Ashoka University’s Centre For Economic Data And Analysis (CEDA) Launches Initiative To Address India’s Plunging Female Labour Force Participation

Delhi: In order to address the rapidly declining female labour force participation, Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) has launched a project on “Partnering with the private sector for Women’s Economic Empowerment”. For this project, CEDA is partnering with several organisations, most notably The Udaiti Foundation, for the component on ‘Women in the Workplace: Increasing Gender Diversity in India Inc’ today. The CEDA-Udaiti joint partnership will work with employers and pilot solutions that work in the short to medium term in increasing women’s participation in paid work.

Over the last two decades, the labour force participation of women in India has been steadily declining, despite an increase in their educational attainment. According to World Bank estimates (2022), the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) in India is abysmally low at just about 20%. This has serious consequences, both for the lives of Indian women and for the country at large.

The new initiative is an attempt to address this skew through a three-pronged approach that will work to

• Inform: through CEDA’s dedicated gender-data portal data portal led by Ashoka faculty Sabyasachi Das and S.K. Ritadhi
• Investigate: through CEDA’s research projects on women’s entrepreneurship, skilling and jobs led by Ashoka faculty members Ashwini Deshpande, Anisha Sharma and Kanika Mahajan
• Intervene: through collaborations with private sector stakeholders to design and pilot interventions that work. This component will be led by The Udaiti Foundation.

Launching the event at the India International Centre, Economics Professor Ashwini Deshpande, Director at CEDA, stressed on the need to pay attention to the demand-side barriers to be able to design solutions that work.

“The mainstream view on this issue is that it is a supply-side issue, i.e. factors accounting for both the low level as well as the decline are those that adversely affect women’s labour supply, such as conservative social norms, marriage, motherhood, sexual harassment in public and work spaces, stigma attached to paid work.

While these are all very important and real issues that affect women’s lives in critical ways, their correlation with FLFP in India is not as clear-cut. Also, factors accounting for the persistently low level of FLFP are not identical with factors accounting for the decline in FLFP in the last two decades,” she said.

“We believe that demand-side issues are very important in this discussion and receive less attention than they should,” Professor Deshpande further added.

Speaking at the event, Doorva Bahuguna, who helms private sector programs and BCC at The Udaiti Foundation said that this project will pilot intervention models and generate evidence to build toolkits and guidelines that can mitigate constraints to women’s participation in formal work. The CEDA-Udaiti partnership will also engage with key stakeholders or “champions” who can help build a case to galvanise change and adopt best practices”.

“This project will also feed into the larger goals of The Udaiti Foundation – i.e. to increase the economic agency of Indian women, and move the needle on FLFPR,” Bahuguna added.

Sharing that, in India women’s representation falls to 15% at the C-Suite as against 28% at entry level (as compared to 25% and 46% respectively at the global level), Ruchee Anand, Senior Director, Talent and Learning Solutions at LinkedIn India, highlighted how the work ecosystem was often biased against women. Recruiters were 13 percent less likely to check women’s job profiles and men were 42 percent more likely to be promoted to leadership roles in India.

“The future of work has to be based on flexibility, upskilling and equity,” said Anand, adding that a ‘skills-first’ approach in hiring expands talent pools and could help improve the hiring of women.

The panel speakers included Yamini Atmavilas, President, The Udaiti Foundation; Seema Bansal, Partner and Director, BCG; Shaili Chopra, Founder, SheThePeople; Anna Roy, Senior Adviser, NITI Aayog; Sharanya Chandran, Associate Director Policy, J-PAL South Asia; Saachi Bhalla, Senior Program Officer, BMGF,   and Ashish Dhawan, Founder & CEO, The Convergence Foundation and Global Board Member, BMGF. The event was attended by prominent members of the corporate, academic and government world.

CEDA was set up in 2021 with the primary aim of facilitating informed debate about economic and social developments in India. The Udaiti Foundation is part of The Convergence Foundation, founded by Ashish Dhawan, the founding Chairperson of Ashoka University. Udaiti aims to build a holistic understanding of what enables the participation of women in the private sector workforce, and design and execute focused pilot solutions with key market players.