One of my other goals this summer was to implement qualitative fieldwork in rural areas to understand the barriers to rural-urban migration faced by young, unmarried women. Only 4% of women who migrate from rural to urban areas do so to seek employment, the vast majority migrate for marriage (Census 2011). Since women typically stop working after marriage, understanding and alleviating the constraints preventing economic migration by unmarried women is potentially an important way to increase female labor force participation. Information frictions, credit/liquidity constraints, moving costs, and risk aversion limit people’s willingness to migrate. Additionally, norms of female seclusion, combined with parents’ concerns about daughters’ safety, “honor,” or marriage prospects, might further discourage migration by young, unmarried Indian women. Pricing in these risks, the reservation wage at which women are willing to migrate is likely high, possibly exceeding many firms’ willingness to pay. Interestingly, “traditional” migration costs (transportation/housing) are less salient in this setting as garment export firms cover these expenses, yielding a rich opportunity to understand the role of information and gender norms in inhibiting women’s economic migration.
To this end, I visited Hosur district in Tamil Nadu, and spoke to several women employed at the Tata Electronics manufacturing plant to learn about their migration experience. Tata Electronics is a major multi-national company engaged in manufacturing “precision components”, which are highly customised machinery parts. They established their manufacturing plant in Tamil Nadu in 2020, and have actively tried to recruit women for their workforce. Electronics manufacturing is not traditionally an industry which has employed a large number of women in India. However, Tata set out with the goal of employing 85% percent women in their workforce. Moreover, their goal was to recruit women belonging to rural areas and vulnerable social groups such as tribal communities and low-income families, in order to create economic opportunities for them and uplift their families. Although a large share of women belong to rural districts in Tamil Nadu, a substantial share of women had migrated from other states including Jharkhand, Odisha, and Maharashtra.
I connected with the HR team at Tata Electronics and they kindly agreed to let me interview a few of the young women currently working at their plant. Tata recruits women who have graduated high school, and offers a package that includes a salary, hostel accommodation, social security benefits, transport from the hostel to the factory, and an opportunity to take classes to obtain a Bachelors’ degree in electronics manufacturing while working. They offer significantly higher wages relative to jobs in the garment sector or tobacco industry in Tamil Nadu (the two largest sectors employing women in the state). However, the work can be quite physically demanding. For example, women working as machine operators must remain standing throughout their shift, and workers are assigned to work the night shift once a month.
Through conversations with these young women, I learned about some of the barriers that inhibit economic migration by unmarried women in rural areas. Most of them said they were able to migrate for this job because Tata is a trusted brand. Their families felt comfortable with allowing them to work there, specially because they knew that Tata was providing accommodation in a hostel. Concerns about daughters’ safety are paramount when parents make decisions about allowing them to migrate, suggesting that employers seeking to hire these women must be able to communicate that they offer a safe working environment and safe living arrangements, such as a hostel. The public sector can also play a role to fill this gap. In 1972-73, the Government of India introduced a scheme providing grants to support the construction of hostel facilities to working women in cities, smaller towns and rural areas where employment opportunities for women exist. State governments, urban local bodies, self-help groups, and village councils, colleges and universities, civil society organizations, and private companies can apply for grants to construct hostel facilities for women. At present, there are 494 operational working women’s hostels across the country which have been constructed under this scheme. The largest number of hostels are in Maharashtra (77), followed by Tamil Nadu (54). Conversations with workers illustrate how important safe accommodation is in determining women’s ability to work outside the home, reinforcing the importance of government and private efforts to provide safe, affordable, clean accommodation for female employees.
A few women mentioned that while their parents were initially hesitant, respected leaders of their local community (such as school principals and local bureaucrats) intervened on their behalf, and encouraged their parents to allow them to accept the job offer. In other cases, the women’s older sisters played a key role in convincing their parents. Prior research has shown that improving women’s negotiation skills helps them convince their parents to remain in school longer (Ashraf et al. 2020) and that the presence of local female politicians increases the career aspirations and educational performance of young women through a “role-model” effect (Duflo et al. 2012). Similarly, training young women in negotiation skills or connecting them to “role models” from their villages who are working/have already migrated for work might be an effective strategy to help increase female labor force participation and facilitate economic migration by women. I look forward to exploring these ideas further in future research.
Notes: I also visited a Government Polytechnic College in Hosur district where Tata Electronics has just launched a new degree course in "Digital Manufacturing". Students graduating from this course will have the opportunity to apply for jobs at the Tata Electronics plant nearby. Many of the girls who had enrolled in the course had older sisters who were already working in the Tata plant.
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