|
|
|
|
Women work their way up in
India
By Priyanka Bhardwaj
NEW DELHI - The past few years have seen a
tremendous resurgence of female workers in India.
Working women - whether single or married - are
clearly earning more and spending more, which is
why corporate and marketing strategies are
increasingly being fashioned to target women.
Unlike the Chinese economy, which is
driven by low-cost manufacturing, India's
services-led economy has been of advantage to
women. A well-educated workforce,
information-technology competence and
English-language proficiency have resulted in the
growth of IT-enabled services - software, business
process outsourcing, multimedia, network
management, and systems integration. These are
also areas where reasonably educated women are
able to fit in, unlike in manufacturing.
Women are also increasingly filling
positions in hospitality, tourism, health, market
research and education. They are estimated to
account for 20-25% of white-collar workers in
software, IT-enabled services such as call
centers, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, market
research, financial services and
advertising-marketing-media, up from 10% in the
1980s. In pharmaceuticals, women account for a
fourth of the workforce. In IT-enabled services,
good pay, flexible hours, glamour and safe and
clean working environments have drawn women in
large numbers, so much so that the gender ratio in
this sector now stands at 1:1.
Of the
200,000 mainly service-sector vacancies filled via
job portal naukri.com last year, 70,000 were
women; a quarter of the 3 million resumes on
monster.com belong to women. On an average, top IT
companies such as Wipro, HCL Technologies, Sun
Microsystems, Oracle India and Infosys employ one
woman for every five men. In the five years
between 1997-98 and 2002-03, the number of female
officers in scheduled commercial banks in India
has increased by more than 40%, from 16,719 to
23,411. According to predictions of IT industry
body NASSCOM (National Association of Software and
Service Companies), the male-female ratio in IT
jobs will be 65:35 by the end of 2005.
In
India's cities, single women are increasingly
making up the second-largest group of home-buyers,
though their size is still small compared with the
number of mortgage loans availed by men. In the
West, single women have already overtaken single
men in terms of mortgage loans. Indian private
banks, quick to sense a new business opportunity,
have brought out specialized products to cater to
the new clientele. ABN Amro Bank and Citibank have
designed special women's accounts that cater to
the investment requirements of the female
investor, offering benefits such as free
consultancy and advice, reduced minimum balance,
breaks in process fees and even lower interest
rates on loans.
According to a recent
survey by Business Today, ACNielsen and ORG-Marg,
working women are slowly becoming a lucrative
target group for a large number of products and
services, including apparel, grooming services,
financial products, consumer goods, and even
leisure and entertainment. The survey reveals that
working women generally contribute more than 56%
of their salaries to the household, keeping 10% to
spend on themselves and saving the remaining 34%,
with 78% of them owning independent sole accounts.
Women are seen as generally more risk-averse than
their male counterparts and are more often
assessed as less likely to default on their loan
repayments. Naturally, they constitute an
important market segment for banks.
The
overall statistics, too, indicate that more and
more women are seeking to enter the workforce.
Female literacy levels have risen to 54% as per
the 2001 census, compared with 40% in 1991.
Management institutes are reporting larger
proportion of female students. The enrollment of
women in higher education went up from 33% in 1991
to 40% in 2001. Working women now form 15% of the
total urban female population of 150 million.
Women as workers
India's private
sector, especially the IT sector, is keen on
hiring women as they are seen to possess a high
degree of interpersonal and analytical skills,
creativity and integrity. They are considered more
loyal and fair and less aggressive then men, more
hard-working, and generally do not have the habit
of scooting with unpaid credit card bills. The
earlier handicap of post-marriage dropout has been
largely mitigated with flexible working hours.
Corporate human-resource policymakers are even
working on the work-from-home option for women in
certain special cases.
Several women have
made it to the top in corporate circles. Arnavaj
Aga (Thermax), Sulaija Firodia Motwani (Kinetic
Engineering), Lalita Gupte (ICICI Bank), Naina Lal
Kidwai (HSBC Bank), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon),
and Ranjana Kumar, the first woman to head a
public-sector bank, are just a few to name. But
the list is still not too long and definitely not
representative enough of the growing female
workforce. According to Lalita Gupte, only a few
women have broken the glass ceiling and entered
the boardrooms. "The creation of more role models
will bring more women into senior management," she
said.
But the BT-ORG-Marg-Nielsen survey
also finds that a third of Indian working women do
not have any kind of insurance; only 15% have a
credit card; 95% park their money in savings
accounts; and just 15% have availed of a loan of
any kind. Indeed, it's still a long way to go for
India's working women.
Priyanka
Bhardwaj is a New Delhi-based writer.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
Asian Sex Gazette South Asian Sex News
|
|
|
