Sutapa Banerjee*

Girl students rapidly catching up with boys in India made headlines recently. They already outnumber boys in post-graduation studies and will soon exceed them at graduation levels too.

Sitting uncomfortably with that news was the recent statistic of the alarmingly low participation of women in the economic sphere: only 27 per cent of working-age women in India work. The number fell sharply in the last decade from 43 per cent to 27 per cent. Nepal and Bangladesh are way ahead, leaving only the Arab countries and Pakistan behind India.

While in a heterogeneous country like India, ‘acceptable’ norms of work may differ based on income, caste, rural/urban and informal/formal sector, one belief is all pervasive: women are primarily homemakers and men breadwinners.

In most countries, higher numbers of educated women have resulted in the improvement of their societal status and economic participation. What explains the paradox here?

New School of Thought
The World Bank report, ‘Precarious Drop: Reassessing Pattern of Female Labour force Participating in India‘, by Luis Andres and others, reveals interesting dynamics at work that vary depending on marital-status, age, education, family labour composition and whether in rural or urban India. A larger number of girls enrolling in schools explains the drop in the number of younger-aged working women in rural areas. Stability in family income levels also lead to women dropping out of the workforce.

Other factors include lower levels of job creation, availability of very low paying jobs in the informal sector, poor infrastructure, safety issues, and boys outnumbering girls in technical and professional education. Insights from the report provide valuable cues for the kinds of jobs and industries that may need to be invested into for increasing women’s participation.

The study concludes that “education skilling and legal provisions may not be sufficient… policy prescriptions need to focus on the acceptability of women working”. While in a heterogeneous country like India, ‘acceptable’ norms of work may differ based on income, caste, rural/urban and informal/formal sector, one belief is all pervasive: women are primarily homemakers and men breadwinners.

If historically other countries with the same cultural bias have been relatively more successful in overcoming them, are there lessons for us? The answer is neither simple nor easy. In a 2015 article, ‘The Weaker Sex’, The Economist highlighted the challenges poorly educated men in the US and other countries face. It called for a “change in cultural attitudes”. “Men need to understand that traditional manual jobs are not coming back and they can be nurses or hairdressers without losing their masculinity.”

Woen working in top ten companies in India

Breaking stereotypes and discarding biases is necessary but activists, NGOs or government merely voicing it, is ineffective. Research in neuroscience states that deep-seated ‘typical’ beliefs regarding race, caste, gender and other social categories get embedded or hardwired in the brain.

Inaccurate to start with, the brain finds it difficult to ‘unlearn’ them even when the reality has changed. It interprets new data in a biased manner to confirm originally held beliefs (confirmatory bias).

Such stereotypes evidently move with a lag, if at all. So, is the answer then decades of waiting for beliefs and attitudes shaped by cultural norms to change, leading to changes in behaviour? Or can change in behaviour precede change in beliefs?

Behave Yourself, & Change
Research in behavioural design provides evidence that this is indeed possible and has been successfully pursued in many countries in areas ranging from public health, tax collection, organ donation, energy savings to representation of women on corporate boards.

There are ‘behavioural insights’ groups advising governments in the US, Britain, Australia and Germany. In India, some semblance of fluidity in gendered roles has appeared in pockets of the urban rich and uppermiddle-income households. Government and corporate sector policies, instead of taking steps to encourage and hasten this permeability, have been misguided. The flawed legislation introduced recently increasing maternity benefits from three to six months is a case in point.

Ostensibly to ensure that women don’t opt out of work, it reinforces gendered norms and unwittingly places women at a disadvantage. What could have helped instead is a combination of maternity and paternity leave, on a ‘use it or it lapses’ basis, as in the Nordic countries.

The age-old argument is, of course, that ‘the reality in India is different’. Sure it is. Except that this law is applicable to the formal sector employing barely 8 per cent of the working population comprising the higher earning classes — precisely the space where a progressive legislation could have made a dent in gendered norms.

In the 1990s, when the BPO industry grew rapidly in India, in a few randomly selected villages, three years of recruitment services were provided to women. Prof Rob Jensen of Wharton School found that not only did this significantly increase employment among women, but girls also experienced greater improvement in health and were more likely to be in school in these villages.

Involving women in the decision-making process and in leadership roles, rather than providing benefits passively, can have far-reaching benefits across income classes in the formal and informal sectors. This invariably entails setting new norms. Behavioural design, when complemented by a judicious mix of legislation and incentives, can go a long way in resetting norms sooner.

Isolated examples in India now need to make way for a more concerted effort by government, and the private and non-profit sectors, to use such design elements and thinking in all policies and practices.

(*The writer is Fellow, Harvard University Advanced Leadership)