Learnings from the Echidna Global Scholar Program: Building a deeper understanding of the problem of low female labor force participation

In the second half of 2021, I took a sabbatical from being CEO of Mentor Together and became an Echidna Global Scholar in residence at the Centre for Universal Education at Brookings Institution, in Washington DC. During my residency, I authored a policy brief on the role of digital mentoring in unlocking the economic potential of young women in India, based on our work at Mentor Together. While the policy brief was the more prominent output of my time away, the personal and professional learnings that this period generated was just as invaluable.

Here’s an attempt to distil some of the ways the fellowship was so incredible. I intended to write a single post with 5 learnings, but my very first learning became so lengthy, that I decided to instead share one learning per post :)

Understanding the key issues underlying low female labor force participation amongst young women in tertiary education : the intersectional, cumulative impact of a skills deficit, a network gap, restrictive gender norms

In 2020, we started a gender-focused version of our digital mentoring program ‘Mentor To Go’, targeting young women studying in Universities. The problem statement was clear – India’s female labor force participation (FLFP) had fallen to about 22 percent even before the covid-19 pandemic, and is less than half the rate of FLFP in other low-and-middle income countries.

Unpacking exactly what underlies this low rate was more complex to nail down. There are myriad drivers of low FLFP in any cross-section of population you pick up in India. I remember Jenn, our fellowship director, nudging me from the time I made the first outline of my policy brief, to identify the specific problems that impacted the particular demographic of young women we worked with.

 The answer lay in the intersection of understanding evidence from secondary literature and understanding the lives of our mentees. I started the fellowship with the latter, and built a much stronger understanding of the former. I spent the entire first month of my fellowship furiously reading and indexing my findings (for which Roam became an invaluable companion) to start to pick up patterns.

India’s low FLFP is a topic that has been and continues to be written about, analysed, and debated, extensively. I hadn’t until the fellowship taken a wider lens to just studying the problem in depth. There were so many things to take away:

1.    Female labor force participation in a country is hypothesized to follow U-shaped curve as the economy develops, a theory first proposed in 1965. The theory posits that when a country’s economy is first in its agrarian state, women are involved in a range of home and farm-based work. As the economy becomes more industrialised, and jobs move to factories, the nature of jobs available leads to women’s participation declining. Later as the economy moves towards a greater services sector and women’s education levels rise, their labor force participation is also expected to increase.   

2.    While this U-shaped hypothesis holds true in several countries, India has bucked the trend despite a growing economy and increasing levels of education amongst women.

Source: Unlocking young women’s economic potential through digital mentoring in India, Brookings Institution

 In the last 30 years, despite significant economic growth that increased gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 73 percent, and a dramatic 678 percent increase in women’s access to tertiary education with nearly one in three women in India in the tertiary education age-group currently studying, overall female labor force participation plunged by more than 42 percent—a loss of two out of every five women working.

While female labor force participation increases for women with tertiary education (34%), the disparity with male labor force participation (81%) for those with tertiary education is striking, especially when we consider that young men and women participate in tertiary education in roughly equal numbers: there are 19 million young men and 19 million young women in tertiary education today.

3.    For this subsection of young women with tertiary education who aspire for jobs mostly in India’s services sector, the low FLFP rates includes those even active in the labor force, looking for jobs. So while there are many bottlenecks and problems to solve in job creation in India, I started to understand the demand side issues instead – i.e. challenges that could uniquely constrain young women from being active in the labor force. From a range of readings that I found very, very insightful and easily digestible (especially as someone who doesn’t read academic papers everyday), I built my hypothesis:

Young women in tertiary education face the triple impact of three intersecting challenges: a skills deficit, a network gap, and restrictive gender norms. 

Deficit of 21st century work- readiness skills: The knowledge and skills that young women gain through the formal education curriculum do not prepare them for the jobs of the future. Tertiary curriculums rarely address eight of the ten skills employers value most, which relate to problem-solving, self-management, and working with people. The lack of work-readiness skills is exacerbated by other wellbeing deficits that women uniquely face. In India’s highly patriarchal society, women often have little self-efficacy in terms of their life pathways. The process of ‘learning’ gender results in most young women silencing their voice and expression as they grow up to preserve relationships, which impacts their overall wellbeing.

Small networks that limit access to role models and career information: The low FLFP means that young women are just not surrounded by large numbers of working women. The lack of role models can limit aspirations and lower belief in personal ability.

Restrictive gender norms: Social norms defining a woman’s role as primarily that of a caregiver is considered one of the main factors discouraging FLFP in India. In urban areas, women’s participation in the labor force drops off in their early to mid-twenties, when marriage and family-related responsibilities tend to increase. Unlike other countries, where women often re-enter the workforce later, in India FLFP is low across the age-span, which suggests that the effects of such norms on the behavior and choices of women persists.

This intuitively made sense to me and also checked out from the lived experiences of young women in our programs, that I collected in interviews.

Young women, especially from economically marginalized families where they’re the first ones to pursue tertiary education, feel unprepared for the skills they know are essential for future job success:

“I studied in a government setup and in vernacular medium up to 12th. So when I joined college, everything changed ….. I was very poor at English. I can understand it, but I did not have the confidence to reply in English. At that time, I felt shame and felt very bad. So I was waiting for a chance to learn…”(Mentee, 20, Telangana)

They’ve chosen undergraduate streams most often based on academic grades, and don’t really know much about career paths that align to these or that can be explored. And don’t know many people who can tell them more about these aspects:

“I know it (a career) will be in commerce generally, but which post or which career should I be in? I was confused in that. And I felt that if I get guidance from a specialist who is in that field, I may get good guidance. It will not confuse me, or I won’t have to think whether this person knows about that field or not.” (Mentee, 19, Maharashtra)

 And as they look ahead to their careers, the ticking clock of marriage and building a family starts to loom.

“I don't have much time. Because in India in general, most girls get married at 23 or 24. In my family sometimes 20, 21. But I've been given a chance from my parents that yes, you can do post-graduate, and after that you get a job. And then you will get married. So I have got very little time.“ – (Mentee, 19, Maharashtra)

I remember feeling a moment of calm amidst all my frenzied reading, when these three things of skills, networks, and norms, suddenly crystalized from my notes, almost like three principal characters coming forward in a tableau. I knew everything else in the background was still very important and would play a role as more data emerged, but I had a strong central premise of what held young women back.

Next, so I had understood the problem more expansively. Would mentoring, a resource-intensive, hard to scale model, designed for one-to-one support, be able to tackle this much more complex set of inter-related problems? In my next post, how the fellowship helped me build a more expansive theory of change for digital mentoring.