Workforce participation rate depends on women’s self-beliefs: survey

“Money earned by a woman is still considered to be the icing on the cake and not the cake itself”

March 07, 2014 02:28 am | Updated May 19, 2016 06:44 am IST - CHENNAI:

Women boarding a train as they return from their places of work. Photo: K. Pichumani

Women boarding a train as they return from their places of work. Photo: K. Pichumani

Forget popular assumptions about why participation rates of women in the workforce remain woeful.

A new nation-wide study suggests that the key to increasing the proportions of women at the workplace might have to do as much with changing attitudes and beliefs of women themselves as with dealing with external factors. While organisations and academic exercises in the past have trained the spotlight on a host of extrinsic issues faced by women, such as lack of infrastructure, India’s joint family system and even male chauvinistic attitude, findings of a nationwide study released ahead of International Women’s Day by Flexi Careers India, suggest that the “secret to increasing workforce participation rate of women might lie not outside but within the woman’s own conditioning and self-beliefs.”

Flexi Careers, a social enterprise that works in the area of women’s workforce participation in partnership with Finscholarz, surveyed 500 women across the country between September 2013 and January 2014 through direct, online and social media platforms to respond to this research project titled, ‘VIEWPORT 2014 - Economic Centeredness of Women’. The study showed that in spite of the incremental increase in the proportion of women in workforce participation, the relationship which women have towards money is still a tenuous one with more than 70 per cent of respondents saying that they pursued a career for the self identity which it brought them rather than the monetary incentive.

The survey found that over 60 per cent of stay-at-home mothers, who did not actively pursue a career, felt that earning money did not contribute much to the family’s sense of financial well being. Significantly, it was fathers who were the primary role models for women when it came to their attitude towards money.

While over 88 per cent of the respondents said they had finances of their own and autonomy over spending it, only 8 per cent trusted themselves with investing money judiciously, women still considered the management and investment of money to be a male forte. “A major reason for the poor workforce participation of women could be the fact that money earned by a woman is still considered to be the icing on the cake and not the cake itself,” said Saundarya Rajesh, founder-president, AVTAR Career Creators and FLEXI Careers India.

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