On this week’s episode, Bloomberg reporters Archana Chaudhary and Ronojoy Mazumdar explore how the coronavirus pushed Indian women out of steady jobs. As infections surged, an already low rate of workforce participation turned dire: Economists in Mumbai estimate that female employment plummeted to 9% by 2022. Read the article about Study india 4bchaudharybloomberg.
That’s right: Just one out of 10 women in India works in the formal economy. (Lots more do informal or unpaid work.) That puts the world’s second-most populous country in the same league as war-torn Yemen.
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Not only is that bad for women’s financial autonomy, it’s bad for India’s economic prospects as a whole. Economists estimate that closing the employment gap between men and women — a whopping 58 percentage points — could expand India’s GDP by close to a third by 2050.
To go behind the numbers and explore the forces pulling women out of the workforce en masse, Archana takes us to Pardada Pardadi Educational Institute, a girls’ school in northern India on the banks of the Ganges. The school is determined to keep girls enrolled through graduation and to help them enter the workforce. But that often also means pushing back on social and cultural pressure to get married, even before they’re legally of age.
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To hear more, check out the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe to hear their stories. — Janet Paskin
By the numbers
- 21Age, in years, that an Indian woman must be in order to marry legally. During the pandemic, the government raised it from 18, bringing it on par with the minimum for men (also 21).
What else you need to know…
- “Women must be at the center” of post-pandemic rebuilding strategies, writes Melinda Gates
- A growing number of people in India have stopped looking for work.
- Schools in Pernambuco, Brazil, are a model for reversing the educational toll of the pandemic
From the episode
“Many of the girls, they didn’t want to get married. But when we tried to stop it, even the community people said, ‘Let it happen.'”
Archana Sahay
Co-founder of a child protection non-profit in Bhopal, India
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