A Job Well Done: Busting the working woman myth

WORKING A WAY OUT: The survey findings expose many myths and reveal a new face of the working women in India.

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Suhasini Haidar

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Here are some common impressions about the Indian women:

-- Except in the big cities, most women stay at home while their men go out to work

-- Women don’t want to work, especially if it involves going out of their home

-- Working women face social disapproval and loss of respect in their family

-- Working women in urban India have a relatively ‘easy’ life

You may have come across some of these impressions and may have wondered if these are well founded. You may of course have noted the very narrow definition of ‘work’ involved here, as if any work that does not get paid for is not work.

You may have asked yourself if it is fair not to regard household work as work. Besides, you may have had doubts about some of the ‘facts’ implicit here.

The Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS survey quizzed about 4,000 women, a little over half in urban India, across 20 states to check how well founded these impressions are. The findings expose many myths and reveal a new face of the working women in India.

There is already enough data to debunk some of these notions. The official Time Use Survey has already demonstrated that if household work in included as a part of work, an average woman works about an hour more than an average man on any given day.

Even if ‘work’ is defined narrowly to mean paid work, the Census shows that about one quarter of Indian women work.

The Work Participation Ratio, as the Census calls it, is actually almost three times higher in villages than in the cities. A majority of the ‘working women’ in India do not go any office. Nearly 70 per cent of them work in the fields, either their own or as a labourer in someone else’s.

The present survey supplements the available information with data on experience and attitudes towards work. There is, for instance, simply nothing to support the impression that women don’t want to work:

-- Three-fourths of all women including homemakers think that there is nothing wrong about women going out to work. Only one out of every eight women was opposed to the idea of working women.

-- When women who were not currently doing any paid work were asked if they would like to work, given a chance to work from their own home, the verdict was a clear 6:1 in favour of wanting to work. One-third of those who were currently working also preferred the option to work from home.

-- Thinking about the future generation, two-thirds of ‘non-working’ women would like their daughters to work rather than stay at home and look after the family. The higher the education, the greater is the desire for their daughter to work.