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The past three decades have seen the advent of major transformations in the Indian economy. The economy has achieved average growth rates of 5–9%, education has risen sharply for both men and women, fertility rates have declined, and infrastructure facilities, particularly access to electricity, cooking gas and piped water, have improved. All these factors are expected to reduce the demand for women’s time spent in domestic chores and increase their opportunities for paid work. Paradoxically, however, the National Sample Surveys document a substantial decline in women’s work participation rates (WPRs), particularly for rural women. Optimistic interpretation of these trends suggests that increasing prosperity accounts for women’s labour force withdrawal. For young women, rising school and college enrolment is incompatible with demands of the workforce. For both young and older women, rising prosperity allows for withdrawal from economic activities to focus on domestic duties. Pessimistic interpretations of these trends suggest that it is absence of suitable jobs rather than women’s withdrawal from the labour force that accounts for declining female work participation. A third explanation focuses on increasing measurement errors in work participation data from the National Sample Surveys. This paper examines these diverse explanations using data from National Sample Surveys and India Human Development Surveys for 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 and finds that: (1) Decline in rural women’s work participation recorded by National Sample Surveys may be overstated; (2) supply factors explain a relatively small proportion of the decline in women’s work participation rates; (3) public policies such as improvement and transportation facilities and MGNREGS that enhance work opportunities for women are associated with increased participation by women in the work force.

The WEDGE advisory board meeting discussed generating cross-culturally comparable data

This year’s crabbing season is fraught with difficult choices for the nearly all-foreign-women workers during the pandemic hit

Although chronic life strain is often found to be associated with adverse health outcomes, empirical research is lacking on the health implications of persistent role overload that many women around the world are subject to, the so-called double burden of work and family responsibilities. Using data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (1994-2012), we examined the linkage between time-use profiles and body mass index (BMI) trajectories for Filipino women over an 18-year span. Out of the four classes of women with differential levels of a combination of work and family duties, the group with the heaviest double burden has the highest average BMI. In addition, those who have remained in this class for three or more waves of data not only have higher BMI on average but also have experienced the steepest rate of increase in BMI upon transition from midlife to old age.

Faculty Associate Philip Cohen points to male smoking habits as an important factor in understanding the relative longevity of women