[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/100992.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

(In)visibility, care and cultural barriers: the size and shape of women’s work in India

Author

Listed:
  • Deshpande, Ashwini
  • Kabeer, Naila
Abstract
Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In particular, we try to disentangle the intertwined strands of choice, constraints posed by domestic work and care responsibilities, and the predominant understanding of cultural norms as factors explaining the low labor force participation as measured by involvement in paid work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) economic work that leads to mis-measurement of women’s work and suggest methods to improve measurement. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lower the probability of “working”, after accounting for all the conventional factors. We also document how, for women, being out of paid work is not synonymous with care or domestic work, as they are involved in expenditure saving activities. We also find that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of working. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we also document that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores.

Suggested Citation

  • Deshpande, Ashwini & Kabeer, Naila, 2019. "(In)visibility, care and cultural barriers: the size and shape of women’s work in India," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100992, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:100992
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100992/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maitreyi Bordia Das, and Sonalde Desai, 2003. "Why are educated women less likely to be employed in India? Testing competing hypotheses," Social Protection Discussion Papers and Notes 27868, The World Bank.
    2. Neff, Daniel & Sen, Kunal & Kling, Veronika, 2012. "The Puzzling Decline in Rural Women's Labor Force Participation in India: A Reexamination," GIGA Working Papers 196, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Kapsos, Steven. & Bourmpoula, Evangelia. & Silberman, Andrea., 2014. "Why is female labour force participation declining so sharply in India?," ILO Working Papers 994949190702676, International Labour Organization.
    4. Klasen, Stephan & Pieters, Janneke, 2012. "Push or Pull? Drivers of Female Labor Force Participation during India's Economic Boom," IZA Discussion Papers 6395, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Indrani Mazumdar & Neetha N, 2011. "Gender Dimensions: Employment Trends in India, 1993-94 to 2009-10," Working Papers id:4502, eSocialSciences.
    6. Maendra Dev, S., 2015. "India Development Report 2015," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199459452.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chiplunkar, Gaurav & Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou, 2024. "Aggregate Implications of Barriers to Female Entrepreneurship," IZA Discussion Papers 17281, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Ashwini Deshpande, 2022. "The Covid-19 pandemic and gendered division of paid work, domestic chores and leisure: evidence from India’s first wave," Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, Springer;Fondazione Edison, vol. 39(1), pages 75-100, April.
    3. Rahul Goel & Oyinlola Oyebode & Louise Foley & Lambed Tatah & Christopher Millett & James Woodcock, 2023. "Gender differences in active travel in major cities across the world," Transportation, Springer, vol. 50(2), pages 733-749, April.
    4. Sapna Goel, 2022. "Effect of Deagrarianization at the Household Level on the Scale and Nature of Women’s Work in Rural India," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 65(4), pages 1053-1082, December.
    5. Maiti, Surya Nath & Pakrashi, Debayan & Saha, Sarani & Smyth, Russell, 2022. "Don't judge a book by its cover: The role of intergroup contact in reducing prejudice in conflict settings," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 202(C), pages 533-548.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ashwini Deshpande & Naila Kabeer, 2019. "(In)Visibility, Care and Cultural Barriers: The Size and Shape of Women's Work in India," Working Papers 1016, Ashoka University, Department of Economics.
    2. Sanghamitra Kanjilal-Bhaduri & Francesco Pastore, 2018. "Returns to Education and Female Participation Nexus: Evidence from India," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 61(3), pages 515-536, September.
    3. Amaresh Dubey & Wendy Olsen & Kunal Sen, 2017. "The Decline in the Labour Force Participation of Rural Women in India: Taking a Long-Run View," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 60(4), pages 589-612, December.
    4. Deshpande, Ashwini & Singh, Jitendra, 2021. "Dropping Out, Being Pushed Out or Can’t Get in? Decoding Declining Labour Force Participation of Indian Women," IZA Discussion Papers 14639, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Ashwini Deshpande & Jitendra Singh, 2021. "Dropping Out, Being Pushed out or Can't Get In? Decoding Declining Labour Force Participation of Indian Women," Working Papers 65, Ashoka University, Department of Economics.
    6. Amrita Datta & Tanuka Endow & Balwant Singh Mehta, 2020. "Education, Caste and Women’s Work in India," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 63(2), pages 387-406, June.
    7. Farzana Afridi & Taryn Dinkelman & Kanika Mahajan, 2018. "Why are fewer married women joining the work force in rural India? A decomposition analysis over two decades," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 31(3), pages 783-818, July.
    8. Bilal Nabeel Falah & Marcelo Bérgolo & Arwa Abu Hashhash & Mohammad Hattawy & Iman Saadeh, 2019. "The Effect of Labor-Demand Shocks on Women’s Participation in the Labor Force: Evidence from Palestine," Working Papers PMMA 2019-08, PEP-PMMA.
    9. Deeksha Tayal & Sourabh Paul, 2021. "Labour Force Participation Rate of Women in Urban India: An Age-Cohort-Wise Analysis," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 64(3), pages 565-593, September.
    10. Shamim Ara, 2019. "Globalisation and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Labour Market in India," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 17(1), pages 93-120, March.
    11. Chaudhary, Ruchika. & Verick, Sher., 2014. "Female labour force participation in India and beyond," ILO Working Papers 994867893402676, International Labour Organization.
    12. Afridi, Farzana & Dinkelman, Taryn & Mahajan, Kanika, 2016. "Why Are Fewer Married Women Joining the Work Force in India? A Decomposition Analysis over Two Decades," IZA Discussion Papers 9722, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Kabeer, Naila, 2020. "Women’s empowerment and economic development: a feminist critique of story telling practices in ‘Randomista' economics," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103880, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Kanjilal-Bhaduri, Sanghamitra & Pastore, Francesco, 2018. "Returns to Education and Female Work Force Participation Nexus: Evidence from India," GLO Discussion Paper Series 162, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    15. repec:ilo:ilowps:486789 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Arlene Garces-Ozanne & Avatar Singh, 2017. "Revisiting The Decline In India’s Female Labour Force Participation: The Rise Of Machines And Security Risks," Working Papers 1712, University of Otago, Department of Economics, revised Dec 2017.
    17. Margaux Suteau, 2020. "Inheritance Rights and Women's Empowerment in the Labor and Marriage Markets," THEMA Working Papers 2020-17, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    18. Deshpande, Ashwini & Kabeer, Naila, 2024. "Norms that matter: Exploring the distribution of women’s work between income generation, expenditure-saving and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    19. Indrajit Bairagya & Tulika Bhattacharya & Pragati Tiwari, 2021. "Does Vocational Training Promote Female Labour Force Participation? An Analysis for India," Margin: The Journal of Applied Economic Research, National Council of Applied Economic Research, vol. 15(1), pages 149-173, February.
    20. Ashwini Deshpande & Naila Kabeer, 2021. "Norms that matter: Exploring the distribution of women's work between income generation, expenditure-saving, and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2021-130, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    21. Gupta, Tanu & Negi, Digvijay S., 2021. "Daughter vs. Daughter-in-Law: Kinship Roles and Women's Time Use in India," 2021 Annual Meeting, August 1-3, Austin, Texas 313373, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    women; gender; labor force participation; India;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
    • J40 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - General
    • B54 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches - - - Feminist Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:100992. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.