India has slipped 28 places to rank 140th among 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. This actually makes India the third-worst performer in South Asia with only Pakistan and Afghanistan faring worse. According to the report, India has closed 62.5% of its gender gap. This figure was 66.8% last year which means a significant regression in gender equality. Worryingly, India declined on the economic participation and opportunity subindex, a trend which could only have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is a cruel irony that despite being on the frontlines of the fight against the pandemic as essential healthcare workers and caregivers, women have been disadvantaged more by Covid. Inherent patriarchal social structures ensure that women get less healthcare attention relative to men, leaving them more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, with most economies around the world taking a hit due to the pandemic, jobs have dried up in several sectors. Again, women have been hit doubly hard by this as they are often discriminatingly seen as dispensable by companies and are more prone to retrenchment. This may be what the index is showing in terms of the decline in Indian women’s economic participation. In fact, Indian women’s labour force participation rate fell from 24.8% to 22.3%.
Further, the share of women in professional and technical roles declined to 29.2%, while their share in senior and managerial positions was just 14.6%. Shockingly, the estimated average income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, which puts the country among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator. And the pandemic will certainly worsen these statistics.
But the other thing that needs to be noted is that India declined considerably on the political empowerment subindex with a significant regression in the number of women ministers – from 23.1% in 2019 to 9.1% in 2021. This appears to be a reflection of populist politics that has swept across large sections of the world, including India. Populism and majoritarianism essentially channel demotic impulses whereby the vote alone is seen as the ultimate sign of legitimacy, giving short shrift to values such as equality and basic human rights. And given how deep-rooted patriarchy is, populist politics naturally boosts patriarchal structures, reflecting the so-called ‘majority’ will which conveniently is male-centric as women’s voices aren’t given the same attention. As a result, under populist political conditions, women are discouraged from aspiring to leadership and decision-making positions.
Therefore, taken together women are facing a double whammy. They were anyway facing populist political headwinds and now have to deal with the impact of Covid which is likely to affect them more economically and socially. But if women lose out, societies lose out. In fact, now is the time that humanity needs to muster all its resources to come out of the current crises – from Covid to the global economic downturn and climate change. We need women to be equal participants in the labour force and become scientists, engineers and doctors to invent vaccines, create green technologies and pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this crucial period of transition. In fact, the world will be handicapped if women are invisibilised and allowed to slip. And for developing countries like India, the widening gender gap will seriously retard their progress at a very pivotal moment in history.
Thus, all efforts must be made to achieve gender parity in labour force participation and ensure an equal number of women in leadership and decision-making.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
