Why Aditi Mittal and Christina MacGillivray want you to pay attention to facts about working women in India

The duo who host the podcast ‘Women in Labour’ is back with a second season of articulate guests, stunning statistics and great comic timing

Stand-up comic, writer and actor, Aditi Mittal visibly sputters, when asked about what her learnings are from co-hosting a podcast on women in the Indian workplace. “The number one reason that not enough Indian women are in the workforce is because men are not helping out at home,” she shares. Mittal’s analysis takes on a hilarious hue: “During the pandemic, we have been flooded with images of men being ‘heroic’ at home. ‘Oh my God, he pressed a button on a washing machine’ and all that stuff. But it died down soon after.” She further articulates, “The thing that blew my mind was that there's so much crap, like sexual harassment in the workplace and commuting spaces. There's a lack of education, all of which are huge, real social problems. And then you find out, it's actually because, you know, dudes aren't helping out at home! It's this one small thing that was the learning from the first season that blew my mind,” she emphasises.

Mittal, one half of a podcast host duo on Women in Labour, has professional heft on her side, having been a pioneering voice on the Indian comic scene for more than decade now. Mittal, along with filmmaker and journalist Christina MacGillivray, began working together in 2019 when the latter reached out to her on Facebook. “I was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, when I got a message in my ‘Others’ folder on Facebook, from someone who was clearly a troll!” Mittal proceeded to ignore the message, only to receive an email from the same person who, of course, turned out to be MacGillivray. “I ended up in Aditi’s ‘Others’ folder because I knew [the podcast] had to be a conversation that opened up the subject further and wouldn’t just be about labour force participation rates and statistics, that would simply put our intended audience to sleep,” chuckles MacGillivray.

Hard facts

As many as 21 million women across India have quit the workforce between 2017 and 2022, say statistics from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) that has been collecting weekly, national-level data from 175,000 households since January 2016. This estimate put women's workforce participation at a startlingly low nine per cent between January and April 2021. You can expect to hear frightening figures like these–along with anecdotal evidence and a no-holds barred conversation between Mittal, MacGillivray and any one of their guests–in the podcast with a delightfully punny title that has now entered its second season.

Their inaugural guest, journalist Namita Bhandare, has and continues to be an inspiration for the duo. “Labour beat reporting does not exist anymore in the media. And here is a woman [ Bhandare] whose journalism is only about women at work,” explains Mittal. Bhandare who has been doggedly covering women in the Indian workforce kicked off the second season’s episode to share some hard-hitting facts about the Indian economy and why the number of women in the workforce is at its highest at the moment. There is a huge but here though, the reasons for which we will circle back to later. “I love Namita Bhandare! I have such a big professional crush on her. The ongoing joke is that every time Namita comes on the podcast, I dissolve into giggles as I'm so excited about talking to her. She's such an inspiration to me. Bhandare is the reason we exist [as a podcast],” MacGillivray exclaims on a Zoom call. It’s an endearing statement that gives credit where it’s due. Both MacGillivray and Mittal, admirers of Bhandare’s work, have hosted the journalist once for each season of the podcast.

Statistics, conversations and collaborations

It was sometime in 2018 that MacGillivray, an award-winning journalist and filmmaker who now lives between New Delhi and the United States, found herself getting extremely alarmed about what she was reading about women and their place in the Indian economy. “I had been living in India for about 10 years and running my own business. I had read this cover story in The Economist that was about women plummeting out of the workforce in India at one of the fastest rates in the world. Saudi Arabia was about to surpass the rate of women working in India. And I thought it was crazy. How is it that I’ve not really come across this before?” MacGillivray began articulating her concerns to friends and colleagues. “Asking anyone that I ran into at a coffee shop or a restaurant, or anyone in Delhi, I would ask them: ‘have you heard this [statistics] about women dropping out of the workforce at this rate?’ The response was always, ‘How can it be?’”

MacGillivray began talking with Laura Quinn, the co-founder of the podcast, and slowly her worries began to take shape into more affirmative action. “It was on the back of a napkin in a bar that we sketched out the idea for Women in Labour. Slowly an idea began to form, and MacGillivray decided to contact Mittal. One good thing soon led to another, and MacGillivray and Mittal decided to collaborate on the podcast, given how the central idea of women and workplace equality is so dear to both of them. “Christina is super organised and had all the episodes already planned,” shares Mittal beaming with almost parental pride.

Human rights done creatively

The duo get genuinely excited when quizzed about their guests and the memorable conversations. While it’s difficult to choose who has been the most memorable, Mittal shares, “Dr Ruha Shadab who has founded LedBy to provide professional training and mentorship to Muslim women is sensational [on season two].”

How does the second season differ from the first? “I had seven million more questions at the end of season one. The first season was at the intersection of where women in labour stand and the various elements of society that women interact with. When we started out, we wanted to talk to every woman alive. But given that is impossible, we’ve also started looking at individual stories,” says Mittal. MacGillivray chimes in, “In season one, we were asking the questions. We sat with a whiteboard and brainstormed: ‘What are the different reasons this could happen? Is it how our children are schooled? Is it public spaces? Is it marriage? Is it motherhood? Or is it about the jobs that are available?’ Then we literally broke it down into different lanes of inquiry and asked if there's one person who could have explained this one question, who would it be?” The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, of course, played a starring role in the first season of the podcast. In the second season, the duo then decided to examine the broader theme of the many ways in which women are helping each other.

Takeaways aplenty

When asked about a singular lesson learned over the course of the two seasons, for MacGillivray, the learning was that women are engaged in over six hours of unpaid work everyday while men do something like 28 to 48 minutes. “And if you can reduce that by two hours a day, the rate of women working jumps on average by 20 per cent. It really is this very unsexy explanation, but it's fundamental.” For Mittal, it was the realisation that men simply do not work in their homes.

The Indian government's Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2020-21 that was released in June 2022 indicates, labour force participation by women (15 years and above) at 32.5 per cent, is at its highest level in four years. Significantly this happened after the strict lockdowns and the second deadly COVD-19 wave in March-April 2021. MacGillivray shares, “In our episode with Bhandare, she shared that for the first time, the labour force rate for women is going up. And we were like, ‘what do you mean it's going up’? Because there's another set of data saying it's all the way down to nine per cent right now. She explained that women are taking up jobs for one third of their salary level. Since the economy is in such dire straits, women and the elderly have to get back into the workforce but not at rates that justify their worth. This blew my mind.”

Between MacGillivray and Mittal, there’s clearly a mutual admiration society and the former’s nerdy ways have found resonance in Mittal who reads extensively on the subject. “I read eight books over the course of three weeks.” The comic would make extensive notes and come back to MacGillivray every week with new findings from reading intense academic books saying, “Did you know that bulletproof vests are designed for men? So women are actually more vulnerable in the military.” And how much of this intense research will find its way into Mittal’s stand-up routines?

“The learnings from season one I am using now in my stand-up routine. I know season two will come out two years later out of my system. You start to see [the information] in the world around you, and then process it through comedy,” she says.

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