Bias forces India’s poorly paid women out of jobs: Report

The study showed that while 60% of men are engaged in regular or salaried jobs, only 19% women are employed in these jobs

Men in India earn Rs 19,779 on an average, while women earn Rs 15,578, a new report by Oxfam on discrimination in the workforce in India reveals.

The study showed that while 60 per cent of men are engaged in regular or salaried jobs, only 19 per cent women are employed in these jobs. Gender-based discrimination is the reason for 98 per cent of the employment gap between salaried males and females in urban areas, the study showed.

In a release, Oxfam said that for the Oxfam India's Discrimination Report 2022, it used a method called ‘decomposition’ to understand differential outcomes in employment, wages, health, and access to agricultural credit among various social groups from 2004-05 to 2019-20 to quantify discrimination faced by women and other marginalised communities.

“The decomposition analysis bifurcates the gap in any socio-economic outcome, such as employment, earnings, access to credit, health facilities etc. between two groups, into two parts – gaps attributed to endowment and discrimination,” the NGO said in a release.

The study also found discrimination against Dalits and Muslims employed in the workforce; on average, a person who was not from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) earned Rs 5,000 per month more than someone from the SC/ST community. Non-Muslims earned Rs 7000 per month more on an average than Muslims.

“What the report finds is if a man and woman start on an equal footing, the woman will be discriminated in the economic sphere where she will lag behind in regular or salaried, casual and self-employment. The inequality in the labour market for gender and other social categories, the report finds is not just due to poor access to education or work experience but because of discrimination”, said Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India.

Gender-based discrimination, the report revealed, is the reason for 98 per cent of the employment gap between men and women, acting as a driving factor behind low Women’s Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in the country. Data from the union ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI), shows that women’s labour force participation in India was only 25.1 per cent in 2020-21 for both urban and rural women, putting Indian behind countries like Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa. Women’s participation in the labour force has rapidly declined from 42.7 per cent in 2004-05 to 25.1 per cent in 2021. By 2019-20, 60 per cent of all men above the age of 15 years had jobs while only 19 per cent of all women in the same age had jobs.

“There is also a significant gap in the earnings between men and women in the case of regular and self-employment in urban areas. The average earning is Rs 15,996 for men and merely Rs 6,626 for women in urban areas in self-employment. The men’s average earning is nearly 2.5 times that of the earnings of women,” the report said.

The effect of covid on employment was felt deeply by Muslims who emerge as the most affected group; unemployment rates went up from 11.8 per cent to 40.9 per cent in rural areas among Muslims, while among SC/STs, it went up from 5.6 per cent to 28.3 per cent, and from 5.4 per cent to 28.1 per cent in the general category.

Rural Muslims also recorded the maximum decline in earnings (13 per cent), while for the others it was close to 9 per cent. The extent of discrimination is higher in commercial banks (34 per cent for SCs and 31 per cent for STs) than in the cooperatives (9 per cent for SCs and 29 per cent for STs).