Comprehensive research makes it amply clear that what’s good for gender parity is good for the economy
In India, as in many other countries, the economic fallout of covid-19 has had a disproportionate effect on women. The pandemic has left them more vulnerable, set progress back on gender equality, and damaged economies. How and when India responds to this challenge will be a significant factor in the country’s recovery from the pandemic and future economic success.
Even before the covid crisis, India’s quest for gender equality was stalling. Globally, female participation in the labour force is about two-thirds that of men. That number had hardly changed between 2014 and 2019. But, in India, where women made up just 20% of the workforce, going by data from the International Labour Organization, there was a slight decrease in female labour-force participation in that period. Against this backdrop, covid-19 has been a gender-regressive shock. Women’s jobs and livelihoods have been more vulnerable to the pandemic. Globally, the covid-related job loss rate for women is about 1.8 times higher than that of men, at 5.7% versus 3.1%, by our estimates. In India, women’s share of job losses, considering only the covid impact on the industries in which they work, would have been 17%, but unemployment surveys suggest that they actually account for 23% of overall job losses. Those numbers translate into millions of disrupted livelihoods.
Source: livemint
