 There are many different things that affect the ability of women to get involved in paid employment, not just the fact that they have to engage in all the unpaid labour. There are legal, social, cultural and other constraints as well. But it's also something that drives the ability to move up in your chosen occupation. And this affects women across all different kinds of activities. This is a circular process. It is that also women then assume that they are really meant only for these activities or they only look for jobs in these activities because that's where women are. So that the idea that you could be in unconventional work or in the non-traditional types of employment is very difficult for a lot of not just young women but even their employers to accept. And it's not just the women themselves or the employers but it's the entire social structure around you. It is the family, it is the community, it's the availability of transport to and from the workplace. It is the public systems that enable certain kinds of work or employment. And all of that is geared to pushing women into particular activities which once they're clustered into them, they become low wage occupations and then the wage penalty exists even for the male workers. All over the world occupational segregation has increased over time, over the last few decades. It hasn't gone down, it has increased. And this occupational segmentation, within that you might find that the gender wage gaps within a particular occupation have reduced but overall they haven't. And what's even more striking is that education does not reduce it. Some of this has to do with the constraints of housework as well. Claudia Golden has done studies which show that even within occupations those who can work longer hours and certain hours in particular are much more likely to be higher paid and more valued by the employers. Whereas once you have household responsibilities and care responsibilities you need to be home at a certain time, you cannot be available for extra work, you can't do things that some of the men can. There are many other reasons why there's this famous glass ceiling that is talked about so much. It's not just the ability to do certain kinds of work which then get you more valued by employers. It's also that there's male resentment. Women are much less likely to be bosses because a lot of men will say we don't want to be bossed around by a woman. We don't want to have to report to a woman, say in finance and consultancy and so on. But also it's not just these social and cultural features. There's a lot of legal discrimination. There's still the case in most parts of the world that there are activities that women are simply barred from, forbidden. And they are not related only to physical characteristics. In fact, if you look at the map of the world you will find that the majority of the countries are still places which forbid women from engaging in particular occupations or activities. And when you go deep down into it you will find it's not about the physical characteristics. Sometimes it's supposedly out of concern for the physical security of women. But instead of saying we will ensure physical security, we will make sure that there are street lights everywhere. We will make sure that there are adequate patrols. You say, well, don't go into those things because that's a risk to you. And so because we care about your personal safety we are going to forbid you. When jobs are more difficult, more arduous, more strenuous, it's usually the job of women. It's not necessarily the physical characteristic of the job. But it's also the case that since women are more likely to be in informal work they have to do a whole range of things that are extremely arduous in which there is zero protection provided. As we find that there's more and more informal work across the world there's less and less legal and social protection for women. In large parts of the world that was always the case that women were dominantly in informal work and so they never had legal or social protection and they also had much less access to social security. And one of the reasons for that is because also they dominate in part-time work which has less likelihood of being covered by all of these benefits. Again, women choose part-time work because of all those household responsibilities or the care work that they are required to perform. And as a result they end up with more irregular working hours. Sometimes even longer working hours even in the paid work. And then of course have to do the unpaid work back home. Now this in turn has very, very specific implications for the ability for upward mobility. Because a lot of the jobs that women do don't really have that inherent tendency towards either learning by doing or improvement in conditions over time. And so seniority is not seen as an advantage. Seniority is seen as a disadvantage. And one of the classic examples of this is in the healthcare sector. Approximately 70% of all healthcare workers are women. But here's the thing, even in the health sector, they are mostly at the low wage end. They are at the front line. They are nurses, midwives, community health workers. We are looking to testing at least 2,000 people today. So in India we have an extraordinary concept of public health workers called ASHA. ASHA is an acronym for Accredited Social Health Activist. Okay, not a worker, an activist, but accredited. And the word ASHA means hope in Hindi. So it's a cruel acronym because these ASHAs are not considered as workers. In some cases, they don't even get any official wage. They get rewarded according to the specific duties they perform, like if they encourage people to get inoculated or if they take babies for their checkups. But as a result, they are getting approximately one-tenth of what the lowest paid male public worker would get. So the state itself is not recognizing them as workers. Now, what's happened across the world during this pandemic is that the ones who are most at risk are front-line workers. And in many countries, not only India, these front-line workers are not seen as public employees. They don't seem to get any of the benefits. Forget the social protection. They don't even get legal protection. They haven't during the pandemic even got the basic protection that you would require to prevent getting ill yourself. Because there have been in large parts of the developing world significant cuts in public spending. Many workers have not even been paid for several months. It's extraordinary that in a health crisis, health workers are not getting a due. And why is that? It's because they are seen as not really expendable, but generally available. If it's not done by this woman, you will find another woman who is available to do it, not only because there's so much unemployment, but because that's what women do. Women look after others. Women do the caring. And so it's all right to exploit to the maximum possible because they will be available for their families, their communities, and so on. As capitalism relies on the fact that there will be some people willing to make some sacrifices for the care of others and therefore implement certain accumulation strategies. So also our societies have grown inured to this fact. And we even get outraged when they don't deliver, when they're not available 24-7 in periods of crisis because of the assumption that this is essentially what women will do. And if you go up the ladder, if you go up to specialists and, you know, surgeons and other more specialized and highly paid activities, it's dominantly men. Again, this is not really only the result of medical education because increasingly you're getting more and more women going in for specialized medical education as well. It's just that despite that you end up with this very top-heavy presence of men at the top of the ladder and a disproportionate presence of women at the bottom of the ladder. There's a lot of economic analysis devoted to trying to understand why there are gender wage gaps. And the typical thing to do is to decompose the wage gap into what is called the explained part and the unexplained part. So the explained part is what they call attributes, okay? Age, experience, skill, education. The idea is that, well, workers will be paid more according to when they're older, they tend to get more wages. If they have more experience, if they have a high level of education, if they have a particular skill, then they will be paid more. So those will be attributes. And then the unexplained part, which you can't explain with these attributes, that's the part which they call discrimination. And across the world, it's found on average the two are kind of equal, that there's an equal significance of both. But if anything, the discrimination part, which used to be around half of the difference, it's been coming down a bit. I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. I think the distinction between the two is analytically flawed. Surely the fact that women have less skill or less education is an aspect of discrimination. So I don't believe that we can really say gender wage gaps, the discrimination part has come down, because that's only if you take a very, very narrow view of discrimination. When you say that it's only precisely for that job that this employer is discriminating against this woman versus another, a man. The older you get, the more likely you are to actually have a lower wage as a woman than an equivalent man worker. This works largely because of what has been called the motherhood penalty. Women take on average a decade more time out of the workforce. That's going to impact. Because women take time off to be mothers, they face worse labour market conditions. Their careers get interrupted. When they re-enter the workforce, they find it much harder either to get a job again or to get a similar job. They've lost all those years of work experience when they were having the babies and looking after the children. And therefore, they're not as attractive to employers as they would have been. You know, there was a study done in Denmark between 1980 and 2013. They tracked a bunch of women. And they found that after the first child, there's a dramatic drop in women's earnings. And they never really recover. So 10 years after the first child in that study, women with children were earning nearly a quarter less than women without children. So that 10-year period meant that they had lost a quarter of their earnings. Whereas for men, there was no difference at all whether they had children or not. So really, that wage penalty is a penalty for motherhood. The other really striking thing that came out from this Danish study is that between the first part of the period, 1980, and the end, the part of the gender wage gap that you could explain because of this motherhood penalty had doubled. It was 40% in 1980 and it was 80% in 2013. So in this period of, you know, greater global integration and all of these things, and supposedly greater gender awareness, women were going to suffer to a greater extent by having children in terms of what they would lose in earned income over their lifetime. The idea of the double burden, you know, really, if you do not have the ability to hire in some of those goods and services, you can buy more processed food, you can mechanize some of the housework, you can buy labor-saving equipment, you can hire people to do care work or cleaning work. If you can't afford to do any of these things, then you have to be superwomen. And the real superwomen are not the more professional, more highly paid ones who can afford to outsource some of these things. The real superwomen are the ones who cannot afford to do that and have to go back and do all of those things in addition to doing their paid work. The usual complaint is that these women are not working hard enough or they're less reliable or they're always taking days off because a child is ill or that kind of thing. So you can see how the very structure of the labor market is, first of all, designed to ensure that it's the woman who's responsible for all of the care work. And secondly, that when they do that care work, they're penalized. We often think of safety at work and in fact, I think there's now more and more awareness of the possibilities of sexual harassment, of different kinds of gender-based violence at work, and different kinds of exploitation at work. And of course, it extends, as we now know, from the Me Too movement. We know that it extends all the way from relatively unskilled and less high-profile activities to the very extremely high-profile and well-paid activities. We know that these are real and common and can dramatically affect women's work possibilities and life chances. But the commute part is much less talked about. And again, it's one of those things when you think about it, public policy doesn't bother really very much to ensure that commutes, the going from your home to your place of work and returning are safe, secure, easy and manageable for women who also have to do a double burden of work at home. How does it feel for you? I see you're traveling with your baby. Perhaps you do that quite often. How does it feel for you as a woman, traveling with your little one and the incidents that we've seen now regarding taxi rapes? As a woman and I'm going with my baby, I don't feel safe because I don't know if I will go where I'm going and be safe or arrive safe with my baby or something will happen. Commute times are becoming more and more significant, especially because there are other changes going on in economies, different kinds of zoning restrictions, different kinds of residential patterns where the rich tend to make themselves into little enclaves where they don't have to mix too much with poorer sections, which have made commuting times for work longer and longer. And often less safe for women. There's another whole aspect of work that we haven't really considered yet and that's self-employment. In developing countries, around half of all workers are self-employed and many, many women are self-employed. The difficulties are often even greater when they're self-employed. Now, why is that? Well, first, because women have less assets, there are many reasons why legal, social, cultural reasons, why women inherit less than men, why they're less able to create assets and benefit from them in their lifetime. Overall, they have less assets. They're also less able to access output markets, many constraints in terms of the ability to sell and less ability to even access input markets. There are often many government programs for specific inputs. There are often other arrangements which are very male. Officialdom also remember is very male. So dealing with all of this male officialdom or even peers, it's very complicated and it means that women are much less likely to benefit from government schemes. Then again, whether legally or culturally, they often require male permission for many activities. So you can't just say I plan to do the following thing or I plan to access the following inputs. You need male permission. So you'd have to have a man as an intermediary which in turn means you're dependent on that man which also means you would possibly lose some of your income as a cut to that man even if he's your husband or some other male member of the household. But nonetheless, you don't have that freedom on autonomy which the man does even in terms of the self-employment. That in turn means they have less ability to access credit. I can think of many developing countries. I can think of my own city of Delhi where I have gone with relatively poor women to open bank accounts and the bank managers have been completely dismissive and said, well, you can't even open a bank account. Not even asking for credit. They just want to open a bank account. They want to put money in the bank and it's very difficult because they're not taken seriously. All businesses require credit. Working capital credit at least. And if you cannot get it from a bank or an institutional credit source, you have to go to a private money lender or some informal creditor and so you end up paying much more. So your costs are already much higher than the equivalent man who can get bank credit. Microfinance was supposed to be a big solution to this and how does that work? It works through this thing called group lending. That is to say, women form groups and that group together gets a loan. And the idea is that peer pressure will make sure that everyone repays and that particular point works. Microfinance has very high rates of repayment because yes, peer pressure is very strong and all the other women in your group are going to make your life miserable if you don't repay. So yes, it does. But the terms of microfinance turn out to be extremely difficult and damaging. In most of the developing world, the interest rates are anywhere between 20% to 60% per year. 20% to 60% per year. Imagine that's the kind of interest rate you're paying and they're usually very small amounts and you have to repay within a few months. Can you imagine any of our big software entrepreneurs who've all relied on lots of venture capital to succeed? Can you imagine any of them managing on terms like this? So clearly, microfinance is not meant for productive investment. It's not designed to help women actually create viable economic activities because the terms are simply impossible. All it does, therefore, it ends up doing what is called consumption smoothing. You need to make a big expenditure for something, a health cost or a child's wedding or education or something. You need a big expenditure. You use the microfinance and then you try and repay it over time. Microfinance gives such terrible terms that it cannot serve as an alternative to normal or institutional credit. And so the very idea that we can posit that as a solution to women microentrepreneurship, that's terrible. So we find, again, this is not just in developing countries across the world. Women-run enterprises, on average, are smaller and they face higher costs. They're also much more affected by these inadequate public facilities that I've been talking about. Street trading is a classic example. It's hugely affected, for example, by street lighting, by the possibility of physical violence or harassment, not just by people around you, but by officialdom, by petty officials down on the ground, by the availability of toilets, which are easily accessible and clean and reasonably safe. UNICEF estimates that half of all rapes could be prevented if there was better access to toilets. As in so many shocking cases, Saroj, from a village in Northern India with no access to an indoor toilet, was set upon when she was forced to go outside. I think I mentioned lack of assets. A lot of that has to do with property rights structures. So there's a very strong tendency to be patriarchal in handing down property. And unless there are legal restrictions from preventing it, in other words, it's not just enough to allow women to. You have to make sure there are clear reasons why you will not inherit. Because in most societies, it's found that whenever you allow women to inherit property, it doesn't follow that they do. It's still that the male children are preferred inheritors. And this is down the line. It's not just among the rich, it's also among the poor. And that, of course, then determines all the other things that I had mentioned, the lack of assets, the less ability to access credit, less ability to start your own enterprise, all of those things. But there are other legal restrictions as well. There was a study done by the World Bank, actually, which found that across the world, women had only about 3 fourths of the rights that men had. So the ability to even get into a small enterprise to do self-employment, all of those things are affected by these legal constraints which do not allow you to benefit from things that your brother can. In general, it's been found wherever there are surveys that women earn approximately half what men do from self-employment. Again, it's not about physical attributes. It's not about skill. It's not about age. It's not about any of these things. It's all about these various constraints, legal, social, cultural and economic, which are put on women to prevent them from being able to be on a level playing field economically with men. So what does all this tell us? In a way, I think what it shows is that women are the most basic form of what Marx had called the reserve army of labor. Basically, Marx said that the reserve army of labor is this very useful thing for capitalism. It's all the workers who are not employed. And their very existence acts as a wonderful bargaining tactic for employers. In other words, capitalism needs that reserve army because it can keep workers under control. It can be a very important disciplining device for those who are employed. You can say that don't dare ask for higher wages, don't dare ask for better conditions because if you do, there are all these other workers willing to take your job. And of course, we've seen how this plays out not just nationally but internationally. Today, employers can tell their workers who are demanding better conditions and higher work that if you don't behave yourself, we will move to Mexico or Guatemala and you will lose your job. So you better not demand all these conditions and higher wages. But women are, in a sense, the quintessential available reserve army. Marx defined them as having three characteristics that it's latent. And of course, that's absolutely typical for women because they will be doing their household responsibilities, their care work. But they can be made available to work when capitalism requires, just as they were during the war in the US, just as they were in East Asia during export-oriented industrialization. They're also, the second feature, stagnant, which is to say that they don't really have huge income opportunities themselves. They're just available. They're latent and they're stagnant and they're floating. They can float into paid work. They can be pushed back out of it. And that's a huge advantage for capitalism. Remember, I'm not saying that this was a creation of capitalism because that's what we've seen, that it predates capitalism. In fact, patriarchal divisions even predate slavery. But what it does do is enable capitalism to make use of it in a way that really benefits its own strategies for worker control and its own ability to extract more and more surplus from different kinds of productive activities. And of course, it does that through these segmented labor markets that I've mentioned. It does that from the fact that women get clustered into low-age occupations. More and more young women get sent out to work when there's more poverty among families. It does that by enabling life cycle pressures to bring women in and then push them out of the workforce as it requires. And it cements the role of women as insecure, low-paid, subordinate workers. The implicit attitude is of women who can be brought in or expelled from jobs depending on employer's requirements and that it's all right to give them worse conditions. It's all right to give them lower wages. It's all right not to promise them secure employment. Now, this works obviously within economies. It works for private employers. It works for public employers. I've already talked about how the government of India is doing it, but there are other governments in South Africa and Brazil and many other countries where this is happening. It works globally through the relocation of production and through the relocation of workers. So there are many ways in which this reserve army of labor plays out and in which globalization has added to that process because these are not just processes that make that particular activity cheaper, but they underwrite a lot of other costs. They underwrite the entire accumulation process in the advanced countries. Again, something which people don't really think about. They don't recognize it even as a major issue and certainly public policy doesn't recognize it either. And that's what I'm going to take up in the next lecture. The many ways in which public policy is not just gender blind. It's not blind, it sees it, but it uses those gender differences to its own advantage and to cheapen its own needs for public spending.