Tag: work

Women’s Work in South Asia: trends and challenges

Although gender equality in employment is among the Sustainable Development Goals for South Asia, progress is hard to observe. Determined to explore why female employment levels remain low and stagnant, Varsha Gupta and Arun Balachandran of YSI’s South Asia Working Group organized a webinar series. Featuring eminent speakers such as Prof. Jayati Ghosh, Prof. Sonalde Desai, Prof. Jeemol Unni, Prof. Ashwini Deshpande, Dr. Dipa Sinha and Dr. Ramani Gunatilaka, the resulting conversations shed much-needed light on the topic.

Illustration by Aneesha Chitgupi, Coordinator of the South Asia Working Group

Employment is a subset of work

The series began on May Day, with an inaugural session by Professor Jayati Ghosh. Highlighting the low female employment figures in India, she explained the difference between employment and work, the former being a subset of the latter. A major proportion of women are involved in work, though it is not paid and hence does not get counted as employment. The 2019 Time Use Survey in India reaffirms that women in India spend 2.5 times more time than men in unpaid activities. The gender wage gap exists and is high in private casual work. The Covid-19 pandemic has made things worse, furthering the case for gender-sensitive economic policies. View here

The impact of COVID-19

The second talk by Prof. Sonalde Desai focussed on employment trends during the Covid-19 pandemic. She presented the latest research with the use of Delhi Metropolitan Area survey (March 2019-20). The decline in employment occurred majorly in wage employment. With the use of econometric techniques, the research finds that in absolute terms, job loss for men was severe in the first wave of Covid-19, while the second surge hit women harder in the Delhi NCR region, India. The closure of schools and the consequent child rearing duties was one of the reasons that women’s wage work fell. Highly educated women were more affected than men. Rural areas absorbed the impact of the pandemic better than urban areas. The gender difference in impact was found to be highly dependent on the sector of employment and region. View here.

Informal workers bear the brunt

Jeemol Unni’s session concentrated on the impact of the Covid crisis on women and domestic violence among members of the informal workforce. Globally, pandemics harshly affect women more, due to the sectors and the kind of work women are involved in. The majority of the women form the bottom of the labor hierarchy. With the use of CMIE and NSS data, it is seen that the second wave of Covid-19 and lockdown affected women’s employment more vis-à-vis men. Discouraged worker effect is also visible among women.  View here.

Prof. Ashwini Deshpande’s talk focussed on the gendered patterns in employment in India during first wave of the pandemic. The world over, the subsequent economic recession led to more unemployment among women than men, a pattern different from previous recessions. This is visible in India as well, in the 2020 CMIE data. The already gendered labor market in India, with fewer women employed, worsened further for females. Though the absolute figures for job loss are higher for men, the impact has been higher on women due to the pre-existing gaps. There has been exacerbating of women’s position in the domestic division of labor during August-December 2020. View here.

The potential of public employment

The penultimate session was featured Dr. Dipa Sinha highlighting the relevance of public employment in generating opportunities for female labor force in India. Nations with higher female LFPR are the ones which also have higher proportion of women in the public sector. In India, the NSS data shows that government is a significant employer for women. There is also sectoral concentration of women in health and education, where they are engaged as contractual or honorary workers (ASHA’s, Anganwadi Workers). Creating regular permanent positions in these sectors could encourage female employment. View here.

Education is not enough

Various facets of female employment in Sri Lanka were brought in by Dr. Ramani Gunatilaka from International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo. While Srilankan women are better educated than their counterparts in other South Asian countries, they still remain disadvantaged in the labour market. As seen from a study led by Dr. Ramani on women’s activity preferences and time use, unpaid care and household work in Srilanka are mediated by social norms, and unequal division of unpaid work makes it difficult for women to take up paid work. View here.

Altogether, the webinars now form a virtual knowledge base on YSI’s YouTube Channel, making the insights available to young scholars all over the world.

About the organizers:

Arun Balachandran has a PhD in Economics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. He is currently a Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, and serves as Coordinator of the YSI South Asia Working Group.

Varsha Gupta is a PhD student in Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She using NSS data to assess issues of labor and gender, and serves as organizer for the YSI South Asia Working Group.

The YSI South Asia Working Group provides a platform for young scholars from South Asia -or those interested in the region- to select an issue they wish to work on, collaborate and discuss for better conceptualization of the problem and, debate, critique and improve upon solutions. We also invite scholars to suggest the most pressing problems and challenges to better guide the path for this working group. Join us!

Can’t talk right now, I’m transferring energy.

You work all the time. But what is work, really? And how has that changed? In Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, anthropologist James Suzman digs into these questions. But whether he realizes it or not, he leaves an even bigger one to us.

The future of work is a hot topic. Automation, climate, and inequality make us wonder what’s coming down the pipe, and how to prepare. We might have to change how work works by decoupling labor from pay… difficult questions. But one thing is clear: if we are to change our conception of work, it will help to understand the one we have.

So what’s work, really?

Suzman starts at the beginning—3.5 Billion years ago. Because at its essence, he argues, work is not whatever you get paid for. It is a transfer of energy. 

Thanks to the law of entropy, he explains, everything in the universe tends to chaos. Life forms impose some kind of order, but creating and maintaining that order takes energy. It requires work to grow leaves or make honey or build a house. So yes, even bacteria and trees do work, despite the fact that they don’t have thoughts about it.

So, Suzman posits that the act of work has been around for a long time, but the idea of work is newer. He explains that our mastery over fire was a likely catalyst. In reducing the energy required to survive, fire gave us leisure. And that might have helped us conceive of its counterpart: work.

How has it changed?

With that energy-definition in place, Suzman talks us through work’s cultural evolution. We start with hunter gatherers: there’s a Kalahari desert tribe who still hunt large animals by chasing them down on foot, just like back in the day. They run until the animal is so dehydrated that it lays down and awaits their spear.

He points out that although such hunts are exhausting, the tribe is lounging most of the time. They conceive of the world as abundant, and have no concept of private property. You only worry about your immediate needs, which are almost always met.

With the arrival of agriculture, that’s what we lost. Because Suzman suspects that the first food surpluses also introduced the concept of scarcity. Once you have a pile of crops, that pile—unlike nature—starts and ends somewhere. And it can be said to belong to somebody.

So farming ushered in modern economics. We started thinking everything was scarce, and inequalities increased. At the same time, farmers had to wait for their crop to mature and thus needed to live on credit for much of the year. So by keeping a record of their debt we created—you guessed it—money.

After that it’s domesticated animals, machines, cities, and the industrial revolution, causing living standards to rise. Working hours rose, then fell, then rose again. Suzman takes us past Luddites, the Great Depression, JK Galbraith, and the War on Talent, all the way until the present where we continue to work a lot while AI seems to breathe down our neck.

As he sends us off, Suzman admits that we can’t go back to hunter-gathering, but hopes that we take inspiration from the tribes and broaden our understanding of work. He reminds us that scarcity and limitless needs are not inevitable truths, nor are they necessary assumptions. These are fantastic points and his detailed evolution of work is very insightful. But it’s missing a piece.

Now for the biggest question

Imagine that you decide to clean up your room, and you call Suzman in to help. He comes over and finds all kinds of junk drawers you didn’t even realize you had, and he spreads the contents all over your living room floor. Then he leaves.

He helped with a crucial step. To reorganize something, you need to know what you’ve got, and identify all the items. But to put them in a better place, you need to know what they’re for. Why did you buy the things you own? And what’s your purpose in rearranging?

To put it bluntly, Work falls short on the question of why. It’s a big book about what we’ve been doing, without much to say about what we do it for. 

To be fair, there are occasions where motives are discussed. One is when he points to a rare bird that builds very elaborate nests only to break them apart and all start over again. Similarly, some people run ultramarathons. Darwin’s survival of the fittest can’t explain it, Suzman says, so it’s probably a way to get rid of energy surpluses. 

I can’t explain the bird either. But ask any ultramarathon-runner, and I bet they’ll tell you they did it because it was a meaningful experience—not because they were sitting on the couch bouncing up and down and only 31 miles would do the trick.

The second occasion is consumer culture. Suzman cites Galbraith who points to the way advertisers exploit our relative needs, making us want to work more to buy more. This undoubtedly plays a role. And to state the obvious, many of those less affluent will do any work that can help them survive.

But is that it?

Consider your own case

Why do you do the job you have? Is it the easiest way to survive? Is it a means to get rid of surplus energy?  I doubt it. The right kind of work GIVES you energy. How does it do that? Because it’s meaningful. Why is it meaningful? Because you are able to contribute something. You are able to make a change. You are fulfilling a purpose you set for yourself. So these are the questions to ask: What’s the work out there that we think needs doing? What should work be for?

Perhaps Suzman didn’t get to these questions because there wasn’t much room for them in the past. In that case, fair enough. It may be that today’s circumstances of relative affluence and increasing levels of automation give them real relevance only now. But if we want a concept of work that we can carry forward, we can’t let ‘em drop.

And Suzman will be happy to know that there are plenty of young economists ready to do away with the assumptions of scarcity and limitless needs. But doing away with things is not enough. We need to introduce some new stuff too. And if you’re asking me, that new stuff is meaning. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do •

About the Author: Heske van Doornen is Manager of the Young Scholars Initiative and co-founder of this blog. Twitter: @HeskevanDoornen

Buy the Book
Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots Book
By James Suzman | Penguin Press (2021)

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