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Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by blueblisters on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @08:12AM (#25657420)
India's female labor participation rate is 20%. In China, it's 60%. Smartphones can help bridge that gap a bit but real progress will probably come from creating safe, well-paying jobs.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by iguy on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:29AM (#25659167)
Seems unlikely this 20% number implies that 80% of women are sitting at home drinking tea & looking after kids.

Where is it from? Is this formal sector employment?

IIRC the informal labor market is something like 80% of the country in total. Lots of people work in ways that are difficult to gather statistics about.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by volgo on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:35AM (#25659248)
If you’ve visited India, you wouldn’t be surprised. Most women do stay home and take care of kids

And it’s really hard work btw, cooking and looking after the house and kids. They’re definitely not just “sitting home and drinking tea.”

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by iguy on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:44AM (#25659351)
Yes I exaggerate slightly. But I wonder a lot about the quality of this data. Doesn't about half the country still work on farms? Low-tech farming has endless labor for all kinds of hands, but little paperwork.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by asenna on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:36PM (#25660684)
I'm from an upper middle-class family in India and the data from all my relatives (including distant ones) matches this - 80% does seem about right for housewives. Similar for my friends.

It's changing rapidly with the newer generation but for my parents' generation that is definitely the norm.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by bloodorange on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:09PM (#25660409)
It's not exaggeration. It's disrespectful and taking their effort for granted.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by iguy on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:31PM (#25660636)
To be clear, I mentioned this stereotype specifically to claim this is not what's happening.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by renewiltord on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:08PM (#25661022)
Yeah, but it's a serious waste of their abilities as humans. It's no surprise that dual-professional households there who hire specialists for the cooking and looking after the house parts have better lives (as judged by the fact that few women who are professionals will want to become housewives while the opposite is a common desire).
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by dudul on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:15PM (#25661086)
How is taking care of their children a serious waste of their abilities as humans?

When you look at all the BS jobs around, spending your time taking care of your family sounds much more productive and rewarding to me.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by renewiltord on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:21PM (#25661147)
Because there are rapid diminishing returns with every extra hour past the first few. My parents put a lot of work into me, but they were also full-time surgeons. My mum most definitely put a hell of a lot of work into me but she didn't spend all the time at home.

Worked out pretty well.

Of course you want to allow for people to do whatever they want, but part of that is enabling them to not have to be stay-at-home parents. And most people want to do something more than that, in practice, because creating things is a fundamental human need that most people have. If people want to be stay-at-home parents and they can do it, more power to them, but it's important to allow them to make that choice otherwise unconstrainedly and not through societal pressure to keep women at home because jobs are unsafe (there are whole categories of work one avoids at the margin in India if one is a woman, because you cannot guarantee safe transport from/to one's place of work).

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by dudul on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:23PM (#25661174)
> I turned out to be pretty damned awesome.

I'm not gonna waste time arguing with someone who writes something like that.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by renewiltord on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @03:13PM (#25661727)
Don't be like that. It's just a bit of humour. But fine, I took it out. Anyway, it's not important enough to argue so this is an okay outcome.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by citrablue on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:22PM (#25662677)
One example from your own experience is not generalizable.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by renewiltord on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:28PM (#25662772)
It isn't meant to be. It's meant to be an existence proof to allow people the freedom to work.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by imtringued on Thursday January 07, 2021 @02:44AM (#25668359)
It's not rewarding when those kids are the reason you are extremely poor. Population growth requires ever increasing productivity to maintain the same standard of living or people must sacrifice their standard of living until they die from preventable diseases or starvation.

Forcing people to have less children is bad (see one child policy). If people want to have less children voluntarily then you've found a way to success.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by r00fus on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:28AM (#25659163)
It's more than that. I know many women who quit their well-paying jobs because societally in the US we have not fully socialized child rearing in a way that China has.

e.g.: Our infrastructure and attitudes about kids transport is in dire need of refactoring.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by mbg721 on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:33AM (#25659224)
That's not necessarily a bad thing. What about women who prefer to see their kids grow up rather than endlessly chase paychecks?
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by r00fus on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:37PM (#25660689)
I think we agree; labor participation rate for women may not be a good single-dimensional indicator of societal progress.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by officeplant on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:40AM (#25659300)
What about dads who would like to do the same?
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by mbg721 on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:46AM (#25659376)
Plenty of families would benefit from dividing labor that way; the biggest (non-artificial) obstacle is probably the inertia from the realities of giving birth and breastfeeding.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by jimmaswell on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @03:57PM (#25662377)
Isn't any labor statistic from India suspect because so many people work in the "shadow economy"?
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by managerclass on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:36AM (#25658605)
TIL China has a higher female labor participation rate than the US. Unexpected.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by renewiltord on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:19PM (#25661132)
Seems related to the famous paradox that women in 'freer' countries choose _more_ gender-specific jobs. I think there's a natural explanation that relates to Maslow's Pyramid but anyway, just wanted to mention that if you haven't heard it.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by bzbarsky on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:51PM (#25660818)
Why unexpected? The Soviet Union did too. A few reasons for that (for the Soviet Union; I know less about China):

1) One of the premises of communism is equality of all people, including equality of men and women. As a result, a bunch of official barriers to women's labor force participation that existed in the US up until recently were removed quite a bit earlier in communist countries. Not only that, but the right to a job was considered a basic human right in the Soviet constitution, and not having a job was a crime punishable by jail time starting in the early 60s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)#So... for some basic details). Note that this did not necessarily affect societal attitudes about household labor, by the way: women were just expected to both work _and_ do the cleaning/washing/cooking at home...

2) Female employment in the US surged during WWII to make up for all the men drafted into the military, then dropped as the size of the military was reduced in the aftermath. Something similar happened in the Soviet Union with women stepping into "men's jobs", but without as much of a corresponding drop after the war. Something to do with the fact that US deaths in WWII (combat and non-combat) were ~400k, which was about .6% of the male population in 1941, on the assumption that most of those deaths were males and males were half the total population. For the Soviet Union estimates for military deaths (mostly male) in WWII vary from ~8 million to ~14 million (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the... ), which corresponds to 4-7% of the 1941 total population. 8-14% of the male population if the pre-war breakdown between male and female was 50-50, which may or may not have been the case. Plus whatever the breakdown was among the ~10-15 million nonmilitary deaths in WWII in the USSR... But the upshot was that there were a lot more women alive than men after the war, which reduced he "men coming home and taking back their jobs" effect, because the men just did not come home.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by trianglem on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @09:37AM (#25658105)
That’s because you are not counting housekeeping and child rearing as essential labor which is inaccurate.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by volgo on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:29AM (#25659169)
Labor participation would be 99% in all countries. What’s your point?

The 20% to 60% is meant to demonstrate female inequality in India, because most of them are working at home for zero pay and low social status. Whereas in more developed countries, women get paid to work in industries.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by svieira on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:40PM (#25661339)
I think the point the parent is trying to make is that saying that "participation of women in the workplace" isn't a directly-correlated metric for the "how happy / empowered / established / productive are women in this society" metric that we all care about improving.

To put it another way, if we just take the former metric as the gold measure it is better to be payed to care for someone else's children than to not be payed to care for your own.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by qsort on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @09:47AM (#25658182)
Is there any particular reason why you are assuming that housekeeping and child rearing should be the exclusive responsibility of women?

I'm struggling to see any honest point in this comment.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by foggyeyes69 on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:01AM (#25658310)
I think OP was making a statement about how things are rather than how they should be.

I agree with you that this shouldn’t be the case, but right now it absolutely is the case in India.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by oblio on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:11AM (#25658968)
OP's comment doesn't add anything of value in that case. In 99% of cultures out there, traditional roles imply that the women is a homemaker.

Nobody reasonable assumes that women not counted in labor participation statistics are partying on the moon :-)

I.e.: we already knew what he's saying.

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by trianglem on Friday January 08, 2021 @05:52PM (#25691573)
A childcare facility shows up in labor statistics, why shouldn’t a mother’s labor?
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by trianglem on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @09:58AM (#25658286)
I said saying only 20% of women are involved in labor in India is incorrect. That number is much much higher if you take those into account.
Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by managerclass on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:43AM (#25658676)
The statistic is saying that 20% of women in India participate in the workforce as it is defined.

Are you trying to say that the 60% of Chinese women includes women who are homemakers and aren't in the workforce as it is defined?

Re:In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a v... by volgo on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @11:30AM (#25659184)
You’re wrong. Every country would have 99% labor participation rate if you count those. It’s not meaningful

The fact is only 20% of women are not getting paid for their labor. It’s a sign of huge lack of development progress