Women`s Work-Life Balance in Urban India

Domestic work has emerged as an important sector within the tertiary realm of the Indian economy. Not only is it one of the main employment avenues available to poor uneducated women but it also offers women from more upwardly mobile and endowed socio-economic classes with services that assist, enable and further the work-life balance, and increase their leisure time and market engagement. This article shall attempt to explore the emerging significance of paid domestic work for working women within the Indian economy and society.

Historically, the urban workforce participation rates (WFPRs) of women in India have been lower than their rural counterparts, with marginal increases being observed in the period between 2000 and 2004 (Rustagi, 2009). The data in Figure 1 show that the national urban female WFPR has peaked to an all-time high of 16 per cent in 2004 (NSSO, 2005). Academics commenting on such trends have observed that women`s increasing labour market entry is witnessed `more forcefully` (ibid., 2009 ) in urban India, with the number of women taking up employment increasing.

Whereas the recent 11th Plan document highlights the role of women as economic agents, who require institutional support to join the labour force, child-care or elderly-care debates in urban India have been close to non-existent, with the dominant view being that providing quality care for the household is primarily a private, familial and female task. Such policy lacunae, in conjunction with our history of feudal domestic labour, have resulted in the increasing importance of informal care and household assistance provided by the domestic worker. The services provided by domestic workers abate the work-life pressures faced by working women, a growing section in the Indian urban landscape.

Paid domestic work is particularly valuable due to the rigid gendered division of roles, wherein women are cast as home-makers and men are seen as breadwinners. Feminist academics have highlighted the role played by care and reproductive responsibilities in mediating the market engagement of  women (Banerjee, 1998; 2002).  A recent survey commissioned by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and conducted by the Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) unpacked the role played by care-related domestic workload in determining women`s decision to take up paid employment. Twenty-five per cent of the non-working women surveyed by ISST cited household workload as the key reason for their decision to not seek employment.

The group of respondents, who withdrew from the workforce, cited excessive household workload as the dominant reason. Findings from the survey also indicate that employed women spend five hours on an average per day on domestic duties, in addition to six hours on paid work. (Sudarshan and Bhattacharya, 2009).

Thus, working women are busy attempting to reconcile time and energy between paid work and care work, without being able to renegotiate the household division of labour. Such dual responsibilities also hamper their career trajectories, with industry studies on women workers also confirming how women`s career advancements are compromised by their familial and personal responsibilities. (ASSOCHAM, 2007).

The ASSOCHAM study discusses the role of the nuclear family unit in creating a greater domestic work burden on working women. Data on family structures substantiate such analysis-with 47 per cent households in urban India housing not more than four members as per the Census in 2001. Other studies analysing the structure of families also find that a majority of the households in urban India are nuclear (Sonawat, 2001). Such changing family structures are extremely visible in urban metropolitan areas, irrespective of the types of settlements. For example, NFHS data for the state of Delhi in 2005-06 show that nearly 62 per cent households in slum communities are nuclear whereas the estimate for non-slum areas is 65 per cent. With weakened support from familial and social networks, managing paid work and heavy household care commitments triggers poor work-life balance, manifesting in psychological tension and daily stress. The services of domestic workers help remedy and ameliorate such concerns pertaining to work-life management and career advancement.

Domestic workers are not solely employed by households with working women. A large majority of women in India continue to not participate in the labour force. Many analysts attribute this to prosperity because women`s entry into employment has often been attributed to the household need for additional income or livelihood diversification (Sundaram and Tendulkar, 2004). Such need-based hypotheses are used to explain how women within a growing upper middle class do not need to work, and thereby choose to remain out of the labour force. However, the consumption of domestic services by the growing middle class is also related to lifestyle changes, whereby women previously engaged in domestic duties can afford to pay domestic workers to procure more leisure time for themselves. In addition, care work ensures the sustenance and survival of household labour, without which income earners-male or female-would not be able to function. Thus, the value of care support provided by domestic workers is linked to the amount of leisure time or remuneration the employing households can enjoy by substituting their time allocation away from domestic work.

With a new emphasis on modernity within urban areas, younger women are increasingly keen to take up employment. This has been identified as a key resource for the Indian economy-both in terms of their contribution to the labour force and the resultant consumption expenditure incurred by independent earning women. A study done by Roopa Purushothaman in 2007 for Future Themes, Future Group, estimated that more women entering the workforce could add 35 billion US dollars to the Indian GDP.

The National Sample Survey data for 2004-05 suggest that women in their twenties are increasing their presence in the labour force. (Rustagi, 2009) The ISST study also indicates that women from younger post-marital age groups possess a greater proclivity to join the workforce than their elder counterparts. (In Census 2001, the mean age of marriage estimated for Delhi is 19.2 for women and 23 for men.) Investigators also found greater willingness among younger women to discuss working patterns and aspirations. To quote one non-working respondent, who has a 22-year-old daughter: "These days, girls work and we do not interfere. Times have changed and they had to. As long as she is happy and well." Thus, with emerging youth aspirations and changing family structures, without any major alteration in the gendered distribution of care roles, the domestic work sector will continue to gain greater significance in the lives and careers of the working women from elite and middle-class urban families.

At the other end of the spectrum are the poor women, for whom domestic work has emerged as a key urban livelihood strategy to allow them to cope with their current economic scenario of agrarian decline, increase in commodity prices, and user fees for essential infrastructure and services such as water and electricity (Bhattacharya and Sharma, 2009). Thus, the sector has emerged as the largest employer of women in urban India (Chandrashekar and Ghosh, 2007). The national estimates for 2004-05 suggest that of the 4.75 million workers employed by private households, 3.05 million were urban women. An analysis of the 2004-05 NSS data also suggests that close to 74.3 per cent of the workers engaged in private households are women (Raveendran, 2009).

In conclusion, it is clear that the emerging economic and societal changes in India shall result in greater numbers of women joining the workforce. Younger women from educated and upper economic classes are increasingly interested in taking up employment whereas women from poor households must find additional employment to keep their households afloat. The significance of domestic work as a sector that unleashes the potential of the female labour force while providing income support to the working poor in the current economic landscape is paramount. Contributions to the GDP by working women through employment and consumption expenditure, and the market remuneration earned by families supported by the labour of domestic workers need to be linked to the value of women`s paid domestic labour.

References

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