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CORONA BUG BITES CAREERS

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 8/3/2020 9:07:32 AM

Ruchi Saini Now I understand why working mothers leave their jobs”, said my friend, who has a son, over a phone call from India. She was one of my closest friends growing up and I was talking to her after more than half a decade. She used to be a very ambitious girl and naturally, I was rather taken aback by her statement. “What happened? How did your views change?”, I asked, to which she replied, “Well, isn’t it obvious, a baby happened followed by the pandemic.” Due to the pandemic, Aakriti (name changed) had been working from home for the last three months, while home-schooling her four-year-old son and performing additional domestic chores. Her husband, on the other hand, is both ill-equipped for and disinterested in performing domestic chores. Even before the outbreak, women in India constituted an immensely small portion of the labour force and the pandemic is all set to widen this gap. A 2019 World Bank report revealed that only 21 per cent of the female population in India is a part of the labour force, compared to 83 per cent in Nepal, 60 per cent in China and 36 per cent in Bangladesh. And while many reasons exist for the abysmal representation of Indian women within the workforce, scholars have talked at length about how motherhood pushes scores of women unwillingly out of the workforce. Growing up in India, I came across various instances during social gatherings and even scholarly meetings where both men and women deemed this as a “natural” and “an unfortunate but inescapable” consequence of the choice to have a child. However, it is not motherhood but rather the unequal division of labour inside the home after becoming a mother that pushes women out of the workforce. Post-childbirth, men can perform all the acts linked with child-rearing (cooking, cleaning, washing and so on) except breastfeeding, but are typically not conditioned to do so. According to a report released by OECD (Organisation for Economic Corporation and Development) in 2018, Indian women spend an average of five hours and 51 minutes daily on “unpaid” domestic work, the second-highest among the 31 countries surveyed. Indian men, on the other hand, spend an average of a measly 45 minutes daily and ranked among the bottom three countries in the table. Given the average Indian male’s distaste towards performing domestic duties, women are shouldering the majority of household responsibilities during the pandemic. An online petition started by Subarna Ghosh (a working mother from Mumbai) urges Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “talk to Indian men about doing an equal share of care work within the household” in his next speech. The petition, which draws attention towards how the nationwide lockdown has forced families to confront the issue of unpaid care work done by women, has already gained 71,000 signatures. A 2018 report by Ashoka University, titled Predicament of Returning Mothers, revealed that after becoming mothers, 50 per cent of women in the corporate, media and development sectors leave their jobs before the age of 30 and only 16 per cent of senior leadership roles in these sectors are held by women.