NL Correspondent
Jammu Tawi: Great Lakes Institute of Management, true to its tagline of ‘Global mindset, Indian roots' organised a
conference – Indian Women and Paid Work, choices, opportunities and constraints on December 9th and 10th in their
Chennai premises.
Helmed by Vidya Mahambare of Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai and Sowmya Dhanaraj of Good
Business Lab, the event saw the participation of 100 people in both modes (direct and online) in spite of rough weather. The
conference deliberated on the constraints which stop women from developing their full economic potential and discussed
ways to bring about change to lower barriers to Indian women's effective participation in the labour market. Participants
were allowed to attend the conference in both direct and online modes, by paying a nominal fee.
The first day of the conference started off with an inaugural speech by K Santhakumari, regional vice-president of the
International Federation of Women Lawyers and the former president of the All-India Federation of Women Lawyers.
While thanking the chief guest for her insightful and inspiring speech, Professor Suresh Ramanathan, Dean and
principal, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai highlighted the steps taken by the institution to empower women.
He said they have a Centre for Women Leadership and said “We do our best to support women to get back to office after a
break,”.
Secondly, Farzana Afridi of Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi) and National University of Singapore spoke about the
networks, gender norms and women's labour supply: Experimental evidence using a job search platform, in the keynote
lecture.
This was followed by a session on job search to climb up the ladder which was chaired by Divya Pandey of International
Initiative for Impact Evaluation. Srinivasan Murali of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; Anant Ahuja of Good
Business Lab and Shahi Exports; J V Meenakshi of Delhi School of Economics; Sangeeta Bansal of Jawaharlal Nehru
University and Brinda Viswanathan, Madras School of Economics presented papers which was followed by open
discussion.
Ashwini Deshpande, Ashoka University and Institute of Labour Economics, (Bonn), spoke about the structural change
and the decline in female labour force participation in India. She focussed on how illiterate and highly educated women are
employable and are employed but the women who fall in the middle with 8, 10th or 12th standards as qualification fall out of
the labour market.
A session in Gender, Health and Crime was chaired by Shreya Biswas of Birla Institute of Technology and Science,
Pilani, Hyderabad. Anuja Jayaraman, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action and Aditi Bhowmick, Data
development Lab, University of Yale presented papers related to this topic.
The second day of the conference started off with a session on social norms and paid work chaired by Brinda
Viswanathan, Madras School of Economics, Chennai. Rosa Abraham of Azim Premji University; Nishant Anjum of
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; Rahul Lahoti of UNU-WIDER, Helseinki; Hema Swaminathan of Indian Institute of
Management, Bangalore; Madhulika Khanna of Amazon and Divya Pandey of International Initiative for Impact Evaluation
participated. Purna Banerjee of Reserve Bank of India and Shreya Biswas of
Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences, Pilani and Debojyoti Mazumder of Reserve Bank of India presented papers on
related topics.
The session on empowering women was chaired by Srinivasan Murali of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Maya Vengurlekar of Crisil Foundation; Rukmini S, an independent data journalist and Kalpana K of Indian Institute of
Technology, Madras presented papers on related topics.