Visualising the Invisible: Re-examining Women’s Labour Force Participation in India By Sarika Chaudhary, Amaresh Dubey, Surbhi Malhotra, Wendy Olsen October 2024
This repository holds multiple files supporting our paper about the International Classification of Status in Employment (ISCE) 2018 of International Labour Office (ILO).
The do files show Stata programming and an Appendix to show how Excel can be used to make simulation estimates. We then graphed these in Stata. Please cite the paper and/or the code as follows:
Visualising the Invisible: Re-examining Women’s Labour Force Participation in India By Sarika Chaudhary, Amaresh Dubey, Surbhi Malhotra, Wendy Olsen Submitted paper, 2024. (Journal target is Economic and Political Weekly)
The appendix shows how we did the construction of revised measures of the labour force, starting with Periodic Labour-Force Survey (PLFS) 2021/2022, then moving to India’s ICSE-18 statuses as simulated percentage estimates. It is necessary to include adults who are not in the labour force for this exercise, because the size of the labour force tends to be higher when we use ICSE18 for India.
So some adults are drawn in from the inactive group at step 1. Contents of the Appendix:
- TUS estimates 2. PLFS Estimates 3. Simulation of PLFS revised for ILO concepts.
Abstract This paper delves into long-term levels of women’s labour force participation in India, arguing that methodological changes can be effective in re-valuing women’s work. While we acknowledge the arguments presented in the literature about a declining and then rising trend in Female Labour Force Participation Rate over time, there is too much ridigity in the measurement schema used. India’s conceptual framing of labour force measures has remained almost unchanged since its introduction following the Dantwala Committee’s recommendations (GoI, 1970). The categorisation used by India’s labour force surveys has failed to capture three evolving dynamics of labour market. Firstly, the female amount of work provided toward economic activities is understated at present, because the PLFS poorly records goods production within households when unpaid workers do non-monetised work. We provide 2019 Time Use Survey (TUS) rates of women’s participation in economic activities, which are higher when measured according to the 2008 System of National Accounts, compared to current definitions. Secondly, the role of decision-making in small firms has been underemphasized. Indian labour force surveys would improve by clearly distinguishing between non-decision-makers (such as contributing family workers) and entrepreneurs. Thirdly, the gig economy and cottage industries have not been kept distinct from casual hourly labour, and hence these are confused with piecework in India. An improved national data-collection schema could benefit from drawing inspiration from survey question wordings provided by the ILO. Their system culminates in a labour-status classification scheme, referred to as the International Classification of Status in Employment, 2018 (ICSE18), which is more detailed than the current method used in India.