Falling female labour force participation in Kerala: Empirical evidence of discouragement?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1564-913X.2015.00251.x
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Shalina Susan MATHEW

International Labour Review, Vol. 154 (2015), No. 4

Copyright © The author 2015

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2015

* Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics, email: shalinamathew@gmail.com.

The research for this article was carried out during the author’s post-doctoral fellowship at the In-

dian Statistical Institute, Bangalore Centre, in 2013 –14. The comments of Madhura Swaminathan,

V.K. Ramachandran (Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore) and Vathsala Narasimhan (University

of Hyderabad) on an earlier draft are gratefully acknowledged.

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and

publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Falling female labour force participation

in Kerala: Empirical evidence

of discouragement?

Shalina Susan MATHEW*

Abstract. India’s female employment and labour force participation have been

declining since the mid-200 0s. Kerala, traditionally its best-performing state on

these indicators, has done worse than the country as a whole. This article exam-

ines the shifts that occurred in Kerala’s female employment and participation be-

tween 2004 and 2 012, by household income level, age group, level of education

and occupational category. Those dropping out of the labour market are typically

young, educated women qualied for professional occupations, suggesting a dis-

couragement effect exacerbated by widening gender pay differentials in top occu-

pations. These shifts have obliterated some of the hitherto dening features of

Kerala’s labour market.

A

disquieting feature of the labour market in India – and in South Asia

more generally – has been the relatively low labour force participation

of women, and its further decline in recent years. Studies on the region point

to an array of complex, often interconnected forces driving female labour force

participation down, including not only socio-cultural norms, but also economic,

human capital and demographic determinants. Against this background, this

article examines the changing labour market dynamics of female employment

in urban Kerala.

Kerala makes an interesting case study indeed. On the strength of its

historically impressive accomplishments in social and human development,

this state in south-western India gained a place of prominence in the develop-

ment discourse as the “Kerala model of development” (UN-DESA, 1975). Its

performance on indicators of human well-being was not only far ahead of the

International Labour Review498

national averages despite its slower economic growth, but also comparable with

that of many middle-income countries.1 While Kerala’s development trajec-

tory thus deviated from the conventional path of economic growth leading to

human development, it had in fact been conditioned by a wide range of unique

socio-political, cultural and historical processes.2 Their development outcomes

are still reected in the state’s low levels of infant mortality, long life expec-

tancy, high levels of literacy, a sex ratio favourable to females, and low popu-

lation growth (currently below the replacement rate). These accomplishments

were hailed as a classic case of “welfare by public intervention” (Sato, 2004),

whereby public action and state provisioning of public goods and basic needs

offered an alternative path towards social development, despite low economic

growth (Drèze and Sen, 1997).

These socio-demographic advances created an environment conducive to

women’s entry into the paid activities in the market on a considerable scale.

While their educational attainments equipped them to seek work in highly

paid service occupations, the state’s socio-demographic progress provided fur-

ther stimulus to their labour market attachment. This resulted in remarkably

high rates of female labour force participation, particularly among higher edu-

cated women, by comparison with the rest of the country. Even among higher

educated women across India, participation was lower, highlighting the inu-

ence of factors other than education and earnings in determining women’s

economic decisions.

Since 2004, however, female labour force participation in Kerala has

trended downwards, as it has done throughout India. Comparatively, it is the

magnitude of the decline and its spread across the female workforce that set

Kerala apart. In an attempt to understand the dynamics underlying Kerala’s

departure from its long-term trend of high female labour force participation,

the remainder of this article is organized into ve sections. The rst provides

some background that contextualizes recent labour market developments, and

the second briey presents the data sources and concepts used in the study.

The third section comparatively examines the compositional shifts in female

employment and labour force participation in India and Kerala by level of

household expenditure, educational attainment, and age, while the fourth sec-

tion analyses the occupational characteristics of Kerala’s female employment.

The fth section concludes with a summary of the study’s main ndings.

1 In the absence of strong economic growth to sustain its social development and welfare

policies, debates were raised on the sustainability of the Kerala model in the long run. Kerala’s ex-

perience was thus referred to as a “paradox of development”, the “paradox of social development

and economic backwardness”, “lopsided development” and so on (Chakraborty, 2005; George, 199 8;

Government of Kerala, 2006; Kannan, 2005; Panikar and Soman, 1984; Tharamangalam, 1998). Such

concerns abated when Kerala’s economy started to gain momentum in the 1980s (Ahluwalia, 2002 ;

Chakraborty, 20 05; Government of Kerala, 2006; Jeromi, 2003; Kannan, 2005; Pushpangadan, 2 003).

By the 1990s, however, Kerala had embarked on a high-growth phase which peaked in the 2000s,

when its economy grew at a rate higher than the national average.

2 For a detailed historical account, see Ramachandran (1997).