India's women were already dropping out of the labor force. Coronavirus restrictions—and one of the worst economic slumps in decades—threaten even more losses for them
Migrant workers, many of whom are women, stuck in Mumbai, India, during the coronavirus lockdown line up for food in the sprawling slum of Dharavi on Monday, April 27, 2020. India’s women were already dropping out of the labor force. Coronavirus restrictions — and one of the worst economic slumps in decades — threaten even more losses for them
Image: Atul Loke/The New York Times
NEW DELHI — Over and over, Seema Munda kept refusing her parents’ pleas to get married. She wanted to be a nurse, not a housewife — and why was employment all right for her brother but not her?
So last summer, Munda lied about where she was going and slipped out of her conservative village in northern India. She traveled 1,000 miles south, to the city of Bengaluru, where she found work stitching shirts at a factory.
“This job liberated me,” she said.
But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Munda’s life of independence shattered. In March, India instituted one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. In April, more than 120 million Indians lost their jobs, including Munda, 21.
As the world takes stock of staggering losses from the coronavirus, economists predict especially dire setbacks for women in the workforce. The United Nations warned in a recent report that the pandemic has not only exacerbated inequalities between the sexes but threatened to undo decades of gains in the workplace.
©2019 New York Times News Service