Income and gender inequality are biggest challenges india is facing today. As far as the job market is concern,income inequality is more evident in the gender paradigm. In the age of liberalisation and the dawn of the information age have been good for India's middle class women in terms of access to job and income opportunities. Various Study suggests that it has been less kind to women who seek jobs in the blue-collar world. The report blames a “jobs deficit” for the decline in female labour force participation over the past decade.It says a lack of “suitable job opportunities” outside farming and close to the place of residence are the main reasons why fewer women have joined the workforce.Also,a culturally patriarchal society and rising family incomes, which allow more women to stay at home, are also to be blamed.
According to the WHO, part of the decline could also be because women are staying in educational institutions for a longer period and Other reasons for their low participation include greater involvement in domestic duties,poor skill training, lack of support for women entrepreneurs, occupational segregation and informality of work. Retail, e-commerce ,hospitality, IT and IT-enabled services, teaching with all the indirect business opportunities for women, are the most visible.Also sectors like accountancy, banking consultancy, engineering, architecture, media and biotechnology have opened their doors to growing numbers of women.
However The widening of job choices for urban women does not extend to their rural sisters. It is striking, for instance, that women are scarce on the factory floor, unless it is in the electronics or garments sector, which is where women's workforce participation has increased in many other countries. This limitation of choice reflects the inequality in education between genders..
Consider car or two-wheeler manufacturing. Most of it is automatic process that does not requires any longer the kind of muscle that made it exclusively man's work. In any case, given the heavy lifting women do on construction sites, this is no reason to exclude them from automated work. Yet, there are no women to be seen on automobile or almost any engineering company/factory, not even in supervisory roles, and few to be spotted training at the Industrial Training Institutes.
Rural women accounts for big share in women in the workforce, but still it would be no overstatement to say that this is a sad commentary on gender equality in India. On the urgency of fostering urbanization, women's education and accelerating economic growth is the need of the hour in order to bring most of the women in the mainstream. Also special attention needs to be given to women in agriculture. Continued support needs to be given to efforts to promote policies and institutions that promote, especially, rural women employment, ownership and access to economic resources and social security.
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