Indian women are shouldering a gruelling double shift

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5 days ago

Indian women disproportionately bear the burden of unpaid domestic and care work, and this burden is especially acute for urban women, with domestic responsibilities clashing with 'corporate burnout', work-related stress and mental health concerns.
This is exacerbated by the inequality in employment trends and due to limited access to essential infrastructure such as healthcare and childcare, data show and experts say.
India's 2024 Time Use Survey showed that on average, an Indian woman or girl, six years and above, spent 426 minutes each day on unpaid care and domestic work for household members, nearly the same amount of time as in 2019. They also spent 341 minutes a day on employment-related activities (343 minutes in 2019).
But urban women spend more time on employment-related activities (391 minutes a day) while spending almost the same time on domestic and care work (427 minutes a day). This implies a higher double burden – defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Gender Studies as the workload of people who do both paid work and unpaid domestic work – on urban women than on rural women.
In January 2024, IndiaSpend reported that married working women in India spend significantly less time in self-care, leisure, socialising and religious activities than married working men.
Need to compensate
A study by the Centre for Economic and Data Analysis at Ashoka University shows that the increase in labour force participation between 2017-'18 (51.5%) and 2023-'24 (60.5%) was primarily driven by the doubling of female labour force participation in rural areas from 23.5% to 42.8%. But this increase has come from self-employment and casual work, says Puja Guha, an Associate Professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru.
Of the proportion of women employed, regular wage employment made up 16% in 2024, down from 21% in 2017-'18. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey data for 2024, women working in their own-account (working in their own businesses) or home-based enterprises made up 73.5% of women's work in rural areas in 2024, compared to 42.3% in urban areas.
In a study with her team, Guha observed that women in rural areas tend to be more engaged in self-employment and unpaid work when there is highly 'gender-insensitive' infrastructure based on the gender-sensitivity index.
'The gender-sensitivity index is based on data from four domains – the gender sensitivity of governance-related infrastructure, physical infrastructure, education-related infrastructure, and health-related infrastructure,' the study states.
They found that self-employment and unpaid work were positively correlated with gender-unfriendly infrastructure, such as proximity to infrastructure for banking, electricity etc, and to education and healthcare infrastructure. This is because salaried work mostly requires women to step out of the house, difficult if the infrastructure for it is inadequate.
The benefit of self employment is that it provides 'temporal flexibility in terms of when one can work and spatial flexibility in terms of where one can work', said Rosa Abraham, another Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University.
In a 2024 study with Vijayamba R, Assistant Professor, NLSIU, and Srinivas Raghavendra, Associate Professor, Azim Premji University, Abraham found that there was a 4.2 minute decrease in time spent on unpaid work, ie, domestic and care work within the household, with one hour of time spent in employment for a rural self-employed woman with 'fairly high' levels of education.
In contrast, time spent in unpaid work increased by 6.6 minutes with an hour of salaried work for an urban graduate woman. Abraham said that this could be because urban women in salaried work feel the need to compensate for their absence from home.
This could result in them compromising on other activities such as self-care. Besides, women with high levels of education may spend more time in childcare by teaching children at home and helping them with academics after school, she added.
Double burden
A review of studies, published in 2021, noted that several studies have linked unpaid care work to mental health issues. For instance, they wrote, a systematic review comparing health outcomes of unpaid caregivers and non-care givers from Africa, Asia, and South America found that unpaid caregivers had higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms than non-care givers.
Similarly, a study from the US found that inequities in the division of housework and women's disproportionate share contributed substantially to sex differences in depression, the authors noted.
A 2024 study by researchers based in the United States and Japan found that an additional hour of caregiving per day reduces the probability of Indian women reporting median level life satisfaction by 26 percentage points and good physical health by 15 percentage points, indicating the adverse impacts of a high double burden on women's health.
Policy solutions
Public provisioning of domestic and care work is essential to reduce the double burden on women, especially in urban areas, said Ashwini Deshpande, Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. This, she said, must begin with recognition, reduction, and redistribution of invisible work that is undertaken within the household.
In urban areas the quality of private healthcare and childcare is highly uneven and inaccessible and thus an improved anganwadi system (which provides nutrition and early education to young children) could help women.
Guha added that public policies are largely intended to benefit only rural regions. As a result, she said, health and care infrastructure in urban areas is led by private players who offer better quality infrastructure but exclude a significant chunk of the population who cannot afford these services.
Abraham suggested that it might help if public childcare institutions like creches function for longer hours, especially for urban women. Besides, she also mentioned that maternity benefits largely penalise women's work as they are a cost to enterprises.
To make it easier for firms to bear the cost, she suggested the government should create a public fund, to which firms also contribute, that can be used to cover maternity benefits for employees.