Vol. 2: Women and Work in South Asia
Women's labor force participation in South Asia remains low and varied. Now, with COVID-19 and the impending recession, women stand to lose the most.
For our second issue, we touch upon the news in South Asia, look at the history of women’s work in South Asia, South Asia’s low female labor force participation despite growth and increasing female education, and policies that boost female employment. Lastly, I am pleased to welcome Sana Haque to Newspaperwali who will be reviewing the Pakistani show Churails for this issue.
Best,
Bansari Kamdar
News from South Asia
[Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault] News in the past few weeks has been heartbreaking across South Asia with a surge of violent rape cases in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal.
Bangladesh has decided to change the maximum punishment of convicted rapists from life imprisonment to death penalty after weeks of protests against sexual violence. Widespread protests started after a video of a woman being attacked by a group of men in the country’s southwest spread rapidly on Facebook. This is the second time this year that thousands are back on the streets. In January, mass protests erupted over the rape of a university student in Dhaka and the government had promised to create a special commission to investigate rising reports of sexual violence "within 30 days." Nine months later, the commission remains non-existent.
Nepalis are protesting about the surge in rape cases after a 12-year-old Dalit girl from Bajhang went missing on September 23 and her family members found her semi-naked body at a nearby temple. An autopsy report confirmed that she was sexually assaulted prior to her death. They are pushing for death sentence to rape convicts.
The Allahabad high court in India has called the forceful burning of the body of Hathras gang-rape victim without her family's consent an "infringement of human rights." It has also asked the Uttar Pradesh government to provide full security to the victim's family. Meanwhile, the UP Chief Minister Adityanath has called the incident ''international conspiracy'' to defame his government. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet to comment or tweet about one of the most violent cases of gang rape in India’s recent history except for a brief tweet from his close Bhartiya Janata Party aide, Adityanath’s account regarding a conversation he had with the Prime Minister.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Law and Justice recommended that the so-called “two-finger test” – invasive and medically meaningless “virginity test” – should not be part of any criminal investigation and is a violation of its constitution. In Afghanistan, despite a 2017 Ministry of Public Health policy instructing government health workers not to perform these tests and a 2018 amendment to the Afghan Penal Code requiring a court order or consent of the person, new research by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) finds neither consent nor a court order was given in 92% of the cases.
Deep Dive: Women at Work
South Asia has the second-lowest female employment rate in the world with women being almost three times less likely to be employed in full-time jobs than men. Women’s greater economic participation has numerous social benefits. When women control a greater share of household incomes, children are healthier and do better in school. Additionally, they have a greater voice in the households, communities and society when they work for pay. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that the overall GDP in South Asia can increase by 25% by closing gender gaps in employment and entrepreneurship.
Some key determinants of female labor force participation (FLFP):
Economic development
Educational attainment
Social norms influencing marriage, fertility, and women’s role outside the house
Access to credit
Household characteristics
Institutional setting (laws, protection, benefits)
Interestingly, the FLFP rate is not the same across South Asia. For instance, India has abysmally low FLFP that has been falling for the past two decades. In comparison, neighboring Nepal has four times the women in its the labor force, almost at par with the men, and nearly 30% more women have entered Bangladesh’s labor force.
Afghanistan: The Taliban era ushered in extreme patriarchy in Afghanistan where unaccompanied and uncovered women in public spaces were punished and education and employment was banned for Afghan women. While women’s labor force participation increased after 2001, there is a growing fear of losing gains made by Afghan women with the resurgence of Taliban and their ambiguity about women’s rights in the ongoing Afghan peace talks.
Afghan women continue to face resistance, harassment and violence when trying to access employment. A recent UN Women study found that only 15% of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of home after marriage, and two-thirds of men complained that women have too many rights now. Violence remains high in the region and not just diminishes women’s willingness to enter the labor force but also increases restrictions on their mobility. Lack of legal protections, weak institutions, little push towards female education and limited access to information are other factors.
Bangladesh: Contrary to India and Sri Lanka, there has been an increase in female labour force participation in Bangladesh, alongside the acceleration in economic growth and female education since the 1990s. It has also been successful in reducing the gender wage gap, having the lowest in the region. Some attribute this to the substantial increase in female employment in labour-intensive export-oriented industries in urban areas, particularly the garment industry, and the rapid expansion of micro-finance has supported women’s employment in rural areas.
Nonetheless, women’s participation remains less than half of that of men in Bangladesh. One major impediment to their participation is the continued prevalence of child marriage, according to a recent book by the World Bank. While marriage of girls under 18 has dropped by 6 percentage points in the last few years, more than one-fourth of Bangladeshi girls continue to be married off before age 15. The earlier the marriage, the lower their opportunities for further education. Women with an education below grade 10 faces a double penalty: they have the low odds of participating in labor markets, but high unemployment if they do participate.
The Bangladesh economy in general and women’s employment in urban areas in particular is to be too dependent on a single industry - the garment industry accounts for 80% of the exports and 20% of GDP. According to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), at least 70,000 people are estimated to have been laid off after clothing orders worth $3.5 billion were cancelled or suspended and exports plummeted by 84% in April. There is rising fear that this will drive Bangladeshi women either out of the labor force or back to informality and dramatically increase wage gaps between men and women.
Bhutan: Women’s labor force participation in Bhutan has remained steady in the last three decades, increasing a little between 2000 to 2010 and then falling back down. With increasing education and economic growth, one study finds that perceptions of gender roles in Bhutan have also evolved and women are now expected to work to supplement family income in the face of the rising cost of living. However, occupational segregation remains a problem with women crowded in lower quality low paying jobs, often in the informal sector. In Bhutan, this segregation is largely a result of perceptions of “men’s” and “women’s” jobs that reflect traditional gender roles, women choosing some jobs due to their unpaid household and childcare burden at home and gender gap in tertiary education.
Large swaths of Bhutan practice matrilineal inheritance, where agricultural land and other property such as livestock is usually inherited by the eldest daughter. About 60% of rural women have land registered in their names and 45% of property titles in urban areas. This provides an economic opportunity for women to use these assets for credit but they are unable to reap full benefits from their ownership due to limited use of land for collateral and lack of decision making power with husbands making decisions despite women’s legal ownership.
India: One in three women have left the labor force in India in the last two decades. Globally, only Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Algeria, Iran, and the West Bank and Gaza have a lower FLFP rate than India. Despite rapid economic growth and increasing gender parity in terms of falling fertility rates and higher educational attainment among Indian women, India’s FLFP continues to fall.
India’s job stagnation and increasing unemployment in the past few years — a problem that is aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic — could further worsen this situation. Researchers have called it India’s “shecession” as 4 in 10 women have lost their jobs during the pandemic, according to the data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. This could be due to women’s concentration in informal markets and occupations worst hit by COVID-19. There is growing fear that even more women will leave the workforce altogether due to the additional unpaid work and childcare burden during the pandemic as a consequences of this unequal division of labor.
In its first time-use survey in over two decades, the report finds that Indian women continue to spend more one more hour on work everyday than Indian men. Women do over three hours more unpaid work and two hours less paid work than men. On average, Indian women spent 243 minutes on domestic chores and household work, almost 10 times the 25 minutes that the average Indian man does in 2019.
[Read my full article in The Diplomat on ]
In India, researchers have observed a U-shaped relationship between education and labor force participation in India where women with no education and women with tertiary education display the highest rates of participation among Indian women. Past research finds that the lack of demand for moderately educated women and occupational segregation in India, cultural norms that prioritize domestic work and women’ care burden, limited mobility and the social stigma associated with work outside the house, risk of sexual assault and unsafe work environment and lastly discriminatory government policies like Section 66(1)(b) of the Factories Act 1948 that disallows women from working in a factory after the hours of 6 a.m. and 7 p.m are some reasons why women stay out of the workforce or leave the workforce in India.
[Read my full article in The Diplomat on Indian women’s “time poverty” and its implications or the Indian paradox of greater gender parity and lower employment]
Maldives: Maldives has doubled its female labor force participation in the last thirty years. However, economic inequality persists with the the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita for women 48% lower than that of men despite women having greater education than men. Female labor force participation is almost half of that of men and women remain underrepresented in critical industries like tourism, construction, fisheries and agriculture. This is due to their unpaid work burden at home and structural limitations to women’s work outside the house like relocation requirements in tourism, fear of sexual harassment and personal safety, societal stigma, lack of work flexibility and more. According to a 2016 limited time use survey in Maldives, women do twice the unpaid work than men, spending on average 6 hours on housework and childcare.
Nepal: Nepal is the only South Asian country where women’s labor force participation is almost at par with men’s labor force participation. One study finds that Nepalese women are less constrained by social norms, though they work mostly in subsistence agriculture. According to the 2020 Nepal Jobs Diagnostic report, wage jobs in Nepal remain low due to its topography, which makes access to wage jobs and to product markets costly. Further, the report finds that two-thirds of the new wage jobs added since the 2008 were largely taken up by men. A recent survey shows that women remain crowded in low subsistence agriculture or low paying jobs with little career advancement opportunities and the gender wage gap remains wide with Nepalese women earning 30% less than their male counterparts on average.
Pakistan: While Pakistan has seen an increase in female labor force participation in the past few years, at 22% it remains low. Women’s labor force participation is almost one-fourth of its male counterparts and closing the gender gap in Pakistan could boost its GDP by about 30%, according to IMF. Gender gaps in education are decreasing in Pakistan and higher levels of education have demonstrated an increase in female labor participation in urban areas but not rural areas.
The familiar “U-shaped” relationship is also found in Pakistan between female education and employment rate, with the 30.2% of women with little or no schooling employed in 2015 , which drops to 13.1% for women with at least some secondary level education and then increases again to 26.3% for those with some tertiary education. In Pakistan, 64% of female employment is in unpaid family work, double the south Asia average. Like Bangladesh, gender norms and cultural practices continue to influence female employment-related preferences and outcomes in Pakistan.
Sri Lanka: Even as the Sri Lankan economy grows and women’s education becomes at par or greater than men’s education at all levels, FLFP in Sri Lanka has been rapidly declining in the last two decades. There is a familiar U-shaped relationship between education and employment with one study finding that having a university education increased the probability of participation by 45% for Sri Lankan women. In comparison, having only secondary education lowered FLFP compared to having only primary schooling or no schooling at all. Further, the unemployment rate for Sri Lankan women has remained twice as high as the male unemployment rate from mid-1980s to now.
Policy Recommendations:
Six economies in South Asia have introduced laws on workplace sexual harassment but that is just a part of the solution. Studies show that providing child care facilities to reduce women’s unpaid care burden, ensuring safe transportation, and encouraging girls to study STEM have led to more FLFP and greater economic equity. Infrastructure spending on rural access to clean water and transportation could also help reduce women’s unpaid work. Similarly, Fan Zhang’s In the Dark: How Much Do Power Sector Distortions Cost South Asia?, reports that FLFP in Bangladesh is 7 percentage points higher in households connected to the electricity grid than in comparable off-grid households. Greater integration into global markets has also demonstrated an increase in female labor force participation.
Postcards of Courage: Nadia Anjuman
One thought of the day I will break the cage
makes me croon like a carefree drunk until
they can see I am no wind-trembled willow tree—
an Afghan woman wails and sings, and wail and sing I will!
- Makes No Sense by Nadia Anjuman
and translated by Farzana Marie.
There is an old Afghan saying that you cannot stretch out a leg in Afghanistan without “poking a poet in the ass.” When Taliban took control of her hometown Herat in 1995 and prohibited women from studying, Nadia Anjuman, who was in eleventh grade at the time, decided to join a secret underground literary society of young Afghan women - the Golden Needle Sewing School.
Sewing was one of the few activities women were allowed to do under Taliban. The young girls of the sewing school would don their burqas to go to the school and once they got inside, instead of learning to sew, they would learn literature and writing from professors from Herat University. They risked imprisonment, torture and even hanging, if they were caught. Anjuman and the girls of the sewing school thought it was a risk worth taking.
Once Taliban left Herat, Nadia Anjuman finished her college degree and published her first collection of poems Gul-e-Dudi (“Smoke-Bloom”). The same year, she lost her life after her husband beat her to death in a brutal case of domestic violence.
He served just a single month in jail.
Read Anjuman’s work in “Load Poems like Guns,”a collection of poems by Afghan women compiled and translated by Farzana Marie. You can also read more about the Golden Needle Sewing Circle in Christina Lamb’s 2002 book “The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan.”
“Churails”: The Witches Who Wouldn’t Burn
Bloodthirsty female vigilantes. Homosexuals and transgenders. Alcoholics. Prostitutes. Abortions. Murder. All the traditional deviants came raging through in a united front against a single criminal – the Pakistani man.
Last month, as my aunt and I watched two shirtless men dancing and holding each other close in a moment of pure, unfiltered adoration – alongside our stunned, prayer bead-clutching mother-in-law – we couldn’t help repeating a single question: “How has Pakistan not banned this yet?”
Churails follows four women – the ideal wife and former lawyer Sara (Sarwat Gilani), disgraced wedding planner and alcoholic Jugnu (Yasra Rizvi), murderer and ex-convict Batool (Nimra Bucha) and burka-clad boxer Zubaida (Mehar Bano) – who are brought together by their collective resentment for abusive and deceitful men to create a detective agency and dispense justice to philanderers.
It was incredibly empowering to witness women of all forms and backgrounds coming together to avenge their greatest tyrant, a walking personification of misogyny, uncontrolled lust and insatiable hypocrisy. The desi male is finally reminded that a woman’s scorn can be swift, painful – and, as Churails emphasized, well-deserved. “Mard ko dard hoga,” or “men will get hurt” is their threat – their promise to all the wronged Pakistani women. As the protagonists shed light on the ridiculous expectations for the desi woman, they overthrow all societal etiquettes to hell, effectively becoming the self-prophesied churails (or ‘witches’ in Urdu).
And here lies the genius of director Asim Abbasi. By shedding light on the different types of “woman” on screen – homosexuals, transgenders, prostitutes, etc. – he attacks traditional notions of what it means to be a desi woman. As he exposes the seedy underbelly of male/female relationships in Pakistan, Abbasi demands that the veil be removed from his audience’s eyes.
All this, again, begged the question – how did he get away with it? The short answer: He didn’t.
In early October, Churails was banned for Pakistani viewers. While this wasn’t out of the ordinary – Pakistan has previously banned content for “indecency,” including Tik Tok, TV series Jalan, The Tick Tock Show and even a biscuit ad — it was still frustrating. Despite international acclaim, the show was taken down from the Indian streaming service ZEE5. It remains unclear what – or who – prompted the ban, with some reports accusing the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) for the ban over a viral scene of a woman talking about giving sexual favors to move up in her career; others claim it was Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), who received complaints and in response, sent a letter to Zee5, prompting the ban.
Less than a week later, countless outraged tweets over moral policing were followed by Zee5 reinstating the show, claiming it was removed in Pakistan in compliance with a PTA directive that had been addressed. However messy, it’s a victory for Abbasi and the show’s fans.
A captivating serial to viewers from Pakistan and beyond – especially neighboring countries fighting similar misogynistic battles – Churails deserved better than to be removed the moment it upset the status quo. If the show was a small step in a larger movement, a shift towards a more progressive Pakistan that would face its dark reality and better distinguish ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ the ban was a stark reminder that we are not there yet. We must allow for blinders.
More and more viewers are either fascinated or horrified by what Churails has to offer. I can only suggest: Give it a watch. See it for what it is rather than what you’ve heard.
Art and cinema are, in part, meant to make us question, to astound us with the shocking and the enchanting. Churails is a rare cinematic triumph for Pakistan – when bold and daring combines artsy and traditional to elevate women’s voices and revel in the true power of female agency and sisterhood.
Thank you for subscribing. Given the heartbreaking news across the subcontinent, our next issue will cover the prevalence of sexual violence in South Asia, focusing on legal institutions and social and cultural norms that bolster this violence.
Bansari Kamdar is an independent journalist and researcher at the Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy. She is pursuing a post-graduate degree in Applied Economics and has a Master’s from Boston University in International Relations and International Journalism. Kamdar reports on gender, immigration, security and political economy in South Asia. Her work has appeared in The Diplomat, Huffington Post, Boston Globe, CNN-News18 and more.
Sana Haque is a communication and external relations manager at a nonprofit called Greater NY based in New York. She completed her Master's in International Relations and International Communication at Boston University. Sana is interested in topics concerning gender, immigration, race, politics, governance, climate change and pop culture.