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Business News/ Opinion / Will changing nature of jobs worsen gender gap?
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Will changing nature of jobs worsen gender gap?

India has one of the worst gender gaps in the world when it comes to labour force participation

Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint Premium
Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

At 53 percentage points, India has one of the worst gender gaps (difference between the sexes) in the world when it comes to labour force participation. While reasons such as social and cultural mores and poor infrastructure are well known, a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) report throws a new factor into the mix, which could well lead to lower female participation in organised sector jobs.

WEF’s Future of Jobs report highlights that most of the growth in jobs will come from mathematics, computing and engineering-related fields where women have been traditionally under-represented. The growth in jobs in these areas is outpacing the rate at which women are currently entering those types of jobs.

This puts them “at risk of missing out on tomorrow’s best job opportunities and aggravating hiring processes for companies due to a more restricted talent pool", said the report which surveyed chief human resources officers representing the 100 largest global employers in each industry surveyed.

This under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs is a global problem, shows data from the Unesco Institute of Statistics. Less than one in three researchers in these fields worldwide is a woman. The ratio is particularly poor in South and West Asia, at 18.9%.

However, as the chart below shows, there is a lot of variation within the region. Only 14.3% of science researchers in India are women, and the country’s ratio is worse than that of countries in West Asia. In Bahrain, for instance, women account for 41.3% of researchers in science.

In India, data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) shows that the percentage of women working in finance, insurance, real estate and business services, which includes informational technology services, is only 13.4% across rural and urban populations.

“This data is surprising because (these) fields are perceived as more women friendly, and these are the fields which have grown in employment in recent times. There seems to be some kind of bias when it comes to employing women," said Jayan Jose Thomas, professor at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Of course, social mores could be at play too, such as girls being discouraged to pursue fields like engineering which have traditionally been seen as male dominated.

The need to increase representation of women in technical fields also arises out of the fact that the biggest decline in work functions will come in areas which traditionally employ sizeable numbers of women such as office and administrative jobs. These jobs will be lost to increasing automation.

In particular, the report warns that customer service roles will become obsolete because of mobile Internet technology which will help monitor service quality online. The report estimates a total loss of 7.1 million jobs— two-thirds of which will be in the office and administrative job family. As the chart below shows, the job sectors that have the highest share of women will also see the steepest decline in employment.

How will employers respond to this change?

A quarter of those surveyed said targeting female talent would be a future recruiting strategy. However, unless more women enter these areas, employers will continue to have difficulty in recruiting women to computing and technology-related jobs.

Workforce re-skilling, though a useful strategy, is unlikely to be enough to correct the gap in technical education.

“There is not only a shortage of well-qualified teachers in schools, but also a shortage of science and math teachers. Since boys’ education is prioritised, the limited teaching resources are directed towards boys. Many girls’ schools, for instance, don’t have science and maths teachers. Within the classroom, there is a bias, where girls are not encouraged to be confident in taking up science subjects," said Padmini Swaminathan, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Clearly, technological change in itself does not imply progress. Unless there is a proactive effort to tackle gender disparity in science and technology, women will miss out on tomorrow’s opportunities.

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Published: 18 Feb 2016, 11:09 AM IST
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