This article is intellectually dishonest. It tries to subtly weave this narrative as causal to the declining participation of women in the workforce.
This is data fudging of massive proportions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the participation of women is decreasing because of worsening social conditions for women. The social conditions for women have definitely become better over the last decades. The declining percentage of women in the workforce could be a result of a hundred other factors even if we assume that data is correct which I would be rather skeptical of.
Maybe it's just that the life has been so terrible in India a while ago that women were just forced to work regardless of the cultural norms, and now when it got better, these norms kicked in?
Life is still terrible for a lot of people - it is terrible for all poor people - it is terrible for all poor men and women - and it is terrible for all kinds of poor people.
But that still doesn't take away the fact that India is changing dramatically for the better for everyone including men and women and lower castes and what not, and the pace of change is accelerating. But no matter how much it changes, some of these stories will be there even decades from now.
The only reason reporting such a story makes sense is when it is indicative of a larger trend and when the writer chose to link it to the dubious statistic, she gave her intent away.
What the author needs to do is to dig deeper into the statistic, how is that collected, what is the segmentation and then align that research with broader economic and social trends to get a true picture. Only after all of this is done that she can take pick an anecdotal case and use that to better articulate her findings.
That research which changes everything wasn't done.
This is data fudging of massive proportions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the participation of women is decreasing because of worsening social conditions for women. The social conditions for women have definitely become better over the last decades. The declining percentage of women in the workforce could be a result of a hundred other factors even if we assume that data is correct which I would be rather skeptical of.