This book explores the paradox of women’s paid and unpaid work in India. It examines key themes including historical discourses, macroeconomic policies, employment trends, issues of tribal areas, public services and infrastructure, climate change and gendered migration and vulnerability of girl children. It highlights the play of gender norms, resource rights, identities and agency in women’s work. Building on feminist theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses from microstudies, the volume offers fresh perspectives for research and policy on women’s work in the Global South. A timely intervention, this multidisciplinary book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political economy, labour studies, women’s/gender studies, public policy, economics, development studies, sociology, South Asian studies and Global South studies. It will interest planners, policymakers, gender advocates, civil society organisations, human rights bodies and international organisations working towards ensuring gender equality and women’s rights.

This book presents research findings from across the global South that substantively improves our understanding of time-use, poverty and gender equalities, to shed light on why unpaid work is indispensable to economic analysis and effective policy making.

The report analyses the ways in which unpaid care work is recognised and organised, the extent and quality of care jobs and their impact on the well-being of individuals and society. A key focus of this report is the persistent gender inequalities in households and the labour market, which are inextricably linked with care work. These gender inequalities must be overcome to make care work decent and to ensure a future of decent work for both women and men. The report contains a wealth of original data drawn from over 90 countries and details transformative policy measures in five main areas: care, macroeconomics, labour, social protection and migration. It also presents projections on the potential for decent care job creation offered by remedying current care work deficits and meeting the related targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The sixth volume in the Rethinking India series, in collaboration with the Samruddha Bharat Foundation, looks at the reality of gender equality in the country against the promises of justice and equality made in the Constitution of India. What it finds is that even today, India remains an unequal country and that women control, at best, about 10-15 per cent of economic and political resources. While there has been progress in some areas, in many other areas there has been very little and uneven change. One of the main reasons for this slow progress is that social norms that assign particular roles and identities to men and women are 'sticky' and hard to change. In India, a highly patriarchal society, these norms give very little power to women and, consequently, they have little control or influence over decisions taken within their households, in markets or in political spaces. Challenging the status quo can cause a backlash, leading to high levels of violence against women in the domestic sphere, the workplace and in public places. If we are to see a more safe, just and equal society by 2047, a hundred years after Independence, it cannot be business as usual. Her Right to Equality argues that what we require is disruptive change through individual and collective leadership and action.

This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made? Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind. Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.

Across the world, unpaid care work - unpaid housework, care of persons, and "volunteer" work - is done predominantly by women. This book presents and compares unpaid care work patterns in seven different countries. It analyzes data drawn from large-scale time use surveys carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). With its in-depth concentration on time use patterns in developing nations, this book will offer many new insights for scholars of gender and care.

Despite years of growth in the number of women in paid work, gender roles in unpaid housework have remained remarkably rigid. Unpaid housework can be outsourced to non-care household service providers, such as cleaners or housekeepers, however, high prices, a substantial tax burden and a lack of easy access impose barriers to greater formalisation of the household service sector.

Offers a novel take on the purpose of labour law and connects constitutional ideals with the objective of labour law.

"Families around the world look, feel, and live differently today. Families can be “make or break” for women and girls when it comes to achieving their rights. They can be places of love, care, and fulfillment but, too often, they are also spaces where women’s and girls’ rights are violated, their voices are stifled, and where gender inequality prevails. In today’s changing world, laws and policies need to be based on the reality of how families live. UN Women’s flagship report, “Progress of the world’s women 2019–2020: Families in a changing world”, assesses the reality of families today in the context of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and social transformation. The report features global, regional, and national data. It also analyses key issues such as family laws, employment, unpaid care work, violence against women, and families and migration. At a critical juncture for women’s rights, this landmark report proposes a comprehensive family-friendly policy agenda to advance gender equality in diverse families. A package of policies to deliver this agenda is affordable for most countries, according to a costing analysis included in the report. When families are places of equality and justice, economies and societies thrive and unlock the full potential of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report shows that achieving the SDGs depends on promoting gender equality within families." -- UNWomen.org.