The ripple effect of gender inclusivity on India’s economy

Do the genders of one’s coworkers matter? This question is pertinent in a traditional setting such as India, where gender roles are rigid, and there is little interaction with different genders as equals, within and outside the family.

In 2019, I conducted a survey of 1,200 call centre employees in five cities in India to study the impact of gender diversity on employee productivity. I found that about 30% of the employees did not interact with the opposite gender outside of their family, while in school. They either didn’t attend a co-educational schools, or if they did, boys and girls were not allowed to sit together. These archaic gender norms which advocate gender segregation at a young age make the entry barriers for women into the workplace even tougher. More than

30% of the surveyed call centre employees were from rural areas.

The field experiment — or randomised controlled trial (RCT) — took place in two Indian call centre companies: Call-2-connect India Pvt. Ltd, and Five Splash Infotech Pvt. Ltd. They serve domestic customers and, therefore, customer sales representatives often speak to customers in the regional language. I randomly assigned the 765 employees into mixed-gender and samegender teams. The employees were seated in teams for three months.

I found that it was not expensive for firms to integrate women into all-male workplaces. There is no negative impact on either productivity or the share of days worked during the study period, of being assigned to a mixedgender team for male employees. Additionally, male employees benefitted from female employees because women were helpful in matters related to work.

Importantly, men with progressive gender attitudes assigned to mixed-gender teams had significantly higher productivity than those with regressive gender attitudes. These attitudes were assessed at the beginning of the study, when I conducted a study to broadly ascertain attitudes regarding gender such as education, employment, fertility, and tradiemployees, there was an increase monitoring and comfort amon assigned to mixed-gender teams.

Research on productivity improve this high-growth, private-sector em crucial for job creation for many youn ers, particularly women. The ministr tronics and information technology ( and the software technology parks (STPI) are interested in expanding t centres to smaller cities and villages, viding special incentives to firms women. This move has enormous p for gender inclusivity.

In a post-pandemic world makers will need to provi stimulus to boost labour de India’s economy. Policie incentivise firms to hire wo bring them into the paid wo The findings of the study al a case for improving gen tudes as a policy mea increase hiring female work productivity in gender-diverse work likely to be higher with more integr long as male employees have progres der attitudes. This can be inculcated

However, gender inequality see increasing with India’s ranking on th inequality index plummeting ove Among its neighbours, its position is ter than Pakistan and Afghanistan Economic Forum, 2021). Bangladesh lower per capita income than India, significantly better in most indicator der equality including sex ratio a female literacy rate, female labour fo ticipation, gender wage equality, income of women and political rep tion of women. Among other policies, desh has made this progress due to empowerment initiatives geared t strengthening social acceptance of w work. Therefore, investments in wo interventions involving gender equali ing by firms in India might be bene improving their productivity and pro centres can be a start.