Women entering workforce less since they have to juggle work with domestic chores: CJI DY Chandrachud

Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud on Monday flagged how women were being held back from entering the workforce resulting in their low contribution towards nation's economy and gross domestic product (GDP). .The CJI blamed the same on women being able to completely part with their domestic duties."The labour force participation of women is 37%. The contribution of women to the GDP is 18%. We have not exactly met the pre-independence hopes about women’s economic participation. A part of the reason is the continued gendered allocation of domestic labour. Even as women are entering the workforce, they are never divorced from the domestic realm."Working women are doubly burdened almost as a penalty for 'transgressing' the domestic threshold, the CJI said."They must simultaneously juggle domestic and care-giving chores ... Besides domestic work being unaccounted for in economic terms, it obstructs women’s ability to hold on to paid work or take on greater professional responsibility.".The CJI was speaking at the SheShakti conference organised by the News18 group. The topic of his address dealt with women breaking barriers..In his speech, the CJI spoke of gender bias and how society fails to appreciate women as individuals. "As women break rank and enter professional workspaces traditionally dominated by men, they are expected to act like men. Ironically enough, they are also tacitly expected to act like women, act-their-part, lest they upset the code of womanly conduct. Paradoxically, women may run the double risk of being labelled demure or shrill, depending the assessor’s stereotypical understanding of 'how women ought to behave'," he said. Rewards and prejudices are entirely de-linked from the calibre of working women and coloured only by her gender identity, the CJI lamented. This in turn leads to high attrition rates and professional stagnation for them, he explained. "As she navigates this tightrope, constantly pitting her capability against perception, she must do so unsupported. For a large part of their lives, institutions have operated in an information deficit about the objective abilities of women. Women traditionally were not a priority in institutional design. Even as they break into elusive and exclusionary places, women are met with institutional apathy at best, and hostility at worst," he stated.The CJI concluded by pointing out that a just institution's foremost inquiry is whether its systems and structures are conducive to inclusivity and provide for women who make unconventional choices that may not be socially sanctioned. "The Constitution guarantees the choice to opt for the conventional and the unconventional alike. Before we regard any choice as unconventional, wait for the moment to pass. Tomorrow a new future unfolds in re-imagining what it is to be a woman.".CJI DY Chandrachud reveals he now appoints young lawyers instead of retired judges as arbitrators