Women's Reservation Bill: A lesson for India Inc

livemint.com:

blog reported the finding that if women worked on par with men and earned on par with men, for the world on average, per capita incomes would be 20% higher. The IMF estimated a few years ago that India’s GDP would be 27% higher if India were to live up to the Constitution’s promise of gender equality. Reserving one-third of all legislative seats for women would not, by itself, improve female labour force participation, or remove the constraints that prevent women from working.

But it would certainly allow more women into public life and even larger numbers into the public sphere. Formal sector work that begins at ends at fixed hours and pays a decent wage is the key to raising women’s employment, and changing attitudes to it. India’s traditional culture does not support women’s large-scale entry into the workforce.

Decent women used to be expected to veil their faces and respect the traditional division of roles at home and in society. Traditional Islamic culture seeks to put women in the purdah and deny them equality in a great many things. Women have to fight the constraints placed on them by tradition, to get educated, to enter the workforce and stay in the workforce while taking on the additional task of childcare, while already bearing the burden of caring for the aged, and often the spouse too.

Then, there is sexual harassment at the workplace, often on the way to and returning from work. The state can and must institute and implement policies to help women overcome such hurdles. Once in the workplace, they are not seen naturally as contenders for leadership, even when deserving, qualified and experienced, and those that do rise through the ranks do so, by breaking "glass ceilings".