Seems unlikely this 20% number implies that 80% of women are sitting at home drinking tea & looking after kids.
Where is it from? Is this formal sector employment?
IIRC the informal labor market is something like 80% of the country in total. Lots of people work in ways that are difficult to gather statistics about.
Yes I exaggerate slightly. But I wonder a lot about the quality of this data. Doesn't about half the country still work on farms? Low-tech farming has endless labor for all kinds of hands, but little paperwork.
I'm from an upper middle-class family in India and the data from all my relatives (including distant ones) matches this - 80% does seem about right for housewives. Similar for my friends.
It's changing rapidly with the newer generation but for my parents' generation that is definitely the norm.
Yeah, but it's a serious waste of their abilities as humans. It's no surprise that dual-professional households there who hire specialists for the cooking and looking after the house parts have better lives (as judged by the fact that few women who are professionals will want to become housewives while the opposite is a common desire).
Because there are rapid diminishing returns with every extra hour past the first few. My parents put a lot of work into me, but they were also full-time surgeons. My mum most definitely put a hell of a lot of work into me but she didn't spend all the time at home.
Worked out pretty well.
Of course you want to allow for people to do whatever they want, but part of that is enabling them to not have to be stay-at-home parents. And most people want to do something more than that, in practice, because creating things is a fundamental human need that most people have. If people want to be stay-at-home parents and they can do it, more power to them, but it's important to allow them to make that choice otherwise unconstrainedly and not through societal pressure to keep women at home because jobs are unsafe (there are whole categories of work one avoids at the margin in India if one is a woman, because you cannot guarantee safe transport from/to one's place of work).
It's not rewarding when those kids are the reason you are extremely poor. Population growth requires ever increasing productivity to maintain the same standard of living or people must sacrifice their standard of living until they die from preventable diseases or starvation.
Forcing people to have less children is bad (see one child policy). If people want to have less children voluntarily then you've found a way to success.
Where is it from? Is this formal sector employment?
IIRC the informal labor market is something like 80% of the country in total. Lots of people work in ways that are difficult to gather statistics about.