aroonwithaview

In school, the majority of my friends’ moms had the same occupation as mine did – “housewife” – so it never occurred to me that this was anything but an acceptable norm. This did change over time later on, as my sense on gender equality developed, but there was relatively little active questioning of why this was such a widespread phenomenon. As an economist, however, I find it ridiculous that FLFP in India is around 25%, which is about half of almost every other country, except the Islamic nations (especially since male LFP in India is similar to the world average). That means a massive chunk of talent in India is just locked up doing household chores.

Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize tells me there’s been some great work done to advance our understanding of the reasons behind trends in FLFP, but I found her work in particular to be quite specific to Western countries. Farzana Afridi (whose work I unfortunately did not appreciate as much as I should have when I was at ISI) and Kanika Mahajan seem to have some really interesting papers specific to the Indian context. My favorite is the one that shows that an increase in the mother’s labour force participation improves school outcomes for the child. This is a really important result, because much of the justification for the “housewife” occupation, at least in middle class homes, comes from the need to ensure sufficient attention to children’s education. My prior on this was that the Indian government would have to invest more in child care to get around this problem, but their finding seems to suggest that any policy that shifts women to the labour force is much less costly than I thought.

A book that discusses this and more in the Indian context, delving deep into the causes and policy implications for India’s abysmal FLFP, would be pretty high up my wishlist. I can’t seem to find one though, so maybe I’ll have to wait until Farzana, or someone as authoritative on this topic, frees up some time.