India’s economic emergence will depend on how safe women feel

India’s economic emergence will depend on how safe women feel

Candlelight vigils, rallies and protests took place in cities across the country on Wednesday night as people came out against the brutal rape and murder of a trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College. 

Doctors are pushing for a healthcare workers’ safety bill, meeting ministers and policymakers. Last week’s crime has shaken people to the core, yet sexual violence is a constant worry in any woman’s life anywhere in the world. 

Women have to be hyper-vigilant while walking on the street, waiting for a bus, shopping in a marketplace or going to work. In such a situation, it’s not crime itself that deters women from going out to work. It’s the threat of sexual violence.

Fertility rates are dropping and education attainment has improved, yet India’s female labour-force participation remains among the lowest in the world—a puzzle the country is constantly trying to solve. 

Policymakers tend to focus on caregiving and child-rearing as the reason, but rarely do they see high rates of crime against women as a contributory factor. 

In their 2021 paper, ‘Women, Violence and Work: Threat of Sexual Violence and Women’s Decision to Work,’ Tanika Chakraborty and Nafisa Lohawala make the case that women’s fear of violence is a reason for low female participation: “For every additional crime per 1,000 women in a district, roughly 32 women are deterred from joining the workforce.” 

Around the world, studies have shown that sexual violence curtails the movement of women and they often alter their lifestyle choices to stay safe. India’s demographic dividend will not last forever and our goal of raising per-capita output requires us to tackle our workforce gender skew. 

If it persists, we will be less productive overall. Safety in the workplace, irrespective of profession, is thus not just a matter of justice; it is also a must for sustainable economic growth.

Some administrations have tried to address these problems with special or free public transport facilities for women and stronger laws against gender violence, but this isn’t enough if society at large believes a woman’s place is in the home. 

We also need to reform the vocabulary used to discuss women in public roles—they are routinely referred to as ‘sister,’ ‘daughter,’ ‘mother,’ and more recently, as a separate ‘caste.’ Such language perpetuates the notion that women can only be viewed in relation to men and detracts from their individuality. 

While there has been a shift towards valuing educated women, this tolerance does not always extend to accepting that wives, daughters and mothers can choose to work outside the home. We ‘allow’ women to get educational degrees, but then control and curtail the way they use their qualifications. 

Often, the shadow of violence is used by families to deter women from seeking paid employment. Should such perceived threats remain a deterrent to women keen on non-household jobs, over time, we could find ourselves back where we started. 

Without earnings that at least defray the cost of women’s education, families lose the incentive to invest in it. Deprived of financial independence, women have less bargaining power within households, which deprives them of inclusion in decision-making and leaves them more susceptible to domestic violence. 

Families are trying to raise independent women, but male attitudes have not changed sufficiently to keep pace with social changes—which puts us all in a dangerous position indeed.

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