The latest US Population Division estimates take the sheen off the popular notion that India has made rapid strides in female labour force participation.
Consider the data: India's female labour participation rate (FLPR) of 47.7 per cent is only higher than Fiji (35.3 per cent) in a list of 14 Asia-Pacific nations. To put things in perspective, the UN did not even include China and Japan in the study.
A direct comparison between India and China on FLPR is difficult because no accurate data is available on the latter's FLPR. But what is known is the Chinese female labour force's dominating presence in factory assembly lines.
In a country where foot-binding of women was rampant to make them physically immobile, the giant leap forward has been mind-boggling. A 100 years ago, almost no women in China could read or write. Today, 86.5 per cent of all adult women are literate compared to 48.3 per cent in India.
While Vietnam tops the UN list with 86.2 per cent FLPR, even countries like Bangladesh (60 per cent) are far ahead of India. Global research has also shown that there is a close correlation between FLPR and fertility rates.
While the fertility rate in India between 1980 and 2001 has dropped from 5 to 2.9 per woman, it has fallen even more dramatically in Bangladesh from 6.1 to 2.9.
Bangladesh's spectacular progress is attributed to the superlative job done by the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Centre in providing micro-credit to groups of women.
As a result, the country has seen an explosion of women entrepreneurs who just couldn't care less about opportunities for jobs in the formal or informal sector.
Even in the organised sector, the lot of women workers in Bangladesh has been improving dramatically. For example, the phenomenal growth of female employment in the country's garment industry.
The manufacture of ready-made clothing for export that scarcely existed in 1980, employed 1.5 million workers in the mid-1990s. Ninety per cent are migrants from rural areas and nearly 70 per cent are women.
The female share of the labour force in the export processing zones (almost 72 per cent) exceeds that of Malaysia and is almost as high as Korea and the Philippines.
Overall, the female share of the total labour force in Bangladesh grew from 6 per cent in the 1981 population census to 18 per cent in a 1995-96 survey with comparable definitions of economic activity. The figure has improved further after that.
Although women still earn less than men, the wage differentials have been declining as women acquire experience and on-the-job training. Also, entry into formal wage employment is associated with delayed marriage and decline in fertility rates.
Compare this with India. While micro-credit for women is picking up, the pace is still too slow, resulting in women depending solely on job opportunities of the kind that are still heavily biased against them.
Nearly two-thirds of women in manufacturing are employed as production operators or manual workers. Even in the service sector, women are concentrated in clerical, sales and services jobs that are traditionally regarded as female occupations.
Women are also severely under-represented in the administrative and managerial categories. They are, however, better represented in professional and technical categories, but again this consists mostly teachers, nurses and other professions that are again viewed as female occupations.
Besides, women workers get paid lower than their male colleagues for the same quantity and quality of job done. An interesting survey involving seven big districts in Uttar Pradesh found that the average monthly wages per male worker is Rs 808 compared to Rs 791 for females.
Women are also increasingly being hired in peripheral, insecure, less-valued jobs as home-based, casual or temporary workers, with very low pay (even compared to their male colleagues), irregular income, little or no job or income security and lack of social protection.
This is important as the UN study argues that increased employment of women is likely to lead to sustained declines in fertility only when the job leads to 'status-enhancing.'
In India, women's employment is heavily skewed towards low-paying, low-skilled dead-end jobs. Fertility rate has dropped sharply whenever women have been employed in quality jobs with clear career prospects that require and generate commitment and offer alternative interests and achievements to domesticity and motherhood.
The experience of developed economies also shows that the fertility rate can drop only when the conflict between women's productive and reproductive roles significantly raises the opportunity cost of having children.
So it is not women's entry into the labour force as such but true economic empowerment that is linked to reproductive decision-making. It is obvious that India has a long way to go yet to catch up even with countries like Bangladesh.
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