Women in Industry

1. M.Karikalan, karikalan@y7mail.com

2. The French philosopher Ren´e Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.”

5. Girls at School in Madras India,byR.Venkiah Bros, c 1930 Source: The New Cambridge History of India IV.2 Women in Mother India- Geraldine Forbes

6. Wedding portriot, ShahayramBasu(Age 20) and his Bride Ranu (Age 8),1907 Source: The New Cambridge History of India IV.2 Women in Mother India- Geraldine Forbes

7. In training to join Gandhiji: Bhrat Scouts,Allahabad,1929 Source: The New Cambridge History of India IV.2 Women in Mother India- Geraldine Forbes

8. Missionaries in India Source: The New Cambridge History of India IV.2 Women in Mother India-Geraldine Forbes

9. Education to Daughter is Father’s Religious Duty Source: The New Cambridge History of India IV.2 Women in Mother India-Geraldine Forbes

11. India in British rule ………. For the British cotton industry had begun to suffer from indian competition. Indian yarn exports exceeded imports from the early 1880's, and a few years later British exports of cheap cottons started to decline. Almost to destroy an infant industry in India……………….. The Factory Act of 1891 raised the minimum age for the employment of children from 7 to 9 years and reduced their working time from 9 to 7 hours, limited the hours of employment of women to 11 hours a day, insisted on proper intervals for food and rest during the day and provided for at least four holidays in every month for both women and children. This did not satisfy opinion in Britain where employment of children and women was restricted to 10 hours during the day. The Dundee Chamber of Commerce, for example, falsely complained that as a result of the want of adequate inspection by officials in India, machinery was worked for 22 hours by women and for 15 hours by children………………….. Much of the work in the mines was done on the family system, the wife and children helping the father; explosions and accidents were relatively unknown; and a needlessly stringent Act might smother a promising national industry. Source: CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES BRITISH POLICY IN INDIA 1858-1905, CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES by S.GOPAL

12. India in British rule..... Rural labourers quite often took children to the field. Universally in the cotton and jute mills in the nineteenth century, especially the jute mills, women took infants into the factory. Inside such a jute mill near Calcutta, infants can be found lying on sacking, in bobbin boxes and other unsuitable places, exposed to the noise and danger of moving machinery and a dustladen atmosphere, and no year passes without a certain number of serious and minor accidents, and sometimes even deaths, among such children. (India, 1928–31:65) (Source: Rethinking Economic Change in India, Labour and livelihood,Tirthankar Roy-Routledge)

13. why women were prone to leaving industry The principal difficulty in classification of women workers was that women often took part both in the occupation of the adult men of their families and in the wage labour unconnected with what the men did. Where the former work occupied them to a greater extent, the difficulty arose as to whether they should be treated as primarily dependents or primarily workers. While there was diversification at this level, in wage work, there was a great deal of gender segmentation. Some work only women did, some work only men. And women entered mainly those jobs that hired only women. There was hardly a hint of competition in historical sources. To the contrary, there were many references to a great deal of compatibility between men and women in respect of their mode of entry into the same work-site. In the cotton mills, women worked usually in the mills where their husbands worked. In the mines, ‘they of course work with or near the male members’ (India, 1921a: 170–1).

14. why women were prone to leaving industry...... Hand-spinning of cotton, basket weaving, grain processing by hand and stone cutting were some of the traditional manual processes in which women far outnumbered men. Of the more modern sectors, metal processing, chemicals or machinery manufacture and printing presses rarely hired women. Mines hired many women, not in extraction but as headload carriers. Cotton mills hired women as reelers and winders in the spinning department. In cotton gins, women fed cotton into the gin. As that task required a large number of workers, nearly half the workers in a gin were often women. In hand-loom factories, women performed yarn processing tasks again as they did at home. In bid rolling, women alone were employed. There was also near-monopoly of women in certain activities allied to the processing or use of minerals. Quarries of hard rock, for example, employed women as small stone breakers. Pottery, brick and tile factories, and cement factories hired women too. If there were changes and shifts within these spheres, we cannot capture them for want of sufficient research. However, we do know that in the spinning department of the cotton and jute mills women tended to be replaced by men after the 1922 Factories Act.

18. In several cases from comparative history, the percentage of women in manufacturing work and the female labour-force participation rates seem to be correlated. Both are relatively low in India, both high in East Asia. (Source: Rethinking Economic Change in India, Labour and livelihood,Tirthankar Roy-Routledge)

19. Another large example in the gender-independence scenario is hand-spinning. This example has occupied, not unjustly, an overwhelming part of the discourse on women’s work in industry. However, a great deal of this discourse is impressionistic. The first thing we need to note about hand-spinning is that it was quintessentially women’s work: very small pay, very labour-intensive and usage of the most unemployable of the rural workforce. Such labour was easily a prey to mechanization because it was much too labour-intensive to be economical for the weaver, and because the income-loss was negligible for the community as soon as an alternative became available. The peak period of the decline of hand-spinning was not well-served by documentation, official or other. However, spinning was faintly remembered at the end of the century. Based on these reports, we know that spinning labour came from across the social spectrum. Women of Brahman households took part as much as poor widows such as the ones described in the matka example above. As one respondent remembered the routine: ‘Females in every household would get up early in the morning and sit in small parties of five or six and go on spinning’ (Slater, 1918:66). The mention of caste is significant, for team-work was not likely to form in too mixed a company. (Source: page 11 to 18 .Rethinking Economic Change in India, Labour and livelihood,Tirthankar Roy-Routledge)

20. Lessons from Bengal Bengal's own factories and mills became major consumers of raw jute. By the early twentieth century, more than half of the 9 million bales of raw jute produced were processed, spun, woven and manufactured into bags in Bengal.9 By the 1930s there were more than 100 factories within 25 miles north and south of Calcutta. The factory production of jute and its importance as packaging for the world's expanding commodity trade brought it into prominence in the nineteenth century. Jute had, however, been known in Bengal for many centuries. Two castes, the Kapalis and the Jogis, grew, spun and wove jute. As in many other low-paid and low-status jobs Hindu widows of even the higher castes were allowed to engage in this poorly rewarded occupation. The coarse yarn was used for cordage and for making paper........ From 1795 Bengal began to export raw jute and jute cloth, mainly to south-east Asia.Around this time manufacturers ........ in 1835 when they applied whale oil to sufficiently strengthen and soften the fibre. Mechanical spinning started and power weaving followed immediately. The real impetus for the growth of the industry came with the outbreak of the Crimean War when the supply of Russian hemp became uncertain. Jute was now substituted for hemp. The shift required no significant replacement of existing machinery and with a little additional investment the packaging industry in Dundee continued to prosper. Scottish jute mills also derived an enormous cost advantage from the easy and almost exclusive access to colonised Bengal's raw jute. The hessian and the gunny sack were to hold the field for the next hundred years.

21. Lessons from Bengal The migration of labour to the jute mill belt of Bengal and, particularly, its implications for the employment of women. The Bengali women in the mills - primarily widows and deserted or deserting wives - were quickly overwhelmed by the migrant men. Bihar and UP women did not come to the mills in large enough numbers to preserve the gender composition of the workforce. There was a greater proportion of women among those who came from northern Andhra Pradesh than among those who came from Bihar and UP, but in absolute terms the Andhra women were a small minority. The women who did migrate to the city, alone or with their families, did so when rural resources were exhausted. They rarely retained a rural base to protect them against the uncertainties of the urban labour market. Consequently, their labour was less desirable from the mill owners‘ point of view.

22. Lessons from Bengal Mill managers also deployed notions of domesticity according to their labour requirements. Thus, when they wished to employ women they emphasized the importance of their contribution to the household budget; when they wished to reduce labour, they found it easier to retrench women, rather than men, on the grounds that women's earnings were `supplementary' and that their primary task lay in housewifery and childcare. In general, managers advanced these arguments to explain women's lower wages and the poorer conditions provided for them in the mills. During the crisis of the 1930s, mill owners formulated concrete policies to increase their direct control over women's activities and to systematically replace women by men. Together, these various policies led to women's marginalisation in the industry. The gendering of the workforce affected social and cultural attitudes to women's work and negatively affected the status of urban women. The poor conditions of women's work and the lower wages they were paid affirmed the ideology of domesticity and seclusion and further devalued women's contribution towards family sustenance. The child-bearing and rearing practices of poor women received enormous public attention in the 1920s and 1930s. The state and the mill owners, prodded by the International LabourOrganisation, discovered the `problem' of the woman factory worker's `motherhood'.

23. Lessons from Bengal Women workers themselves rarely perceived a stark opposition between wage work and their family roles. Their family responsibilities usually included and overlapped with their role as workers. An elitist definition of womanhood, which celebrated the exclusively domestic, never applied to these women. However, such elitist perceptions did also accord primacy to poor women's family roles and they affected, through state and entrepreneurial policies, poor women's position in the workplace. Working women had to negotiate and contest these perceptions and they had to resist both class and sexual oppression. As a result, their protest gained a remarkably militant edge. They became reputed for their militancy in strikes and in violent confrontation with managers and the police. Their participation in strikes, however, often derived from criteria of self-worth and notions of honour that were not part of the organised structure of elite-led trade union politics. Source : 19 to 22 page in ppt.-Women and Labour in Late Colonial India-The Bengal Jute Industry by SamitaSen, Cambridge University Press 1999

24. Driving the employments The Japanese mills drove out the cotton mills of Bombay from the China market within a few years in the 1890s. They had an advantage, as the Bombay mill-owners noted, with a sense of despair because they could not hope to match that particular advantage. This was low-wage female labour. Young unmarried women from farming families moved to cotton-spinning mills in Japan. Cotton mills elsewhere in the world employed farm girls too.Their wages were very low, though in order to employ them the mills needed to create special systems such as all-women dormitories. They were employed only for a few years, and the pay covered little more than subsistence. And yet, through this transfer of population, ‘the industries in Japan secured cheap labor, the farmers secured some cash income, the girls secured dowries—and the contracts were completed by the age then regarded as appropriate for marriage’ (Taeuber, 1958:115–16). While the Japanese employer created conditions enabling women’s entry into the factory, the Indian mill-owner was stubbornly indifferent to the most elementary enabling conditions. Most women workers were married with small children. Until the late-1920s most mills did not have child-care facilities, and yet had begun to prohibit entry of small children into the space where their mothers worked. The women were left at the mercy of

25. the sardars (the contractors-cum-foremen) for breaks from the shop-floor, or dependent on older children, and were compelled to use what tree-shade they could find outside the mill to nurse small children. There were many other, less glaring, cases of neglect and indifference. Not surprisingly, the presence of women in the mills began to decline quickly after the 1922 Factories Act. No less powerful barrier than employer indifference were the social and cultural attitudes of the workers themselves. A group of women complained before the Royal Commission on Labour that ‘the chastity of the female employee working in the factory is always in danger’ (India, 1928–31:65). On the point of patriarchal prejudices, Indian trade unions were partners and collaborators of the mill owners. One mill union, for example, stoutly resisted ‘the scandalous system of men and women working jointly on the same machine’, which an innovative South Indian mill tried to implement in the 1920s. Many other unions shared the sentiment.

26. The sardar was typically a labour supervisor ± and there were three or more sardars in every department of a mill. The line sardars, supervising a small group of workers were under a head sardar. The sardars were always men. The jute mills, in not pursuing a strict horizontal segregation of genders on the shopfloor, rigidified the vertical segregation of women into the lower echelons of jute mill work. Since men could and often did work in the departments where women also worked, and since male workers would not be amenable to supervision by women, there were no women sardars in jute mills. In contrast, in the cotton mills where women had their own departments, they were headed by women supervisors. Source: Women and Labour in Late Colonial India-The Bengal Jute Industry by SamitaSen, Cambridge University Press 1999

27. India Vs Japan This difference between Japan and India had probably more to do with economics than prejudice. The critical question is: why did the Indian employer not want to spend more on welfare or accept the cost of special legislation, considering that women usually received smaller wages than men for the same work? Underlying the difference between them in the status of women inside the factory, there was a calculation of how valuable or indispensable the women workers were. Both societies were patriarchal and neither allowed women freedom to work or live as they wished. The crucial difference, I believe, was in the fact that the women workers in the Japanese mills were unmarried. Being unmarried and young, they were more suited to training than married women might have been. The Indian women workers were married and thus seen as not reliable material to be trained and put to the skilled tasks. Women were part of the core workforce in Japan, whereas the Indian women workers were usually a marginal part of the factory. The Japanese women worked the ring spindle while the Indian ones were set to unskilled tasks. The Japanese women were part of the steady workforce, at least for a few years until they were married, the Indian women were casual workers. If culture does enter this story of marginalization of women, it enters via marriage norms, and not via employers’ biases.

28. India Vs Japan..... The second objection to ‘barriers to entry’ is that government regulation did not touch more than a small fraction of the workforce in the developing countries. Using South Asia as an illustration, between 1911 and 1961, more than one-and-a-half million women notionally exited manufacturing in this region.In the mills covered by the Factory Act, Disputes Act and other regulations, the extent of the notional decline was only a few thousands. The real sites of the decline were small factories and workshops that employed wage-labour, showed a strong preference for male labour, but were not subjected to any regulation worth the name. The gender-bias of mill-owners or the legal safeguards do not really matter, in a quantitative sense, to explaining why women’s presence in manufacturing fell in India. To explain why we find few women working in these units, we need to consider the hypothesis that perhaps women could not seek these jobs. We consider supply of labour again, in the form of what I call barriers to exit from the family.

29. Barriers to exit: marriage Numerous reports point to a deep-rooted and universal feeling of uneasiness and unwillingness on the part of the Indian woman to work in a factory alongside men. How do we account for such a feeling? Married women faced a singular barrier to exit the household: children, especially young children and infants. Even in the presence of adequate institutional safeguards at the factory site, it was not easy to go round this barrier, for the traditional society would not easily accept these institutions to be adequate substitutes for maternal care. A consideration such as this would tend to bias married women’s work towards household industry, part-time or casual work rather than permanent contractual work, and bias it towards agriculture and services, rather than manufacturing. For, manufacturing by contrast with farming, would require steadier commitment and possibly staying away from children for longer periods during the day.

30. Barriers to exit: marriage How wide or narrow was the window of opportunity during early stages of industrialization? It was relatively wide in Japan, about 4–5 years—the maximum length an unmarried girl would spend in a spinning mill at the turn of the century. On the other side, the window was probably a negative range in South Asia. The mean age at marriage in South Asia has been historically the lowest in the world and rose rather slowly in the twentieth century. The mean age at marriage for women in India was thirteen in the decade 1891–1901, and sixteen in the decade 1951–61. The age was lowest by far by any contemporary standard. In 1920, the mean age for women in Japan was twenty-three. In Europe, the age was twenty-five or more even at the beginning of industrialization. In neighbouring Burma and Ceylon, the average age for women in the first decade of the twentieth century was 18–20. The mean age did not necessarily increase in the long run in regions where it was high to begin with. However, if it fell, it fell marginally. (Source: page 26to 29 .Rethinking Economic Change in India, Labour and livelihood,Tirthankar Roy-Routledge)

31. Indian employment............Despite the fact that the highest levels of protection were provided to the import-competing industries that were most capital-, technology-, and skilled labor–intensive, India experienced a considerable widening of the skill wage gap. Trade in manufacturing benefited skilled men and trade in services benefited skilled women. Overall, the male-female wage gap narrowed for high school and college graduates. Cadot and Nasir (2001) report that the monthly wage for an unskilled textiles industry machine operator is less than one-third of the equivalent wage in Mauritius, around half that in China, and only about 60 percent of the average wage in India. Although labor productivity is apparently much lower in Madagascar than in Mauritius or China (and equal to that in India), unit production costs are among the lowest in the world and lower than in the other three countries. (Source: Globalization, Wages, and the Quality of Jobs- FIVE COUNTRY STUDIES -Raymond Robertson, Drusilla Brown, Gaëlle Pierre, and María Laura ,Sanchez-Puerta- www.worldbank.org)

32. India provides a good example of the way in which export orientation changes labour management practices so that they raise productivity and product quality. Beginning in the mid-1980s, India’s automobile industry grew rapidly and attracted significant FDI flows. As a consequence of domestic-content requirements, local components producers were required to significantly increase quality and productivity. Okada (2004) reports that firms responded by hiring more educated and qualified workers for production and managerial positions. Firms also emphasized cognitive skills and behavioural traits in recruitment and increased formal training in quality control and line management. (Source: Globalization, Wages, and the Quality of Jobs- FIVE COUNTRY STUDIES,Raymond Robertson, Drusilla Brown, Gaëlle Pierre, and María Laura ,Sanchez-Puerta-www.worldbank.org)

33. Conclusion The remarkable spiral between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ Cohn depicted in the first citation above could leave the information theorist at a loss. Modern technical usage of both these terms keeps these two concepts strictly distinct, defines these differently, and in such a way as to be able to understand their interconnection. The classical communication theory, for example, defines information not with respect to its functions but to a state of uncertainty, information is reduction in uncertainty. The theory also implies that the one who possesses or controls information does not have full control over its communication to others because of the ‘noise’ that necessarily enters all communication channels. Knowledge differs from information in a number of ways, by an element of intentionality for example, or by the fact that knowledge is constructed through a process of recognition of information to be correct or useful (Lehrer, 2000). ….. Colonialism had to create an information base on the people of India before it could filter it into knowledge about colonial subjects.

34. First, systems of governance operate at different levels, principally, administration and ideology, and the fit between the two is not necessarily very close, as one might imagine from reading Cohn or the subaltern studies treatment of colonial sources. Administration in a colonial society took on a life and dynamics of its own. Indeed, some of the most valuable descriptions of life and livelihood of the poor in colonial India arose out of the autonomous uncoordinated research by officials whose connection with governance went no further than using the government press to publish their findings. A great deal of the work done for the census, the craft monographs, the caste surveys and the village studies belonged in such research efforts without plausible political roots.

35. In the cotton mills, women’s work inside the factory depended on a support system outside to look after young children and bring them to their mothers at certain times and places. Not all mothers could access or create such a system. And those that could needed to have large families. For, older siblings played a crucial role in this scheme. My second hypothesis is that men, being in control of capital and marketing and having undergone more rigorous training, faced greater opportunity cost of outright exit from manufacturing than did women. They persisted with industry much more, if necessary, leaving the family and resettling in a different town. Women as merchants were probably not unknown, but the rare instances in which we see them involved odd personalities and odd domestic circumstances.

36. My third hypothesis is that it is precisely these constraints that made it more difficult for certain products to survive commercialization. The outcome of distinctively women’s labour such as waste silk yarn, carpets, embroidery, or a sari meant for display of its maker might be distinctive and might have potential market, but these products were not backed by a strong commercial organization. When a market did grow for such products, only in rare instances did women artisans supply that market. In carpets, they were almost wholly displaced, in sari and embroidery partially displaced. Commercial organization evolved in some of these cases to utilize the particular craft skills that only women could supply, but usually, involved men in trade and women in production. The distinction between gender-integration and gender-independence matters in this context. When a product moved from the household to the factory, we are talking about a gender-integrated scenario weakening. The decline in women’s work in such a case implicated (a) technological change that made the factory a superior organization, and (b) differential gender endowments in production skills that made men better able to join the factory. When a product earlier made by women, but not by the whole household, began to be made in a factory or by men, we are talking about a gender-independent scenario breaking up. That kind of change implicated not differential skill-endowment, but differential endowment of capital. Women might be able to make that item better than men, but could they market it? Not usually, unless there were certain institutional changes. Such changes occurred particularly in Lucknowchikan embroidery or Assam handlooms in the late twentieth century. But these were rare instances.

37. IDEALS AND REALITIES India’s secular, democratic constitution is formulated on the principle of social justice for all. Its laws give women equal rights to property (1956) and prohibit dowry (1984), child labor (1987), and female feticide (1984), and its press is vigilant and relatively free. Indian women made notable strides in literacy by 2001 (53.7%) from the abysmal 7.30 percent at the end of colonial rule. This is especially significant as the population tripled, thus raising the number of literate women from 11.7 million (1951) to 255 million (2001).Other achievements include the appreciable drop in the fertility rate (1990: 4 children per woman; 2007: 2.7), as women wait longer to marry and to have children. Women of the expanding middle class have garnered high professional honors at home and abroad, although these benefits have not yet accrued fully to the lowest-caste and tribal women. A growing number contest and win elections to village councils (panchayats), provincial councils, and Parliament, while dissident women challenge corrupt officials and multinational corporations to change the power structure. Despite poverty and patriarchal traditions, women juggle family duties and work to be their own agents. They care for children and seniors at home, while bringing in an income as farmers, herders, weavers, craftswomen, teachers, doctors, scientists, pharmacists, lawyers, judges, administrators, bankers, businesswomen, nurses, soldiers, policewomen, computer technicians, tailors, artists, performers, shop assistants, and construction labourers.

38. Everything from Women I do not have specific bias for women engineers. I do agree that they are more competent, intelligent, possess more integrity, and are more efficient than men engineers, but they are helpless. In spite of their full willingness to perform their duty perfectly they are not able to meet with the requirement of the organization in which they are employed due to family responsibilities like their responsibilities towards their children, in-laws, parents, and other social obligations towards family, illness, etc. In Indian culture men expect everything from women. • Source:Parikh and Sukhatme, “Women in the Engineering Profession in India,

39. Equal Opportunity ? Achieving gender equality is therefore not just women’s concern—it deeply concerns men. -BinaAgarwal, economist

40. start and implementation of new welfare policy

41. Source: Women in Asia , Editor: Louise Edwards (Australian Catholic University) For Reference (Japanese Women Activities)

47. Sexual Harassment India Risk Survey 2014 http://www.ficci.com/Sedocument/20276/report-India-Risk-Survey-2014.pdf

50. Crime has been graded as the fourth risk in India. The increase in crime rate in India is a cause of worry for the Indian economy. Crime against women has seen a rise in the last one year. India remains as one of the violence prone nations with violent crimes registering a 65 per cent increase. Foreign respondents to the survey have also recognised the increasing percentage of crime as one of the major dampeners that inhibit prospects of business in India. The fall in tourist traffic in India can also be attributed to the rise in the level of crime in the country.