Issue 60: Where are the educated women? - Part 1
And why are they dropping out of the workforce in alarming numbers?
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question in the middle of a placid lunch conversation - What do you think of women who drop out of the workforce to become dependent wives and stay-at-home mothers because their husbands earn enough?
I reacted immediately on what I “thought”, how hard it is to juggle everything, how rigged the society is towards the ideal roles that men and women are expected to play, and so on.
Then, I reined myself in and went back to first principles.
In a recent article I read about the gender divide on education and employment in India, three things stood out.
The pool of women getting educated is increasing. 47% of women in the 20-24 age group have >12 years of education vs 35% in the 25-29 age group. Every younger pool of women has a higher probability of education. Great news!
Girls’ education is directly proportional to wealth. As in, the wealthier the family, the more probability the woman is educated. Sounds kind of obvious, but keep this info in your back pocket because this has ramifications.
Female participation in labour is 24% vs 74% for males. What more. This number has been steadily dropping. In 2010, it was 29%. So, more women are getting educated with the moving decades but fewer percentages of those educated pools are in paying jobs.
Over the years, a bunch of things have changed in this country (and perhaps the world). Of course, women’s education has changed for the better. But, work has got greedier. And the society has got greedier too.
While the 1980s and 1990s saw 8-9 hour workdays and hard stops at 5.30pm, the advent of dotcom and the tech industry in the new millennium heralded 12+ hour workdays and fluid timings that got mapped to global time zones. GenX and millennials started earning disproportionately higher than their parents but they also started spending disproportionately higher time in office compared to their parents.
Meanwhile, society didn’t want to be left behind. When I was growing up, schools were places of maths-science-language learning, exams, and holidays. Now, schools have reinvented themselves as providers of holistic education, practical / project based assessments, and useful holidays filled with further holistic education.
The educated woman got caught in the middle of all of this.
Firstly, her spouse now earns way more than someone from his previous generation, even after adjustment for inflation (the same wealth that helped her get education is now even higher in her married life). Secondly, the society has way more unpaid tasks stacked up for her as a mother (practical projects require more parental support than straightforward exams). Thirdly, paid work is unforgiving, and in many cases, looks down upon her and doesn’t pay her as much as her male counterparts because she either took a maternity break or will take one (because ain’t she a married woman).
It’s the exact opposite of ‘May the odds be ever in your favour’. The odds are forever against the woman’s favour and so she decides to make a choice - one that looks simplistic from the outside, the choice to become a “dependent wife” and a “stay at home mother”.
But then. You tell me. If everything is stacked up against you and you have a way out that conforms to everyone’s expectations around you, wouldn’t you be tempted to walk down that path?
This is Part 1 in an I-haven’t-decided-yet-how-many-parts series on the elephant in the room. What will make us reverse this trend, as a society, as a country, as this world.
P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.