Women Educated But Unemployed

Context: Indian women does not garner enough employment despite their social, economic, cultural and political achievements.

Representation of Indian Women in Different Areas

• Business/corporate:7% of CEOs of companies are women like Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon.
• Literature: Thought leaders like Aruna Roy, Arundhati Roy, Mira Nair, Aparna Sen, Deepa Mehta, Romila Thapar, Ela Bhatt, Sarojini Naidu, Amrita Pritam and Mahasweta Devi.
• Legislation: proportion of women Parliamentarian in Lok Sabha was over 14% in 2019, 11% in 2014 and 2009 and 8% in 2004.
• Bureaucracy: One in five of all IAS officers is a woman.
• Judiciary: One in nine High Court judges and only one in 30 Supreme Court judges is a woman.
• Political leadership: Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa have been or continue to be big mass influencers.
• Education: 50% of all fresh graduates were women between 2011-12 and 2015-16 and 53% in 2019.

Challenges and Problems

• Educated but unemployed: women work a lot as domestic worker but their labour participation outside home is very low due to societal bias against working women.
  • As per Periodic Labour Force Survey-2018-19.
    • Low participation in urban women labour marketse 20.4% against urban men (73.7%).
    • Higher women unemployment rate of 9.8% in urban India, compared to men i.e 7%.
    • Lower urban women employment ratee 18.4% against 68.6% of urban men.
  • As per CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey
    • Only 8.4% of urban wo­men of 15 years or more were employed in 2018-19 and is likely to fell to 7.3% in 2019-20 and 6% in 2020-21.
• Legislative challenge:
  • Women’s Reservation Bill proposed in 2008 that sought to reserve 33% of parliamentary seats for women was never passed.