A Deprivation of Pink Collar Jobs

Women’s getting more unemployed.

The corona virus pandemic has destroyed many livelihoods many unemployed workers are migrating to one state from another and a massive disruption of labour market have occurred in India. The job loss of women in India has taken a wide toll on the unemployment rate. As the country is already witnessing 2nd wave of COVID and likely to soon approach the 3rd wave it is crucial to learn lessons from those waves to prevent these problems ahead.

1. A Huge gender gap.

Even before the year 2020 there was a huge gender employment gap as only 18% women were employed in their working age as compared to 75% of men so, inshort the pandemic has worsened the situation. The pandemic and lockdown wasn’t that efficient to women as compared to men as 61% of men were unaffected (mostly those of white collar jobs) while only 19% of women witnessed this kind of security. And some more surveys show that 47% of women haven’t returned to their job after lockdown whereas only 7% was the ratio in men. Why weren’t women getting employed even before lockdown?

Well, there are many reasons for this questions some of them are:-

1. Lack of good jobs

2. Restrictive social behavior from the family

3. Household work burden

4. Taking good care of children and elderly

Knowingly or unknowingly many household works are assigned to most of the women only.

• Women have lost jobs not only in industry sector but also in health and education the following data represents the same.

Around 20 out of 100 workers in education were women out of who lost their jobs were 70 out 100 were females.

Apparently in the health sector 40 out of 100 workers were women out of whom 80 out of 100 who lost jobs were females.

1. Increasing household tasks.

Preciously around 10 to 20% of women reported spending around 2-4 hours of time spending on domestic work but by the recent report it says that this percentage has increased to around 50% that to for the work which is unpaid.

1. The solution.

The long awaited question of women’s paid work and contribution to economy is urgent as women’s paid work has reduced and the unpaid care work is increased which isn’t helping the economy.

• How can we treat this problem?

We can treat this by increasing more job schemes by government for women such as MGNREGA and the introduction of urban employment guarantee targeted specially highlighted for women.

Further, a COVID-19 money allowance of at least rupees 5000 per month for 6 months should be announced to around 2.5 million anganwadi workers most of whom are women.

The time is right now if we invest safely it would be a lot beneficial for our Indian Economy.

• Blog by Jitisha .s. Hiremath.