Gender, Poverty and Old Age Livelihoods in Urban South India in an Era of Globalisation

Pre-print Gender, Poverty and Old-Age Livelihoods in Urban South India in an Era of Globalisation. Oxford Development Studies 40 (3), pp. 324-340, 2012 ISSN 1360-0818.

Gender, Poverty and Old Age Livelihoods in Urban South India in an Era of Globalisation

Penny Vera-Sanso[1]

Abstract:

This article examines how older women’s work in the informal economy contributes to family, national and global economies. It is argued here that protecting and promoting older women’s livelihoods will not only serve the interests of older women, but will also have much wider social and economic significance. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken over the last two decades in urban South India, the article demonstrates that amongst the poorest families, rather than being dependent on spouse or family, older women are often self-supporting, support husbands and subsidise the incomes of younger relatives. Older women’s work not only helps to reduce family poverty, it is critical to the distribution of agricultural produce in urban areas and supports India’s global competitiveness. The article identifies how state and market responses to liberalisation and globalisation are threatening older women’s livelihoods while failing to provide adequate safety nets for older women or their families.

Key words: old age, livelihoods, globalisation, inter-generational relations, poverty, gender, informal economy

The orthodox approach to development and poverty alleviation, ie integration into the global market, foreign direct investment and the reduction of state provision, relies on the assumption of a ‘trickle down’ effect that will expand employment and raise living standards for all. It is claimed that this will enable families to invest in their futures through education, by building assets and purchasing ‘risk-averting’ pensions and insurance. Whilst it is clear that certain sectors of society are doing well under economic globalisation, for others the global market is compounding pre-existing disadvantage. This compounding is evident when we consider the gender dimensions of the generation and distribution of wealth, and is particularly so when we investigate how gender and age combine to determine the living standards of older women – we find that disadvantage accumulates over a lifetime.[2] National and multinational agencies have put few resources into addressing old age poverty (Gorman and Heslop, 2002; Barrientos, Gorman and Heslop, 2003; Lloyd-Sherlock, 2010). Instead policy makers have relied on two assumptions: first, that older women are supported by their spouses or adult children and second, that older women’s economic engagement is of little consequence to the economy and the development process (Gorman and Heslop, 2002). This article takes issue with both these assumptions. Drawing on two decades of research in the low-income settlements of urban South India, the article reveals that older women provide significant sources of financial support to their husbands and married children. It also demonstrates that older women’s work plays an essential role in the distribution of agricultural produce and directly supports the economy’s engagement in global markets. This article not only demonstrates that the routine assumption of female dependence in old age is erroneous but also identifies the kinds of policies and effects of globalisation that are undermining older women’s livelihoods while failing to provide alternative means of support.

The first section of the article introduces arguments to explain why the poor are forced to work late into old age, and why women are at greater risk of deeper impoverishment in old age than men. The second section sets out the reasoning behind gendered work trajectories in urban South India in order to explain gendered differentials in work patterns and access to spousal and family support. The third section sets out older women’s contribution to and experience of the national and global economy.

The era of globalisation: exacerbating pre-existing pressures on older women

Inequalities in later life derive from the accumulation of advantage and disadvantage over the life course (Dannefer, 2003). The Cumulative Advantage/Disadvantage (CAD) approach shifts analytical attention away from dualist approaches that posit declining physical and mental capacities as the source of old age disadvantage, focusing instead on issues of inequality both within and between age cohorts. The CAD framework ‘thus brings into focus questions concerning the extent to which observed age differences and age-related variability result from systemic processes’ (Dannefer, 2003: S327). Of central importance to the possibilities available in later life are social and economic class and socio-demographic characteristics; critical to improving such possibilities is public policy (Estes and Mahakian, 2001; see also Schroeder-Butterfill and Marianti, 2006). In other words, the circumstances of older women are the outcome of: a) their social and class position, b) institutionalised discrimination that women experience throughout their life and c) age discrimination. The divergent possibilities of later life for men and women within the same social class are determined by lower levels of education and training for women, gendered productive and reproductive roles, lower pay, fewer enforceable rights in property and other assets and lower (if any) independent pensions, coupled with women’s greater longevity and morbidity in old age. In the South Asian context, where large portions of the population find it difficult to meet their daily nutritional requirements and public provision of social pensions and health care fall significantly short of need, the poor are forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence, irrespective of age and gender. In these circumstances, and due to the age differentials between spouses and the low levels of widow remarriage, men are more likely than women to end their lives having had the financial support and care of a spouse.[3] Women, by contrast, face a long old age reliant on themselves, younger relatives (who are struggling to support their own marital families) and inadequate state provision to meet subsistence and care needs.[4] This reality is very different from the commonly held assumption that in developing countries it is inevitably and overwhelmingly women who depend on spousal and family support in old age.

The erroneousness of the assumption of spousal or familial support for older women arises from a failure to examine family relations as one of the primary mechanisms through which economic systems extract paid and unpaid labour. Deeply unequal systems put pressure on the poorest and socially weakest to labour the most and accept the lowest returns. Economic systems combine with social and political systems to value labour and attribute needs and rights by socio-demographic categorisation: class, race, caste, ethnicity, migration status, gender, age, marital status, physical ability, and so on. This categorisation defines not only wage levels but also access to family resources and state provision and, indeed, the capacity of a person to control the incomes they earn (Vera-Sanso, 2008). What this means in practice is that in countries without adequate safety nets, the poorest families must find the means to ensure that everyone contributes to the household economy.[5] In South India, for example, the means used by poorer families to cap dependency and increase contributions are the formation of nuclear households soon after marriage and the postponing of support, in favour of more urgent expenses, for those whose capacity to secure employment or earn a living is on the wane (Vera-Sanso, 2004).[6]

Global market integration has amplified these pressures on the poorest and socially weakest as the downward pressure on wages increases, property values boom and state policies and resources are switched from an emphasis on the direct support of local social and economic development through public services and the stimulation of domestic production, including public-sector driven industrialisation, towards privatisation and the encouragement of foreign direct investment. Simulation and field studies have demonstrated that trade liberalisation has led to a reduction of regular work, an increase in casual work and downward pressure on informal sector wages (Sinha and Adam, 2007; Kaur et al, 2007; Singh and Sapra, 2007). In an economy such as India’s where an estimated 86% of workers are engaged in informal activities and the informal sector in 2004-5 (NCEUS, 2008:3) and where 42% of the population lives on incomes below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day in 2005 PPP (Chen and Ravallion, 2008) it is clear that, far from bringing prosperity, trade liberalisation has led to the deepening immiseration of the growing number of informal sector workers (NCEUS 2009). Evidence from the 2001 Census showing a substantial increase in the female work participation rate demonstrates that a large number of women entered the workforce as marginal workers to compensate for the sharp fall in the numbers of main workers, especially male workers since India began to liberalise under the Structural Adjustment Programme of 1991 (Government of India, undated).[7] Liberalisation has increased the need for older women from the poorest sections of society to support themselves and their families, drawing many more women into contributing to the national product and, indirectly, to the global economy.[8]

Gender Differentials in Spousal and Family Support

This article draws on two decades of research undertaken in urban Tamil Nadu, the south-eastern state of India. The research was undertaken in Chennai, formerly Madras, between 1989 and 1992 and between 2007 and 2010. In the 1989-92 study a stratified sample of 200 households was selected for qualitative research from a purposive sample of 450 households surveyed in two slums.[9] In the 2007-10 mixed methods study of 800 households, a survey was undertaken drawing on a systematic sample of five low-income settlements, including the two from the 1989-92 study. From the 800 households, 175 participated in in-depth qualitative research. In addition, a street market in central Chennai was observed between 2007 and 2011. Chennai is the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu; in 2001 it had over 7 million residents of whom 7.8% were aged 60 and over (CMDA, 2008). In recent years the city has developed an international profile for information technology (IT) and Back Office Processing sectors (BOP) as well as medical tourism, and has a diverse industrial base catering to national and international markets.

i) Gendered work trajectories and spousal support

The field research, undertaken over the past two decades with people living in Chennai’s slums, shows an unanticipated degree of continuity in the patterning of work force participation across the gendered life course. In all the low-income settings studied, at the start of the marriage husbands are the sole earners. Married women only take up paid work to cover the gap between family expenses and their husband’s income.[10] By their late twenties a few widowed and deserted women are beginning to take up paid work.[11] Thereafter the number of women entering paid work rises as their husband’s contribution to the family budget declines. By the time men reach their late 40s, their contribution to the household budget is increasingly irregular due to age-discrimination in the labour market, injury and ill-health.[12]

Qualitative data gathered between 1989 and 1992 revealed that women living in Chennai’s slums were generally married before the age of twenty, did not start working until they were in their late twenties or later and only did so to support their family because of debts, their husband’s inability or unwillingness to fully support the family or because of widowhood or desertion (Vera-Sanso 1995). The 2007-10 800 household survey in five of Chennai’s slums and the interview data from a subsample of 175 of these 800 households reveals that women are continuing to enter the work force to support or substitute for their husband’s role as family provider. While the reasons propelling women into the work force have remained the inadequacy or lack of male incomes, the reasons for that inadequacy have changed since the early 1990s.

In Chennai the population structure and labour market is changing and this is evident in the settlements studied. The survey of 800 households reveals a preponderance of young men in the age band 20-39, which corresponds to Chennai’s overall population structure. This youth bulge is a factor contributing to age discrimination against men in some sections of the labour market that begins when they reach their early forties. In addition to age discrimination, older men are facing a reorganisation of labour markets that marginalises middle-aged and older workers; some skilled crafts are being displaced by digital technologies and some sections of the job market are being organised using more formal recruitment practices.[13] Added to this increasing marginalisation of middle-aged and older men is a dramatic drop in the number of men aged 40-44 (highlighted in Table 1); thereafter the number of men in the population is outstripped by the number of women to the extent that in the sixty and above age band, there are 1.6 women to every man.[14] Table 2 plots the reported work participation rate for women and men by age. From this we can see that almost all men are reported as working by the age of 29 and that there is a long and substantial tail of older men reported working, with the result that while 78% of all males aged fifteen or more are reported as working, 30% of all men aged over seventy are reported as continuing to work. Table 3 plots age and reported work participation against marital status. It demonstrates that approximately one-third of men reported as working are single and two-thirds are married. It shows that 90% of men aged 20-24 are single, that by 35-39 most men are married and at age 60-64 90% of men are married. Tables 2 and 3 reveal results that run counter to the usual expectations regarding gender, age and dependency. Table 2 reveals that young men aged 20-24 have a lower reported work force participation rate than older men aged 60-64. Table 3 indicates that young men’s work participation is closely linked to their transition into marriage, which in Chennai’s slums mainly happens between the ages of 25 and 34. Survey data corroborate qualitative data: the pressure on older married men to generate income is greater than that on younger unmarried men, especially when we bear in mind that a number of the younger working men surveyed are apprentices (mechanics, carpenters and painters) whose work is ‘more learning than earning’.

Table 1: Age distribution of females and males in the settlements studied in 2007-10

Table 2: Age and work participation of women and men in the settlements studied in 2007-10

Table 3: Age and marital status of working women and men in the settlements studied in 2007-10

Turning to the data on the female population in the slums studied, Table 1 demonstrates that while there is also a youth bulge in the population pyramid for women, the drop in numbers across the age bands is less precipitous than for men, despite starting at the same age, ie 25-29, which is also the age at which women’s reported work force participation begins to climb (see Table 2). Unmarried women are reported as working earlier than unmarried men and some women seem to be working until their late twenties, which is late for marriage in these settlements. This appears to corroborate activist views that families have begun to delay their daughter’s marriages as young unmarried women are now better placed to earn incomes in Chennai’s export-orientated economy. More than half of women aged over 40 reported as working are widows (see Table 3). However, it is not widowhood per se that is the determining factor in women’s work, for only a third of all women reported as workers are widowed (see Table 3, counts). Rather, for women work is associated with greater age; 62% of women reported as working are aged 40 and over, the peak being 45-49, where the percentage of women reported as working reaches 37% (see Table 2). A larger percentage of women aged 65-69 (20%) is reported as working than of women aged 20-24 (16%). If we take Government of India standards for working age (15-59 years), it is apparent that in the slums, for men and women, work is more closely aligned with ‘post-retirement age’ than with ‘early working life’ and that the association of women with later life working is stronger than it is for men.

The number and proportion of women reported as working is much less than that of men. Yet to dismiss women as having a limited role in supporting themselves, their husbands or their families would be to misunderstand women’s, particularly older women’s, role as an economic safety net in domestic economies. This is visible from an analysis of work trajectories across the life-course. While the total number of men reported as working in the five slums outnumbered women by nearly three times, 63% of the reported male workforce in the settlements studied was under forty and only 37% of men reported as working are aged forty or more. By contrast, 49% of reported women workers were over forty (see Table 2). Breaking this down further, Table 2 demonstrates that between the ages of 25 and 29 men reported as working outnumbered women reported as working by a ratio of 4:1, but in the age band 40-44 men’s dominance fell to 2.3:1 and then to 1.8: 1 in the age band 65-69. What we are seeing are work trajectories in which husbands start out as the main family providers, over time many married women are forced into work to supplement or substitute for insufficient, possibly falling, male incomes and/or contributions to the household, such that by age 39, a third of women are reported as working. The proportion then continues to rise as women move from supplementing to substituting for and then replacing a spouse’s contribution to the household.