Long road ahead: From I-day speech to women’s work

By “care work burden” or “motherhood penalty” we mean women’s burden of childcare and domestic work

This is an important factor that disadvantages them in the labour market, both globally and in India.
It is also seen to underlie gender gaps in wages, lifetime earnings, career choices, and upward mobility.

Will demographic shifts minimize the effect of care work burden?

Globally, for instance, TFR has fallen to replacement levels or below both in high-income and many middle-income countries.
In India, as per the 2019-20 National Family Health Survey-5, the TFR is at 2.1 (replacement level) with only five states (Bihar, Jharkhand, Manipur, Meghalaya, and UP) having TFRs above 2.1.

In the UK, 50 percent of women who turned 30 in 2020 had not had children, and many will never have any.
In India, the figures while very low, also show a slow rise, from 2.4 per cent childlessness among women born in the 1940s to 5 per cent among those born in the late-1970s driven by higher female education in India
With few children, the time women spend in childcare will fall.

However, Will the burden of elder care replace that of childcare?

Most people no longer live with their elderly parents, either in developed or developing countries.

In the US, only 18 percent of households were multigenerational in 2021 (Pew Research Centre survey).
In the UK, 7 percent of households were multigenerational in 2013-14.
In India, only 16 percent of families are deemed joint by the 2011 census.

Thus, the evidence does not suggest that eldercare is replacing the burden of childcare for most women.

Demographically, therefore, we can expect a decline in the extent to which childcare will restrict women’s labour market options in the future.

A 2019 study by John Bonggarts et al. (Population Studies) of 58 middle and low-income countries found that a fall in fertility and hence fewer children at home was linked with a significant increase in the percentage of women employed.
Improvement in basic infrastructure, such as piped drinking water and clean natural gas can further reduce domestic work burdens such as fetching water and fuelwood.
Hence, while it remains essential to move social norms towards more equal sharing of housework by men, changing demographics (especially falling fertility) and basic technologies could reduce, to an extent, the importance of childcare and unpaid domestic work as constraints to women’s employment.

This “rebooting” could help us focus on other constraints, demand-side factors, that remain strong such as

Training women in non-traditional skills with market demand
Creating more public and private sector jobs for them closer to home
Raising awareness among employers that hiring women can have a significant positive effect on productivity and work culture.
Creating secure accommodation in small towns and cities
Safe modes of public transport
Zero tolerance for sexual harassment in workspaces

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