ICRISAT News

Co-authored by Nikita Sangwan, Centre for research on the Economics of Climate, Food, Energy and Environment (CECFEE), and Dr Shalander Kumar, ICRISAT.

• When women are more involved in the workforce, the dietary diversity of their households improves. The extra time that women use at work does not have adverse effects on their health.
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• Women’s paid and unpaid work impacts dietary diversity in different ways: paid work results in financial independence and empowerment in household decision-making that allows women to diversify diets. Unpaid work increases the number of food groups produced by women for consumption by their households.
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• The generally held belief is that when women take up work outside the home, it can increase their time burden and leave them with less time for cooking and producing other food items. Consequently, it could impact the nutritional intake of their households because fewer food items would be prepared. The exhaustion from an increased time burden could also harm women’s health. And these impacts could be aggravated if men do not share the additional time burden to compensate for the potential loss in women’s time. 
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• It is therefore important to evaluate the implications of policies aimed to enhance women’s labor force participation, considering these generally held beliefs.
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• In our recent study, we find that women’s increased labor force participation in fact improves the dietary diversity of the household, with no reduction in the number of home-produced food items or the monetary value of home-produced food and non-food items. Notably, our results also rule out any adverse effects on the health of women due to their higher participation in the labor market.
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• Our study used a unique panel dataset of 832 rural households from 18 villages in the semi-arid tropics of India, spanning the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Data was collected from the same households across three seasons: (i) Kharif (July-October), (ii) Rabi (November-March) and (iii) Summer (April-June) during 2009-2014, which allowed us to account for seasonality in consumption patterns. The data was drawn from a farm household panel dataset provided by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
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• Policies and development programs can harness synergies between schemes to improve nutrition and increase women’s employment to pursue global goals of ensuring better food for all.
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Greater participation of women in the workforce can increase a household’s income and allow them to purchase a more diverse food basket.

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