India's Reform Journey Revisited - Mahima Vashisht, Womaning in India

What is one reform that India needs today?

I am not an economist. I'm a storyteller, and what I do is I interview real women of India and I tell their stories and how the gender roles, gender stereotypes, biases, and policies have affected their lives. One essential conclusion that I've come to is that the line between the personal and professional space is very, very blurred. Your personal life has a very deep impact on your professional life. Labor force participation of women is, not entirely, but very heavily influenced by gender roles at home.

One of the biggest changes in a woman's life comes when she becomes a mother. That is the point at which many women fall out of the labor force as well, and the numbers I'm sure will support that conclusion. Why does that happen? Because primary care, giving responsibility for children, lies heavily on the mother. This responsibility, I would argue, is not as natural as it is humanly made or constructed.

In the olden times, the village would raise the children, but now these days, in terms of nuclear families, the disproportionate burden of caregiving for children and elders falls on the women of the house. At the time of birth, when you give six months of compulsory leave to women, which is, by the way, great for Indian women in terms of the women across the world who have to come to work two days after giving birth, one month after giving birth, which is just inhuman, in those times, it's a great policy, I think, but, of course, it has also had unintended consequences of more biases against hiring women at the workplace because it is costlier to hire [women.

That also leads to the reinforcement of these gender roles at home because the mother is at home for the first six months of the child's life. The roles that the couple falls into in these six months is basically the roles that will continue for life. As women fall into this life-long role of being the primary caregiver for children, they'll fall out of the workplace participation. According to me a huge reform that's needed is compulsory and equal paternity leave for men.

Now, how we fund it and what are the modalities, whether it'll be state-sponsored or company-sponsored, are details to be worked out for sure, and those are not easy questions to answer, but we have to find an answer whereby we put men in a position where they are able to take on equal caregiving responsibilities at home, which will lead to, in my opinion, a much more equitable workplaces for women in India. That, according to me, is the number one reform which will have a huge impact on women's labor force participation.