Editor’s Pick

Inspire Inclusion

March 2024 is here, and it arrives with a celebration of the Women’s History Month as well as the International Women’s Day. The theme for this year, ‘Inspire Inclusion’, urges us to take action towards gender parity. As the world celebrates International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, let us browse through the SPRF archive and take a closer look at how policy making shapes the lives of women in India.

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Valuing Unpaid Work: Women’s Role in Care Economies

Care work, broadly defined as the provision of physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental support to individuals, plays a pivotal role in society. It encompasses a wide spectrum of activities, from direct and personal care tasks like nursing an ill family member to indirect duties such as cooking and cleaning . . . Unpaid care work, predominantly shouldered by women, carries immense importance for economies on both direct and indirect levels.

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Gendering Work from Home: An Analysis of the Visible and Invisible Women Workforce in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Phrases like ‘remote work’ or ‘work from home’ are primarily found in conjunction with the pandemic-induced ‘new normal’. It is generally assumed that the origin of the work-from-home employment relationship lies solely in the pandemic. However, when evaluated from a gendered perspective, work from home emerges as neither a novelty nor a temporary make-shift stint to facilitate social distancing protocols. For women, the concept of home as a workstation has been a long-standing patriarchal reality.

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Women’s Experiences of Climate Change: Notes from a Village in Rural Nainital

The state, famously home to the revolutionary Chipko Movement and its forest conservation objectives, has also become part of the ecofeminism discourse. While two prominent men led the movement, it was Uttarakhand’s women who were most affected by the loss of forests in the state. . . There is a saying in the state’s Kumaoni language that roughly translates to, “the jungle is a woman’s maternal home”. The expression shows the cultural interlink between a pahari woman’s identity and the forest.

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Distress or Growth?: Exploring the Recent Trends in Women’s Labour Force Participation

The female labour force participation rate in India, its drivers and patterns, has been a much-discussed topic . . . Typically, increasing employment rates and decreasing unemployment rates signify an improving labour market. However, given the unprecedented economic and other hardships during the pandemic period (CEDA & CMIE, 2022), the current data prompts a pertinent inquiry of whether India’s employment growth process reflects economic prosperity, which this discussion paper seeks to explore.

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Understanding the Socioeconomic Conditions of Fisherwomen in the Fish Supply Chain of Northern Andhra Pradesh

“The Indian fishing industry is a rapidly growing sector, with Andhra Pradesh contributing significantly to it. The paper shows the crucial link the fisherwomen of Andhra Pradesh play in the supply chain within this industry. The paper covers the challenges women face in post-harvest fishing tasks . . . It also identifies opportunities to enhance the income and working conditions of the fisherwomen within this informal system.”

Editor's pick curated by team SPRF