Women in India's labour market: Address ageing for better results

The burden of unpaid care work underlying our low female labour force participation will increase as the population ages

- INDIRA RAJARAMAN

The Nobel economics prize to Claudia Goldin filled me with elation, and not just because she studied economics at Cornell University, where she was inspired as I was by the legendary Alfred Kahn.

Her 200-year series on women's labour force participation rates (LFPR) in the US innovatively used a variety of data sources, since official labour market statistics for a long time were collected only on men. She found that the LFPR graph was U-shaped, showing high initial levels in predominantly agrarian settings, a down-slide with the spread of industrialization, followed by a rise as the sectoral mix turned towards services.

She found that gender wage disparities persisted within occupation categories, not because of deficient skill or education, but starting with the birth of a woman's first child. She also gave a name to "greedy jobs," where promotion was contingent on people being ready to work very long. irs, and travel incessantly (this has gone down post-covid), in exchange for astronomical remuneration. Dizzy corporate pay in turn has spurred climatedestructive consumption practices.

Claudia Goldin's work is restricted to the country she knows, and uncovers the barriers women are up against even when they have surpassed men in skills and education, as in the US. But the U-shaped curve has been validated against cross-country data sufficiently for it to have become a universal template against which to compare the historical movement of participation rates over time in any particular country.