UN Women released the Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 report some weeks ago. The report shows that despite significant gains, the breaches in women’s rights are still extensive. The most worrying of these is that even though we live today in the wealthiest world that mankind has seen so far, millions of women are still relegated to low-paid jobs and unpaid labour.
“In developing regions, up to 95 per cent of women’s employment is informal, in jobs unprotected by labour laws and lacking social protection,” the report says. Simultaneously, women also have to take on the burden of unpaid household work. UN Women found that in India, women do nearly six hours of unpaid housework every day.
This statistic about unpaid house work must be studied carefully in juxtaposition with another fact. The report found that in 2014, across six of the most influential global economic institutions, women’s representation on the board ranged from 4 per cent to 20 per cent. Recently, India Inc got a lot of flak for not meeting SEBI norms of having adequate female representation on their boards. In fact, most companies took the shameful route of simply nominating mothers and aunts. But there is a deeper malaise here — the fact that there might not be enough women in top management positions to nominate to the boards.
And there is more to this than the obvious glass ceiling into which many women crash as they climb up. The fact is, a very large number of women drop out of work altogether in the middle or at the peak of their careers. Two years ago, BBC surveyed 1,000 women working in and around Delhi and found that only 18-34 per cent of women continued working after having a child. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg says that 43 per cent of highly qualified women leave their jobs to raise their children.
Fostering a family is an elemental task of human society, yet men are unwilling to share the task and women are penalised for doing it. UN Women calls this “a care penalty that unfairly punishes women”. At the lower income levels, it’s the state’s job to provide fair pay, childcare, and access to water and toilets, so that more women can work. At the corporate level, companies have to provide the support, whether on-site crèches or paternity leave, so that women don’t drop out. And men have to share the burden of care-giving. A middle-aged friend has had to practically wrap up her consultancy work to take care of her ailing mother. Nobody even expects that her brother will suffer a blip in his career for the same task. Wives give up careers to look after their husband’s ailing parents because the sons won’t. And children, of course, are invariably the mother’s responsibility. This makes women always economically vulnerable and dependent.
We need formal policies and shared roles that make it possible for both men and women to care for families, without either sacrificing economic independence. A career cannot always be a man’s entitlement and a woman’s extravagance.
