E-Paper
India’s economic ambitions rest on empowering women in manufacturing
This article is authored by Parmesh Shahani, head, Godrej DEi Labs.
India’s factory shopfloors are slowly but surely becoming ever more gender diverse, yet we still have some way to go before we can call them truly inclusive. Women today account for over a third of India’s manufacturing workforce, up from less than a quarter in the year 2000. They are also responsible for nearly three quarters of the net new jobs created in the sector between 2017-18 and 2023-24.
Women are clearly powering the sector’s growth and, by extension, playing an instrumental role in helping India realise its Viksit Bharat dream.
But India’s shop floors are not equipped to meet their needs.
From security and privacy to a lack of washrooms, many of the needs of women in manufacturing go unmet.
To be sure, a number of companies including the larger conglomerates of Corporate India have gone above and beyond in equipping their shop floors to be women friendly.
At Godrej, our commitment to boost diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at our companies have transformed our shopfloors. The number of women employees at the Godrej Chemicals manufacturing facility in Ambernath, for example, surged 10-fold from a mere four to 40 between April 2022 and October 2023.
But a majority of the women engaged in manufacturing jobs are employed in the informal sector which is populated by enterprises that don’t have the scale or the will necessary to get their assembly lines women ready.
As a result, even as female participation in the manufacturing workforce has steadily increased, it isn’t what it could be. The lack of female-friendly shopfloors is creating attrition that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
And it is costing us.
Increasing participation of women in the workforce has been proven to have an actual and tangible impact on a country’s economic growth.
India could add 1.5 percentage points to its annual economic growth if participation of women in the workforce went up to 50%, Annette Dixon, the World Bank’s then South Asia vice president noted in 2018.
Those remarks referred to female participation in the workforce as a whole, which incidentally stood at 41.7% as of 2023-24, according to the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey.
But India is banking on the manufacturing sector as one of the engines of its economic aspirations.
Factory floors thus need to evolve to be truly inclusive of women workers’ needs. Otherwise they will continue to limit female participation in the sector’s workforce which, in turn, would hold the economy back from growing at its full potential.
It all has to start with security. Enterprises need to make assembly lines a secure place for women to work. Factory premises need to be environments that feel safe and are free from gender biases and harassment. Ensuring that premises are well-lit, hiring women wardens for dormitory areas, for instance, are examples of measures that can improve security.
Companies should also sensitise male colleagues through workshops and special sessions. These workshops can educate male employees, thus far used to working in a male-dominated environment, on how to conduct themselves in a workplace they now share with women.
A robust reporting, escalation and accountability mechanism is a must that should go hand-in-hand with preventive security measures.
Enterprises must similarly guarantee security outside the workplace, especially on the commute to and from the factories.
Factories today operate around the clock which can mean odd working hours and so ensuring the security of female employees’ as they make their way to and from work is crucial.
Companies can also make adjustments to shift rosters. In addition to commuting at odd hours, many women also double up as the primary homemaker. They have households to run, children to bring up and look after.
Accommodating them in shifts that allow them to balance both their work on the shop floor and their responsibilities at home can go a long way towards creating an enabling environment that makes them feel cared for, valued understood and empathised with.
Then there are the basics. These include providing women with enough clean washrooms to use, or creating specially-designated female-only changing facilities, instituting paid menstrual leave policies and equipping factories with specialised medical aid facilities. Introducing such measures ensures a certain degree of dignity and decency for women employees at work.
Taking inclusivity a notch higher, shop floor design as a whole needs a rethink. Enterprises need to pay attention aspects like the height of the consoles that control factory functions for instance, or creating personal equipment and kits that have been specially designed for women. These are tiny details, but tiny details that can make a big difference.
Lastly, the power of allyship is also not to be underestimated. Family support goes a long way towards encouraging women to work in the manufacturing sector.
Think about it, for any one of us pursuing our dreams with the support of our families and loved ones is always easier than having to do so against the tide of their opposition. This is especially true for women breaking glass ceilings in traditionally male-dominated realms like manufacturing.
To encourage allyship, we must celebrate it. For instance, last year we invited the families of all the women employees working at our plant in Malanpur, Madhya Pradesh, to a special celebration.
The event was held with the aim of creating an impact beyond the factory walls, sparking conversations in homes across Malanpur and beyond. Hopefully, it will encourage parents to celebrate daughters who dream of a future filled with possibilities, or mothers to find their own confidence bolstered, or even fathers to re-evaluate their roles in supporting their families.
Nari Shakti isn’t just a slogan. It’s a promise to India’s women and a recognition of their power and potential to shape India’s destiny.
This article is authored by Parmesh Shahani, head, Godrej DEi Labs.
