The 2017 amendment, which provided for increased paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks for the first two children, followed an 8.4% decline in women’s employment and a 2.6% rise in men’s employment at covered manufacturing firms, according to a study.
They found that firms hired fewer women and more men after the amendment. The study found no significant change in firms’ output and profits. The study, ‘Mandated Maternity Leave and Labour Substitution: Firm-Level Evidence from India’, found that the number of days women worked fell by 9.5%. The number of days men worked rose by 2.1%. The study was published in August as part of the IZA Discussion Paper Series by IZA@LISER Network, a global community of over 2,000 labour economics scholars across more than 450 institutions. The Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research coordinates the network The researchers, Souvik Banerjee, Preeti Jaiswal (IIT Bombay), and Sankar Mukhopadhyay of the University of Nevada, Reno, and IZA@LISER, used Annual Survey of Industries data from 2012-13 to 2019-20 to examine employment changes at firms covered by the law.
Harshil Sharma, who holds a PhD in labour studies and has more than a decade of experience in labour welfare and policy reforms, said his fieldwork also showed similar barriers to women’s employment in construction. “PLFS [Periodic Labour Force Survey] data tells the same story: construction employs about 15.6% of India’s male workers but less than 5% of its women workers,” Sharma said.
