Greater access for women in labour market a challenge: Gowda

Ensuring greater access to the labour market for women remains a challenge, especially when their participation in the workforce is dwindling, Statistics Minister D V Sadananda Gowda said today.

"A major challenge in India is to promote greater access for women to the labour market," Gowda said addressing the inaugural session of the two-day National Consultation on Data Generation for Gender Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The minister said, "One of the areas of concern in the employment market is the low level and declining female labour force participation for which strategies need to be evolved to address this issue. During the last decade, the decline in female participation from 29 per cent to 22.5 per cent is a matter of concern."

The Goal 5 of SDGs aims to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against women in public and private spheres. It also seeks to undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources and access of ownership of property.

Besides, the SDGs call for ending gender disparity in all sectors, with special emphasis on ending poverty and hunger, ensuring healthy lives, quality education, promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth and productive employment and decent work for all.

The minister said, "The SDG Goal 5 on gender equality and women empowerment along with more than 70 indicators on the 2030 agenda will be monitored at national as well as global levels. This poses a great responsibility on the statistical fraternity to fulfil data requirements under SDGs and help the government in designing targeted interventions to improve these indicators."

On initiatives taken by his ministry, Gowda said, "There is also focus on identifying new data sources for meeting growing data demand."

In the works are regular establishment surveys for all sectors, data warehousing initiative and Time Use Surveys.

The latter will facilitate generating indicators to measure women's contribution at home and in establishments, he added.

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