The State of Women in India’s Workforce – Women for The Win

On 5th February 2019, Anand Mahindra, Chairman of Mahindra Group, shared a tweet on his twitter profile depicting the difference between the lives of men and women.

Although, many disagreed to this and said that men too have a lot of responsibilities on their shoulders and that this picture sends out a wrong message.

Men do have a lot of responsibilities to take care of, agreed, but have you noticed a decrease in the number of men in the professional sector? No. But on the other hand, the Female Labour Force Participation (FLFP) has dropped by 27% in the last two decades.

What should be a major concern for all of us is that these two decades has seen relatively stable economic growth, yet India is ranked 121st out of 131 countries in the FLFP.

On digging deeper on this issue, we found out that it is not a problem of scarcity, but a problem of not enough encouragement. 80% of the women have had to leave their jobs because their peers did not receive it well.

Following are the reasons which have lead to this situation in the market –

The professional environment is not equipped to take care of an individual’s safety.
The lack of a support system and natural environment for women to pursue their dreams.
It is very difficult to handle the household work and professional work side by side. It takes courage, hard work and a strong will to be able to manage both sides. A lot of the women today, lack the courage to take up both the tasks.
The lack of courage again comes from the lack of helping hands from their own families. The load is not shared equally among the family members. Even Airel asks you to #ShareTheLoad, but do we?
The mindset has a vital role to play in this situation. India has always been a patriarchal country and the thought of women working, is still not taken well.

Most of the women are pressured to leave their jobs and concentrate towards building a happy family. There are issues when a woman earns more than her husband and is again forced to compromise. Even as we’ve already entered 2019, the ratio of men and women working in a company is not healthy. There have been many cases where a woman who is a part of the board has quit or stepped down from her position due to lack of women board members.

On speaking to our partner companies on this issue, we realised that there are a lot of companies facing difficulties when it comes to hiring women. Out of 10 people who apply for a particular position, only 2 are women. This is a concern that most of the companies have expressed.

ikigaiHub is taking a small step towards help solving this colossal issue with “Women For The Win”, a women-only digital marketing workshop, on the occasion of Women’s day, to pledge our support to bring the numbers back and even better. We want to help girls and women who, for whatever reason, are not able to pursue their dreams and progress in their careers.