comparable countries are much better off even Bangladesh is at 40% okay no point in even comparing with China which is at 70% and if you look at comparable countries like Indonesia Philippines they are also 50 plus okay wow so what is going on right and this is important it is fixing this is important for our economic growth yes for reducing poverty for reducing inequality for increasing the status of women in our country right so this episode is about what is the
problem why it is important to fix why is India so much worse than other countries and to fix it what works and what might not work I have one question before we start this episode sure why are two men talking about why women don't work well see the thing is that we are simply summarizing the work done by a lot of women right most of the research that we have used in this episode and we are referencing in the description is done by women Claudia golden won a Nobel Prize for her work on women in the workforce Alice Evans has done a lot of work on Indian conditions and a bunch of the other reports were
produced either by groups of women or women working with men so we are just summarizing right we haven't done any of the work ourself women have done this this is mostly we are channeling the women who have done the hard work so what we are essentially doing is we are just adding our voice to all of these voices that we are about to sort of reference so let me Begin by asking this question why is it so important to have women in the labor force yeah if women did that we could all be 30% richer 30% yes there is an IMF report which says that if women had equality in our Workforce then our GDP would be higher
by 27% okay wow now that doesn't just mean more money okay higher GDP means we would be all healthier we would have less pollution there would be less corruption in the country there would be more equality in the country there would be less poverty in the country right so it's not like just you know capitalist pigs saying we want more money it is actually improves the lives of the Common Man right yeah but this would also make the women's lives better right absolutely if women are working outside the home and they have an independent source of income there is less domestic violence they can speak up much more and their voices are heard in the household
they are part of the decision making which they were not part of before because then they can't get to hear or nobody can tell them you're not earning the money I'm earning the money and it doesn't have to be said explicitly it happens automatically correct and also the women themselves their confidence increases true but also they get exposed to other women role models other ways of thinking modern ways of uh thinking right not just that but if more women work that means there are more women going out on the streets which means the streets are safer for women so it's a self-fulfilling thing also yeah the streets are not dominated by men there will be uh a lot of women also so women
will feel safer it's yeah very psychological thing but it does make sense yeah uh but that brings the question how bad is it currently just just look at this map of women in the workforce across all the countries of the world right we are in the worst patch we are right there with the Islamic countries which don't allow women to step out of the house or drive anything uh even the Sahara countries are better than us okay but why is India so bad at this yeah so when this question is asked to either people or researchers many different reasons are given right right we are going to look at which of these reasons are valid reasons and which are
not very valid reasons how are we going to know which are valid and which are not two important ways of doing it right one is that you compare India with other countries which had a similar background as far as that particular reason is concerned and if the labor force participations are different then you know that this is not the reason correct similarly look at this other map of India labor force particip a by state and you can see in the data that there is a very significant North versus South divide South India has much more participation so if your reason cannot explain this difference then that's not a valid reason this is not a North
versus South thing this is just data we are talking about exactly yeah so first let's take the not so valid reasons and get them out of the way okay the most important reason is wealth well in the sense of society wealth primarily right okay so the idea being that the more wealthy Society is the more there will be labor force participation of women and we are not a wealthy Society right but if you look at Punjab and harana huh right they are fairly wealthy States and they have some of the worst participation right so it's not wealth okay right second H cast system yeah that's a big one yeah so there is some impact of the cast system the upper
casts have these Notions of Purity and don't want their women to like be out in the impure world and so on yeah but that can't be the most important or you know uh the key reason because that doesn't explain the north south difference the cast system is just as strong in the South it is so what gives right so yeah what gives right third is the impact of colonialism right colonialism the idea being that you know these European powers they came and pretty much screwed up the governance the societal fabric they increased the divides the cast system they accentuated all kinds of problems they caused and maybe it has something to do with that right so
people became more entrenched in their beliefs of cast and everything else without going into too much detail there could have affected fair but that still doesn't explain the nor sou divide so we drop that yeah the nor sou divide true two very interesting ones that you might not have thought about right one is materialism or matriarchy so in Kerala the husband moves and starts living with the girl's family right okay yeah Power passes down through the women in the family that should lead to more women in the labor force right of course yeah yeah I mean and you know it's like Kerala is in the South the problem with this explanation is that materialism is
there in only a small pocket right South is pretty big true so again that is not an explanation right okay the other fascinating one is that in the 80s an influential paper had been written saying that cousin marriage is a important issue right cousin marriage helps increase participation of women in the labor for basic idea being that if women are getting married within the same extended family then they are going into their own people and so they will have better equality and better equality leads to more freedom and more freedom leads to more labor force participation this is all sorts of wrong in terms of the DNA intermixing and whatnot and also if you look at it right
Andra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have a lot of cousin in marriage and also they have better labor force participation right so does it's a valid reason no it does not because you know the Middle East also has cousin marriages and they are much much worse right so yeah and plus that cousin marriage thing or within Village marriage is another related thing there's a whole bunch of little things about the data that are not explained right so we keep that one also out okay so all of these reasons that you just pointed out wealth cast system Colonial ISM mat lism and cousin marriage or within Village marriage all of these are invalid reasons well cast system is kind of valid but in
conjunction with the important one which is religious beliefs culture patriarchy right and safety of women okay right now the thing to keep in mind huh is to explain why is this all stronger in a North right huh one reason huh is that the North was exposed to frequent invasions of Muslim Invaders coming in from the Northwest correct right and one of the problems at that time was that as part of these raids there used to be Mass rapes of women women being carried away and so on so pretty soon the north learned to have increasing protections for women yeah seems like a reasonable logical reaction yeah the second thing that happened is that when the Muslims
came in and they actually started ruling they brought their PDA culture with them right so they didn't want the women going out very much like Saudi Arabia still is today right so that had an impact the Third Way this impacted was now for hundreds of years these Muslims were at the top of the social hierarchy right so other groups and jatis who wanted to increase their influence and who wanted to right you know be sort of important and powerful and all that they started copying the Muslims right so you can see if you look at the architecture you can see that some of the sections of Hindus would copy similar you know segregated women's quarters and houses
and uh you behaviors and cultures those windows with little and J and so on right yeah very interesting this unfortunately carries over today also right wherever there are more communal riots same problems happen and as a result women in those areas are in more need of protection or at least that's the perception right okay that makes a lot of sense and if you look the north south divide and even the north India versus Northeast India divide can be explained by some of that it can it can and I am in fact now thinking of so many different places where these behaviors that have been sort of carried down from the mugal era are still visible in our
current times even in Cosmopolitan cities for example the whole notion of a lady's compartment in trains kind of can be connected back to that I know it's a hypothetical assumption I'm kind of making but yeah the jali the independent quarters but let's not put too much focus on just this one reason right there are two other important reasons okay the second one is just the kind of work kind of work in the sense simple if it requires a lot of strength M then women can't do that work right the weaker sex so to speak because in the old days where most of the work was farming right if the farming involved like tillage like using a heavy plow
then women couldn't do that on the other hand if the farming involved uh say rice farming where it's a lot of work but not requiring strength then women end up doing a lot of that because women can do a lot of work right we made an entire movie on this Mother India where she's carrying the plow so yeah yeah so then again if you look at Rice cultivation versus wheat cultivation you can see again a similar thing uh showing up in the data and there is also north south divide there as well interesting in the modern systems uh right if you compare India with say Taiwan or China or something like that it boils down to
labor intensive work okay in factories okay even Bangladesh what they have done is that they have significantly increased their textile industry they and that is labor intensive but not like heavy labor so a lot of women work in that industry but here is my rub uh Bangladesh is a majority Muslim population they have a very Muslim culture so to speak and in all the other Muslim countries that we' have seen women in the workforce is terrible participation so the simple thing about labor intensive work is that if the work needs to be done and the powers that be are desperate that the work get done people find a way right same thing that happened in thaan right yeah so Society
adjust if there is a strong culture against something but you really really want that to happen both I mean the poor people want it because that's how they get money and the rich people want it because that's how they make profits yeah then it happens right yeah I mean if you want your textile industry to boom and the only available labor force is women then you find a way to get women into the textile industry and the same thing is happening in some small way in the fox con Factory in Tamil Nadu right there Foxon has set up a factory and it needs women to work for the same reasons that we just about earlier and
they're finding solutions to these well-known problems so for example they have created hostels for women to stay right next to the factory itself ah and those hostels have a 6 p.m. curfew oh right so that the women are never out in a dangerous way and they can tell their families that we have a 6 p.m. curfew and then family feels oh then that's fine she can work there right and a bunch of other such things that they're slowly discovering there's a link in the description okay go check that link out while we continue with the this is very very interesting all right the third important reason in India why women are not able to work is household work okay
that's called unpaid work in economics but basically all the cooking and cleaning and child care that women have to do in India now you can say oh that is important work right and that you know everywhere in the world there is the same issues or that the women are outside are ignoring their children no there is one very simple statistic to look at okay which is look at the amount of this unpaid labor that is done by women compared to the men correct okay take the ratio H and India is the worst right literally the worst literally the worst like way up here look at this graph India is up here and then everybody is down here right and it is
up by a mile 10x yeah okay women do 10x the work as men no other country in the world are the men so incompetent and useless useless yes I don't think this is incompetence no they think of this as like major competence look I can do no work at home and still everything gets done right they're very proud of this Indian men so yeah they are yeah they are anybody who's been outside India and interacted with non-indians knows that there is this big difference yeah so so because this is such a well-known problem I'm sure there must be some solutions that are proposed or thought of there are lots of solutions that have been proposed uh and we can go through
the list and we'll do a similar thing first talk about the solutions which either haven't worked or unlikely to work and then the ones that have a better chance we know they haven't worked because there is research and data about that or similar reasons we look at the reasons so one that a lot of people like to talk about is the UCC the uniform civil code right so the basic thought process being that if a lot of this is because of religious cultural Reasons by enforcing common standards across the country we can increase the equality of women especially in sections like Muslims where uh their situation is worse off because of certain religious cultural behaviors that is unlikely to work
because if you just look at labor force participation huh at certain sections of society there isn't much difference between the Hindus and Muslims oh okay so it's not that it's not okay so is not not really going to help the other thing is increased wages okay okay the idea being that women typically get a lower salary for doing the same jobs right and if we were to somehow change that either through encouragement or some subsidy or like passing a law maybe the uh you know women will work more it should right I mean yeah unfortunately the data shows that if you do that it helps a little bit but not a whole lot right okay
changing the wages without changing other things doesn't significantly have a big effect okay but I still think they should change the wages yeah that is definitely that should happen right a third thing is skills training or vocational training for women right that's a big one Everyone likes to say oh well we will teach them sewing or we will teach them this and then they will be able to work and so on right again the shows that there is a temporary increase in women working but after a little while they go back because of pressure from their families and their Community to not work okay so unless you fix the culture just giving them skills and vocational training isn't good
enough we keep coming back to culture as come to that right finally there is like Ubi cash transfers huh mg and Rea right rural L yeah so again those things they have some impact for a short while but they're shortlived right one big thing that you see is that as long as the work that they can do is nearby and easy to do they will do it okay but as long as it requires Mobility they will stop so you know they are not treating it as an important thing it's more like a you know good to have well the mobility kind of explains because going far away from home yeah comes with its own set of
problems in fact that is one of the things that actually works focusing on that right so let's get to the things that actually work quite well please the biggest one is related to what we said about unpaid work household work right extra wages doesn't help as much as free child care oh right make Child Care easy to access and labor force participation goes up it makes absolute sense Claudia golden got a Nobel Prize for pointing out that the most important reason that women make less and are less in the labor force isn't because of discrimination directly against women it is because women need the job to be easy to do right because they have to cook at home
they have to go back early they can't work late nights they can't suddenly go out of town and so on like all kinds of things that men are able to do and so companies are willing to pay more for a man who can do this and obviously they pay less for a woman who refuses or can't do all of these things fix these things and women's participation goes up child care is just one part of it right that's such a double jeopardy thing I mean it is you are doing unpaid work and then you are getting paid less because you are doing unpaid work and you can't do the paid work exactly wow right so it's not just about
the hours right it's also about the flexibility so if you give flexible work hours right lots of research suggesting that women working increases if you give them flexible hours ability to work from home at least some of the time and so on right makes absolute sense very counterintuitive thinking but it makes total sense when you go that extra bit of logic that extra step of logic third thing is safety okay so there is some research showing that if you Institute sexual harassment training in a company and processes to deal with sexual harassment and you publicize this fact then the number of women working in those companies as opposed to companies who are not doing this goes up right
right there is research showing that if workplaces are near say metros in DHI so that you can get to and from work without ending up in unsafe places yeah women in the workforce increases right so the things that you pointed out if some of these we can work on that uh makes a difference yeah and all of these are uh pretty straightforward but also they will require active intervention by the authorities by us so there are two kinds of interventions right M that help three maybe so one is awareness right okay so just lightweight awareness flyers and ads and so on no doesn't help no okay what helps is actual role models in that Community working and visible to people
we did an entire episode and you're saying this doesn't work this won't work no what we need is for people listening to this episode to go and make changes right so but yeah role models help so women inv visible positions help so right that's why uh manels are a bad thing that insistence that panels should have a woman uh is a good thing right absolutely and just for the record the person on the other side of this camera is a woman and a very competent one at that arushi say hi hi so making public spaces safer for women right increase the amount of lighting on the streets make sidewalks a little wider so that when a woman is
passing a man it doesn't have to be too close right that sounds very funny but you know it is a very smart idea most importantly though is government should encourage labor intensive Manufacturing in the country like we saw with the example of Taiwan and Bangladesh yeah all these other problems would get fixed because then both ends the people with the money and the people who need the money both will work hard to fix the problems by themselves so more of foxcon factories in India it will also help because iPhones will get cheaper yes we care about the women so summarizing India is especially bad at getting women to work for cultural religious communal and safety
reasons right it is holding back our economy our equality and ability to fight poverty right how do we fix it most important we have to make it easier for women to work men who are watching this show please do more household work right you are the worst in the world at doing this okay also employers who are watching this show please do things which make it easier for women to work the two things to focus on are flexible hours and access to child care right yeah people who are putting up panels and calling people for talks and all that bring more women because role models help I know what you're thinking and yes we will have women on this Manel
soon I won't tell you when because we still working on that but listen when naven says men you're the worst you better listen to him okay that's a graph pointing out that you are the worst so there you go he always comes with data always comes with research backed facts which is why I love sitting next to him every week when we put out these episodes Shri Kant naven future IQ and if you like this episode in which we destroyed the misconception about why India's women don't work then you'll definitely like the other episode we did on uh India's income inequality go check that out shrikant naven future IQ thank you