The proportion of girls aged 5 to 14 working domestically has dropped dramatically since 2004 in both rural and urban households, more than halving in rural households and falling 42% in urban households. In cities, less young women between the ages of 15 and 29 are working as well, declining 8%. This is mainly because more and more girls are going to school instead.
"Among the younger age group, the level of education has gone up," says economics professor Neetha N Pillai of the Centre for Women's Development Studies. "[The] number of years of education has increased, which means they have less time to contribute to household domestic duties."
Girls' school enrollment rates have shot up in the past ten years, with the number of girls enrolled in standards I-VIII increasing by nearly 3 crore from 2003-2004 to 2013-2014 according to District Information System for Education (DISE) data — a 42.9% increase.
Other reasons for less girls working at home include improved technology and hired help.
"The younger generation go for paid domestic work. They have an idea about leisure, quality time and things like that, especially among the educated young women — they actually hire other women to do their domestic work" Pillai said. "The other thing is that many families have modern equipments — washing machines, other gadgets, mixing grinders which used to be very labor intensive earlier but have now been replaced by machines."
But at the same time the proportion of women older than 15 doing domestic work has gone up — by as much as 15.3% in rural households. Rural women of all ages older then 15 are working more — young adults, middle aged, and the elderly. And in cities, despite the fact that less young adult women are working at home, women overall are still working more with a 1% increase.
This startling jump in rural women doing domestic work is largely because less labor is needed in the fields and there are few alternative jobs available for women — meaning most women end up staying at home.
"The labor required for a typical area of land has actually declined over the years — both because of technology [and] changing cropping patterns," Pillai said. "And if you ask any women what you are doing, if they are not working they will say they are doing domestic duties. It's a withdrawal of women from the labor market which is in effect the increase in domestic duties."
The proportion of rural women that participate in the paid workforce has dropped sharply since 2004, going from 52.5% to 39.9% in a matter of five years — a 24% fall. As agricultural jobs disappear, new jobs are not appearing to take their place.
"There are not much employment opportunities, because the kind of employment opportunities that are available many women may not take up," Pillai said. "It may be employment in very menial jobs — it may be very substandard, exploitive, low wage kind of jobs but not many people are willing to take that, so they're withdrawing from the labor market."
At the same time, though men, too, need to work less in the fields, they are not stepping in to share the burden of domestic work. Though the percentage of women doing domestic duties increased from 37.9% to 44% from 2004 to 2012, the same percentage for men did not budge — in both 2004 and 2012, only 0.4% of men were engaged in domestic duties. So as young girls stop helping with household chores such as taking care of their siblings or cooking, older women are called upon to step in and take care of the chores.
"Since there are less and less younger women to participate [in household duties] and then there's no increase in the participation from men in domestic duties, the burden is increased on aged or older women," said Pillai.
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