Will a six-month maternity leave in India backfire?

Numbers always tell a story and if we read the labour data it becomes amply clear that we need more women in the workforce. Between 47-57 per cent of women in the age group of 25-59 are out of the labour force, while as many as 68 per cent women graduates and 53 per cent postgraduates are not part of the Indian labour force.

An Indian labour market report states that the numbers are fairly similar for rural and urban areas because fundamentally speaking, across the country, responsibilities of caregiving fall primarily on women who are forced to opt out or are unable to break into the workforce for lack of a support ecosystem.

In that context, providing protection by law to women who are constantly taking on more roles - of a mother, daughter, wife, daughter-in-law - and could need the support system to come back, or come in to the workforce, as the case might be, is a well-intentioned move. However, let’s also take a look at the economic realities of India – small and medium enterprises employ about 40 per cent of India’s workforce and there are just seven firms among the Fortune list of world’s 500 largest companies that can actually take the lead in implementing such policies.

There is also a slowly developing start-up universe which is begging for simpler compliance rules and for many of them a paid maternity leave of upto six-and-a-half months would be prohibitively expensive and disastrous.

India at the moment does not have the organisational capacity to match the benefits offered to women in East European and Scandinavian countries, where maternity leave extends beyond six months and is matched with paternity leave, but the fact is also that it has a very skewed work ratio and an overwhelming number of women drop out of the workforce every year.

According to the World Economic Forum, India has 24 per cent women in the workforce, one of the few countries in which participation is actually shrinking. India ranks at 114 out of 131 countries in female labour participation. A Sheroes report points out that almost 48 per cent women drop out of the workforce before they reach the middle of their careers. Women tend to do academically better than men and yet the numbers don’t reflect in the workforce. The reasons for that are many – India’s patriarchal mindset puts the primary responsibility of caregiving on women, whether it is caring for young children, the elderly or running a home, it all comes down to the woman.

Indian companies, however, are yet to fully embrace the culture of flexible work or recognise the cultural challenges that come from operating in a country like India. They have been painfully slow in adapting to a flexible work culture, and it’s a mindset shift again that companies are trying to come to terms with. Changing lifestyles have not kept pace with the expectations of women. That has largely remained relatively unchanged. There are several perception battles women have to fight as they navigate the workplace and the prospect of staving off a prospective employers’ concern over the cost of a woman employee could be another one on the list.

The government in the past has also mandated reservation on company boards – the intent was to increase the presence of women on boards, but it has largely come down to elevation of women family members to boards.

Should India be nudging India Inc to be more competitive and towards creating processes that have a long-term impact? Or should it be mandating policies that could make the perception battle harsher for women? And of course, the larger question is that after what point in regulation does the government get too much into how businesses should be run? Perhaps a stress on paternity leave, where men too have the option to be primary caregivers could have actually initiated a shift in the mindset and of course created a more level playing field where a prospective employer would have had a similar set of concerns for both men and women.