Women’s Labor Force Participation Project
How do we keep India’s working women in the labor force and transition women’s work from jobs to careers?
Much has been made of India’s low and declining female labor force participation rate (FLFP), hovering at around 22% (PLFS 2019-20), which is significantly lower than the global average rate of 47% and is the lowest in the G20 save Saudi Arabia (World Bank). India’s low FLFP is particularly concerning as it stands in stark contrast to male labor force participation at 79% and represents a nearly 50% decline over the past fifteen years. In the effort to unpack this puzzle, substantial policy and research attention has focused on the barriers women, particularly young women, face to entering the labor force. Few, however, have investigated the barriers to women’s retention in the labor force. In an original survey we conducted with more than 5,000 recently employed vocational trainees, we found that more than 99% of adolescent women who had accepted a job offer left their job within one year, and only 20% were employed elsewhere. Anecdotal evidence from interviews with leaders in the garment and electronic industries in India suggests that while there is unmet demand for female labor, the duration of women’s employment status is perceived as less reliable; employers commonly assume that female employees will not remain in the labor force for longer than two to three years. Accordingly, our research team has identified a critical point for future intervention: identifying avenues for preventing women’s attrition from the labor force.
Recruiting women to enter the labor force is not enough to sustainably increase India’s national labor force participation rates if women drop out shortly thereafter; some focus must be placed on the retention of female workers who have already overcome the barriers to labor market entry. For migrant women workers, this challenge is particularly salient; they have already surmounted the sizable hurdles to labor migration and yet most struggle to stay employed for more than a year. Yet this project is motivated by a critical finding from our survey with recently employed vocational trainees: the provision of post-migration support was a large and positive correlate of job retention, suggesting that challenges associated with labor migration can be mitigated through on-the-job interventions. The firms employing young (migrant) women have the potential to be key actors initiating such interventions, but each individual firm is subject to its own incentives and constraints regarding the provision of social support to employees. A deeper understanding of these firm-level constraints and possibilities may help stimulate new ideas for the retention of women workers.
Research Design
How do we keep India’s working women in the labor force and transition women’s work from jobs to careers? One major constraint to understanding women’s attrition from the Indian labor force is the availability of data. Most studies on Indian FLFP to date have focused on data from the NSS and PLSS, but these national surveys only offer a snapshot of gendered economic trends. Data at the individual and firm levels are more useful to understanding the specific constraints faced by working women across a variety of industries and contexts, and it is imperative to note that this data already exists. The problem lies in the fact that this data has been collected and stored in the private domain by firms, vocational training, and labor matching agencies and is therefore inaccessible to the public. In order to leverage this wealth of knowledge, the development of partnerships between researchers and the private sector will be crucial to understanding the best strategies for supporting women’s labor force retention.
With the core goal of partnership development in mind, the ID2 Lab has launched a collaborative research agenda in partnership with the Udaiti Foundation to understand the constraints to women’s labor force retention and test and evaluate mitigation strategies. The Udaiti Foundation is has compiled a database of internal data from several major job training and matching companies in India and has shared these data with the ID2 Lab for analysis.
As part of this research agenda, the research team intends to analyze these large-scale administrative datasets to understand (a) gendered patterns of labor demand by companies, (b) gendered patterns of labor supply and sectoral placement, and (c) gendered labor trajectories. These data will enable us to understand where women are falling out of the labor force and how women’s attrition varies across industries, pay levels, benefit provision, and other labor conditions. This quantitative data analysis will be paired with a supplementary data collection effort consisting of a sample of semi-structured qualitative interviews to enrich our understanding of the particular challenges faced by migrant women workers.
Ultimately, the evidence generated by our proposal will enable us to conceptualize informed strategies for improving existing job opportunities that are available to women and to make vocational training and job-matching programs more sensitive to migrant women’s unique gendered needs. The research team intends to complete this initial phase of the research agenda from June 2023 – March 2024. Once this phase of initial data analysis is complete, the research team anticipates that the evidence generated by this proposal may be used to design a series of scalable, informational interventions geared toward improving women’s labor force retention outcomes.