Building Faith in the Power of Words..........

Building Faith in the Power of Words..........

A Positive Step Towards Gender Equality

A piece of news that is worthy of being shared with everyone who thinks a homemaker’s job is simple or lacks value, including homemakers themselves, is the landmark judgement by the Indian Supreme Court. The Supreme court of India recently gave a landmark judgement in favour of women; it said that the value of a woman’s work at home was no less than that of her office-going husband. The court enhanced the compensation to relatives of a couple who died when a car hit their scooter in Delhi. The woman being a “housewife”, the insurance company calculated compensation only based on the husband’s income. But the court would not accept it and enhanced the compensation to relatives of the couple by adding the contribution of the woman too.
The court stated that a homemaker’s work contributes in a very real way to the economic condition of the family, and the economy of the nation, regardless of the fact that it may have been traditionally excluded from economic analyses. The judgement given by the learned bench gave the hope of a major new change, and it is a great boost towards the achievement of one of the important targets of SDG-5  i.e ‘Value unpaid care and promote shared domestic responsibilities.’ The learned judge mentioned that as per the 2011 Census in India, nearly 159.85 million women mentioned “household work” as their main occupation, as against only 5.79 million men. He also referred to a recent report of the National Statistical Office titled ‘Time Use in India-2019’ which suggested that, on an average, women spend nearly 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services for household members versus 97 minutes by men. Unpaid work done by women across the globe amounts to a staggering USD 10 trillion a year, which is 43 times the annual turnover of the world’s biggest company Apple, an Oxfam study said, and in India  the unpaid work done by women  is worth 3.1 per cent of the country’s GDP. As per the 2019 ILO report ‘A Quantum Leap for Gender Equality’ identified unpaid are work as the biggest impediment to women’s formal employment, as it engaged 21.7 per cent of women between 18-54 years of age, as opposed to 1.7 per cent of men.
 
The judgement is a reflection of changing attitudes and mindsets and of our international law obligations. And, most importantly, it is a step towards the constitutional vision of social equality and ensuring dignity of life to all individuals. There is a need for more such efforts to ensure gender equality. In order to achieve the objectives, comprehensive care policies should be anchored along two axes: transformative care policy and labour regulation. The first axis on transformative care policy includes direct provision of child-care, elderly care, disability services, and care-related social transfers. The second axis of comprehensive care provision is labour policy. The care- component of labour policy such as comprehensive maternity and paternity paid- leave as part of terms employment, is an integral component of family-friendly working arrangements. Flexibility in the employment structure is the second aspect of labour policy related to care providers who intend to join formal employment. Comprehensive care policies can be rooted in ILO’s ‘Decent Work Agenda’ principles that begin with recognising the value of unpaid care work, reducing drudgery of work, redistributing responsibilities of care work between women and men, remunerating care workers, and representing their concerns. Non-standard work schedules such as part-time, flex-time, and remote working are already emerging as types of employment. the phenomenon witnessed the world over during the pandemic Covid-19.
Role of the State Comprehensive care policies demand/needs state involvement in investing, formalising, and regulating the care economy. In addition to providing care benefits, national accounts should also be sensitive to the contribution of unpaid care to economic growth. Gender-sensitive budgeting, satellite accounts, and tax policy are some of the ways in which economic policy can acknowledge and reward care work. Finally, the state would be an important arbiter in engaging with care workers to realise and expand their rights

*image from video Who Cares: Unpaid care work, poverty and women’s / girl’s
human rights
*originally published by IAW
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