Employment Data

Why 75% of Indian Women are Unemployed ??

Three out of four Indian women are unemployed. That’s more than Saudi Arabia — a country where women have only been allowed to drive since 2018. This is no statistical sleight of hand. In fact, “three out of four” is wildly conservative.

This number — called the “labor force participation rate” includes both anyone with or without a job — as long as they’re looking, however passively.

Of those 24% of women technically in the “labor force”, many don’t actually work. Then there’s the question of “what counts as ‘employment’?” In this case, the answer is as little as one hour each week of paid labor.

Put differently: of India’s 1.4 billion people, 681 million are women, 509 million of those are at least 15 years old, 122 million officially in the “labor force”, and a tiny 38 million — 8.8% — according to the Indian think-tank — meaningfully employed.

In a country of 1.4 billion, in other words, just 38 million women have jobs. The United States, by contrast, has twice as many women employed — in absolute terms — with only one-fourth the population.

How can that possibly be true? Could it be that Indian households are now rich enough to comfortably subsist on one income?

No, far from it. The country’s per capita GDP is less than $2,400 — just one-fifth the world average and where China was about twenty years ago.

Is it because women lack access to education?

According to the World Bank, “better educated women are more likely to participate in the formal labor market”.

Again, no.

Strangely, in India, educated women are less likely to find employment.

College enrollment has soared since the turn of the century, yet women’s participation in the labor force has actually been on a steady decline until very recently.

Perhaps it’s precisely because women are in school — studying, rather than working.

Nope. It’s not that either, since older women are also missing from the labor force.

Finally, could it be an issue of personal safety or cultural expectations?

Certainly this is a major piece of the puzzle. India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for women. Just getting to and from work safely presents a not insignificant challenge.Meanwhile, 99% of Indian women eventually get married, 90% of those marriages are arranged, and women are expected to do nearly all of the housework.An extraordinary six percent of men report doing any cooking whatsoever and only 8% do at least some cleaning. More of women’s time spent cooking and cleaning is less time for paid labor.

Case: closed.

Bangladesh vs India

Except, hang on — take a look at India’s neighbor-on-three-sides, Bangladesh.

The two countries rank nearly identically on the “Women’s Peace and Security Index” — that is, very poorly. They share many of the same cultural norms, practices, and beliefs. And yet, women in Bangladesh work at a much higher rate.

Clearly there’s much more to this story. What’s really going on?

The answer lies in this graph.

But first, a brief aside.

In India, like many countries, a family’s honor depends on the “purity” of its daughters. Any time spent outside the home — for example, at work — exposes women to accusations of promiscuity, tarnishing her family’s honor. Parents, therefore, strongly pressure their daughters to stay home. Of course, working also has its benefits — children are expected to contribute financially.

This presents a trade-off between income and honor.

And since honor is more-or-less a constant, the important variable here are wages — for any given family, is the extra money generated by allowing your daughter to work worth the damage to your reputation, and, by extension, her marriage prospects?

When families are poor, this loss of honor is strongly preferable to the alternative — starvation. Women have no choice; they have to work.

Conversely, when wages are high, they offset this honor “penalty”, causing women to rejoin the workforce.

The U curve

India, as a country, is stuck at the bottom of this “U” curve — what Dr. Alice Evans of King's College London calls the “patrilineal trap”.Wages are just barely high enough that families can scrape by on one income, but not high enough to draw women back to the workplace.Women are trapped between low wages and suffocating social norms. They do go to college — though mainly to find a husband.And they do want to work. In a recent survey, 75% of teenage girls said they hoped to find a job after graduating.

The problem is that wages aren’t high enough to convince their families. The real mystery, then, is why Indian wages are still so incredibly low.

Since 1990, its economy has grown at an impressive average rate of 6% a year — not so far behind China’s miraculous 8.8%. Back then, India was only the world’s twelfth-largest economy. Today, it’s the fifth. Yet somehow this spectacular growth failed to create any jobs.

Now, economists call the number of new jobs produced for every 1% change in GDP the “elasticity of labor”. Well, between 2011 and 19, the Indian labor force grew by 0.26%, imputing an elasticity of 0.04 — which is a polite way of saying virtually zero jobs were created over 10 years. This implies that if its economy were to double overnight, employment would only increase by 4%.

Between 1999 and 2005, 60 million new jobs appeared. Between 2004 and 10, just 3. The result is fierce competition for every last scrap of paid work. In 2019, 12 million people applied for 35,000 railroad jobs, and 1.7 million for 1,500 jobs at a state-owned bank. Most of these applicants are young, and the vast majority college-educated. Those who are both young and college-educated don’t stand a chance. Today, 42% of Indians under 25 with graduate degrees can’t find work.

So, what do all these young scholars do? They go back to school, of course — fueling a race to acquire an increasing number of unnecessary credentials or else fall behind. Others simply lose hope and spend their days doing what Indians call “timepass” — aimless leisure. Now, one clue to the whereabouts of these missing jobs is the country’s most common occupation — not salesperson, waiter, or janitor but “CEO”. Truly. You see, contrary to the image of sweatshops many around the world imagine, Indian employers are actually quite tightly regulated. Legally, they must provide workers with paid leave, pensions, and health insurance. They even need permission from the government to fire or lay them off.

At least, in principle.

In practice, most of these laws only apply to businesses with 10 or more employees.And, unrelatedly, for some odd reason Indian companies seem to have decided nine is the optimal number of workers.

So, what do you know — the vast majority of businesses are exempt from these regulations.

Another reason they stay small is to evade corruption.

Companies with 10 or more workers are visited by labor inspectors, many of which enforce arcane rules to extract bribes.Thus, whereas China has a healthy balance of mid-size companies — many of which have between 51 and 200 workers, over 80% of Indian apparel firms, for instance, have less than eight.

With so many small businesses, it’s no wonder India has perhaps the world’s highest density of “CEOs”. As companies grow, rather than hire more workers, they simply outsource this additional labor to other small companies.

But this loophole — clever as it is — has a cost: smaller companies are less productive.

On average, those with 50-199 workers are about 60% less productive than those with over 200, and those with 5-49 workers about 90% less productive.

Lower productivity means lower wages. Lower wages mean less consumer demand. And less demand means fewer jobs. Not just fewer but also lower quality. Only 21% of Indian workers earn regular wages. Of them, 46% don’t receive any paid leave, 53% don’t receive social security, and nearly 60% have no written contract at all.

This “flexibility” — as employers call it — is stressful and unpredictable during the best of times.When things are anything less than peachy, these informal jobs become downright catastrophic. Like, say, during a global pandemic.

In 2020, the Prime Minister declared what began as a three-week national lockdown which immediately put 100 million Indians out of work, who fled en masse to the countryside — the only place they could go.By December of that year, 75 million people had been plunged below the poverty line of $2 a day, according to Pew Research.

But there’s another, bigger, structural, reason why India has so few jobs. Of the countries that successfully escaped poverty in the last hundred years, almost all have pursued the same, tried and true development recipe: a rapid progression from agriculture to manufacturing to services — in that order. It worked for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and now China. India, on the other hand, seems to have somehow missed this memo. By the time its economy liberalized in the early 1990s, China was already ten years into this journey. And having started so late, Indian factories couldn’t compete with their Chinese competitors. So, they largely gave up. I

Instead, India skipped straight from agriculture to services — leaving out that very critical middle step in the recipe: manufacturing.

Today, Vietnam — with a population of less than a hundred million — exports more clothing than India, with a population of 1.4 billion. Now, there’s nothing wrong with services. Nearly all rich countries are service economies — from the U.S. to Japan and Switzerland. So you might think India found a shortcut. The country has an impressive depth of finance, insurance, real estate, and technology expertise. Deloitte, Goldman, and Tata pay their Indian consultants and bankers top-dollar — much more, of course, than most factory workers.

The problem is that there just aren’t that many of these jobs. As Indian farmers have grown more productive, as they have across the globe, agriculture has been on a steady decline. No surprise there. Usually, however, all these farmers would become factory workers. One labor-intensive industry replaced with another.But, as you can see, manufacturing hasn’t absorbed these displaced farmers. Sure, these new service jobs have helped — just not nearly enough.

So, in order to make up the difference, Indians have flocked to construction.

These jobs are often temporary, low-paid, and physically dangerous.But this trend is particularly bad for women. In East Asia, where manufacturing replaced agriculture — women became factory workers, which slowly influenced social expectations and afforded them newfound freedom. In India, women were pushed out of farming but discouraged from taking on construction. A few lucky women secured lucrative service jobs. But the vast majority simply left the labor market altogether. They had nowhere to go.T his is why India’s economy continued to grow — those new service jobs are very very productive — while the number of jobs did not — they’re few and far between.

It’s why women in Bangladesh work at much higher rates — its many factories provide them with a socially-acceptable place to do so, whereas India has no such scale. What India does have — that most of Asia does not — is time.China’s population peaked last year and its labor force is expected to decrease by about 1% every year starting in 2030.

India, meanwhile, is still very much young and growing. 40% of its population is under the age of 25, and 53% under 30. Its median age is a youthful 28, compared to China’s 38, or Japan’s 48.

With any luck, India has about two-decades remaining in its “demographic window” — a critical transition period during which a country has a large number of working-age people compared to children and retirees.

If the country can harness this labor, it could still experience a taste of the demographic dividend that propelled China from a poor to a middle-income country. By merely employing women at the same rate as men, according to Bloomberg, India’s economy could grow by nearly a third by 2050.


{
    "year": "2021",
    "reference": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India",
    "data": [
        {
            "age": "0-14 years",
            "male": 183695000,
            "female": 166295000,
            "percentage": 25.68
        },
        {
            "age": "15-64 years",
            "male": 472653000,
            "female": 447337000,
            "percentage": 67.49
        },
        {
            "age": "65 and over",
            "male": 44275000,
            "female": 48751000,
            "percentage": 6.83
        }
    ]
}

Percentage by payroll

Payroll Data EPFO Dec 2023

epfindia.gov.in

Net payroll Dec 2023: 1529277

Percentage of people got payroll in dec 2023 (age: 15-64) = 0.16

percentage = (1529277/(472653000+447337000))*100
print(percentage) 
# 0.16622756769095318

To do (Not found the data yet)

State wise calculation
District wise calculation
By male
By female
By other gender
By Salary range

I am brainstorming