This point, and the related implications for the nature of economic participation by women in urban India over the 1990s, deserve some greater elaboration. Feminisation of employment had become one of the economic buzzwords of the 1990s, as the role played by female labour in the east Asian export boom became more widely recognised, and as many export-oriented producers even in India chose to employ more women. This preference for women was typically a reflection of their inferior status, because of lower reservation wages, acceptance of worse working conditions and willingness to work under much more fragile casual contracts whereby they could be hired and fired at will. But in turn the very process of such employment generation often played a role in changing gender equations and relative power in society, so that market-based economic participation by women began to be seen as an important means to their economic empowerment.
 
This was very much the received wisdom not only in India, but through Southeast Asia where the process was far more advanced, until the mid-to late 1990s. However, data relating to the latter part of the 1990s that have recently become available, suggest that the process of feminisation of work may have decelerated or even begun to reverse, even before the crisis of 1997. Thus, female shares of manufacturing employment began to decline in most of these countries by 1994 or even earlier, as the increased employment of women led to upward pressure on their wages, reducing the gender gap in wages, and also involved louder social demands for better working conditions for women workers. These pressures actually made them less attractive for employers, and the impetus to feminisation became less marked.
 
Such a reverse process naturally raises the uncomfortable question of how the market participation of women workers can be encouraged without inevitably relying on worse conditions of work and greater fragility of such employment. In India, the question is even more pressing, because formal feminisation of work is still relatively less developed, although there is evidence that it is on the increase.
 
Thus, one of the more important forms of women's work has become in home-based work as part of subcontracting networks that can extend all the way from large (often multinational) companies down through various subcontracted units to women working on a piece-rate basis at wages that are often below the breadline. This is possible because women are still seen as subsidiary earners in households and the widespread extent of underemployment makes any remuneration, however little and unfair, seem attractive as part of the material survival strategy of poor urban households.
 
Open unemployment rates are shown in Chart 3 and Chart 4. In countries like India, as is well known, open unemployment rates are very poor indicators of the actual levels of job availability, because the material circumstances and absence of public social security systems mean that most workers have little choice but to find some employment, however unremunerative. Underemployment or disguised unemployment, which is far more difficult to estimate and measure, is therefore the most common tendency.
Chart 3 >> Chart 4 >>
 
It is true that there is more likely to be recognition of open unemployment in urban areas where surplus labour is less easily disguised as work in the fields. However, even here, the proliferation of informal activities, mostly in the service sector, can serve as a way of camouflaging the actual extent of underemployment. This is of course another reason why data on service sector employment in countries like India need to be viewed with some degree of caution.
 
Even given these caveats, the evidence from the NSS thin samples shows that rates of unemployment for both men and women have been rather high over the 1990s. Already at the start of the decade, the rates were relatively high, indeed 50 per cent more than the average rates of the previous decade. After dipping a little in the mid-90, by 1998 the male rates were even higher (at 5.3 per cent) than in 1990-91, while the female rates were as high (at 8.1 per cent).
 
It should be noted that these higher unemployment rates in the latter part of the period are still not enough to explain the overall decline in work force participation of women, because the period when unemployment rates were lowest (1995-96) was also one when work force participation was low.
 
In terms of employment by sector, there is no clear evidence of any systematic pattern for urban males over the while period from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s (Chart 5 and 6). Indeed, what is surprising is that despite a brief period of falling share between 1995 and 1997, by the end of the period the impression is that of the stubborn persistence of the primary sector (at between 9 and 10 per cent of employment).
Chart 5 >> Chart 6 >>