Hosted by the 21st Century India Center, scholars converged to discuss creating economic opportunity for Indian women
The 21st Century India Center, part of UC San Diego’s School of Policy and Strategy (GPS), hosted the “Making Work Work for Women” conference on Oct. 26, which brought scholars together to discuss ways to make working more accessible to women living in India and beyond. The event was co-sponsored by Good Business Lab.
Over the course of the day, more than a dozen speakers presented their economic research to share the ways they found to involve women in the Indian workforce — which even today is overwhelmingly male, and therefore operating at only around half capacity.
Many of these barriers are rooted in commonly held perceptions of the proper roles of men and women.
“There’s a mismatch between the types of jobs that are available and the types of jobs that women can — or want — to do, given current norms of appropriate behavior for women,” said Lisa Ho, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University who was part of the conference.
Ho presented her research suggesting that more remote work opportunities could lower the barrier of entry for women to start working. Her findings suggest that virtual work-from-home arrangements even have the potential to get women with traditional views about gender roles into the workforce: once they start working, such women seem to reevaluate those gender norms and warm up to in-person work.
“We’ve found that work experience changes people’s attitudes to gender, most notably among women who came in with traditional views,” Ho said.
Another talk, by Smit Gade of the Good Business Lab, detailed the benefits of providing women early access to their earned wages, similar to how some U.S. banks allow employees to receive their paycheck a few days before payday.
However, what might merely be a nice surprise to see in a banking app for high-income workers in Western countries can have a dramatic effect on low-income women’s wellbeing in places like India. Gade explained that when women have a more consistent stream of income as a result of this earned wage access, they are less dependent on borrowing money through costly informal avenues, especially when unexpected emergency expenses arise.
Anant Nyshadham, associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and co-founder of Good Business Lab, noted how the organization’s work, fuelled by programs like the event at the 21st Century India Center, has already made a tangible impact.
“Our organization’s research, advocacy, and programs are all designed to create economic opportunities for low income-workers, especially women, and help them thrive,” Nyshadham said. “I’m proud to say that our work has already positively impacted over 2 million low-income workers globally.”
Achyuta Adhvaryu, the director of the 21st Century India Center and one of the other co-founders of the Good Business Lab, added that the center — and GPS — were particularly well suited to host this event.
“Millions of women are left out of the economic opportunity created by India’s blockbuster growth, and that’s a problem for the government, businesses, the international community and, of course, women themselves,” Adhvaryu said. “Given our position at the nexus of academia and the ‘real world,’ the India center has the ability to bring together the very top academic minds with policymakers and funders to both fuel more high-quality research and generate more action that moves the needle on this pressing issue.”
