Women in India are facing a jobs crisis. Are factories the solution?

Before her husband died and she was left to raise their 2-year-old daughter alone, Sarika Pawar never imagined working a regular job. Like her own mother and most women she knew in rural India, she spent her days in her village. Her hours were spent tending to her toddler, boiling water for drinking, and preparing an evening meal.

But with her husband gone, cutting off his waitressing wages, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a town about 100 miles north of Mumbai. A dozen years later, she’s still there, plucking newly formed food containers and other household appliances from an assembly line, labeling them, and packing them into boxes destined for kitchens as far away as Los Angeles and London.

Ms Pawar earns about 12,000 rupees a month, or about $150, a paltry sum by global standards. Yet those wages have allowed her to keep her daughter in high school while transforming their daily lives.

She bought a refrigerator. Suddenly she could buy vegetables in bulk, which meant fewer trips to the market and more leverage to negotiate better prices. She added a propane stove—freeing her from the wood fires that filled her house with smoke, and escaping the tedious task of scouring the ground for sticks to light on fire.

Ms Pawar, 36, described mainly that her horizons had been broadened.

“When you come out of your house, you see the outside world,” she said. “You see the possibilities and I think we can make progress.”

As global brands reduce their dependence on China by moving some production to India, this trend has the potential to create significant numbers of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially for women, who have so far been largely excluded from formal Indian employment.

“There is a huge reserve of female labor in India who would work if given the chance,” said Sonalde Desai, a demographer at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. “When jobs open up for women, they take them.”

In many Asian economies, the rise of manufacturing has been a powerful engine of upward mobility over the past half century. Incomes have risen, poverty has declined, and job opportunities have opened up. Women have been at the heart of this transformation.

In Vietnam, where the factory boom has been particularly large, more than 68 percent of women and girls over the age of 15 work for some form of payment, according to data collected by the World BankIn China, the figure is 63 percent; in Thailand, 59 percent; and in Indonesia, 53 percent. Yet in India, fewer than 33 percent of women are employed in paid jobs counted in official surveys.

The important work that women do in India is reflected in their households, where they do almost all the housework and childcare, and in agriculture, where they grow crops and keep animals.

“You’re raising chickens and raising children, and it all goes hand in hand,” Ms. Desai said. “People are finding work, but it’s not very rewarding work.”

Where Indian women are largely absent is from the ranks of companies that offer regular, paid jobs, which are subject to government regulations that provide protections over pay and working conditions. Their absence partly reflects social factors, from gender discrimination to fear of sexual harassment.

One of India’s most high-profile foreign investments, a factory run by Foxconn that makes iPhones, has avoided hiring married women because of their responsibilities at home, a Reuters research published last week. Indian authorities said they would investigate the reports.

But more than anything, the lack of women in the Indian workplace is evidence of a scarcity of opportunity. For decades, India’s economic growth has not created jobs. The roles that do exist are often monopolized by men. With notable exceptions like the tech sector, the jobs that are open to women often pay so little that they’re not worth challenging the social norms that often confine women to the home.

If jobs were available, more women would face social constraints in their pursuit of economic advancement, economists say. This is especially true because India has invested significantly more in girls’ education in recent decades.

“The supply of young women who want to work is very high,” says Rohini Pande, an Indian labor expert and director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. “In all the studies we see, women want to work, but they find it very difficult to migrate to where the jobs are, and the jobs aren’t coming to them.”

The consequences of this are serious: poverty continues to exist, while the chance for improvement is lost.

In a pattern repeated in many industrializing societies, as more women enter the workforce, it causes families to invest more in girls’ education. It also increases household purchasing power, spurring economic expansion that prompts investors to build more factories, creating more jobs — a feedback loop of wealth creation.

This is the dynamism that India missed, because it did not participate in the diffusion of manufacturing that boosted prosperity in many Asian economies.

And this is the prospect that is suddenly becoming reality, as geopolitical forces such as trade enemies between the United States and China give new impetus to the establishment of factory labor in India.

In the industrial enclave of Manesar, about 35 miles south of Delhi, Poorvi, who goes by one name, spends her days in a factory that makes toys — kits that children assemble into items like pinball machines — for a fast-growing startup, Smartivity. She inspects the finished products for defects and earns about 12,000 rupees a month.

Growing up, her mother stayed home. Poorvi is recently married and sees her factory job as a pragmatic way to cope with the rising cost of living in a rapidly growing urban area.

“Now one income is not enough to run the family,” Poorvi said. “So women are coming out and working. It is progress, but also a necessity. Women do many things. Why not me?”

Her bosses, two male graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (a kind of Indian version of MIT), have a preference for hiring women.

“There are certain aspects of the job that are better for women,” said Pulkit Singh, the company’s chief of staff. “Women can concentrate longer than men. They don’t need as many smoke breaks, or breaks in general. Women are definitely harder working and more productive than men.”

About 40 percent of Smartivity’s nearly 200 factory-floor jobs are now held by women, and as the company grows, that percentage could increase.

Ashwini Kumar, CEO of Smartivity, said the company is in talks with Walmart to sell its products on the shelves of stores in the United States, a development that could more than double the number of jobs.

“They want to diversify,” said Mr. Kumar, 35. “They want to move their supply chain to India.”

At All Time Plastics, the company near Mumbai where Ms. Pawar works, 70 percent of the roughly 600 factory workers are women. The percentage rose sharply last year after the local government amended the law to allow women to work night shifts. The factory runs buses that pick up and drop off women at their homes to ease safety concerns.

Among the women who recently worked at the factory was Smita Vijay Patel, 35. A mother of two, she dropped out of school after eighth grade because her parents couldn’t afford tuition and books. Her own daughter, 15, is still in school and plans to go on to college, a prospect made possible by Ms. Patel’s factory wages. Her son, 19, is already in college.

Mrs. Patel now effectively has two jobs: she is a quality control officer at the factory, she cooks for her family and she takes care of the house. She wakes up at 5 a.m. to start her 7 a.m. shift.

“It’s hard, but good,” she said. “I didn’t have an education, so I think my children should be educated so they can progress more.”

Hari Kumar contributed to the reporting.