Women and their Childcare Needs: Assessing Childcare Provisioning in India through a Gendered Lens

Abstract

In September 2018, Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST), as part of its broad objective of understanding and highlighting barriers to women’s economic empowerment, organized a two-day national workshop on ‘Women and their childcare needs’. The aim of this workshop was to collate existing evidence that support universal child care provisioning as one of the strategies to achieve women’s economic empowerment and also highlight evidence required to build more support for the call for universal child care services. As an output of this workshop, it was decided that it would be useful to juxtapose the rich discussion output of the workshop with findings from recent empirical studies in form of a paper, in order to create new evidence that can re-iterate the need to look at substantial child care support as an important strategy to ease the burden of work on women.

Keywords: Women and Childcare, Economic Empowerment of Women, Child Care Services, Unpaid Women Work

JEL Classification: J16, J21