The podcast Women in Labour started taking shape in 2019, after shocking statistics about the country’s gender employment gap revealed that more and more Indian women were falling out of the workforce at an alarming rate. A pandemic has ravaged the world since then. And in the first episode of season two of the series, we discover that although women’s workforce participation is at its highest now, they are coming back under economic distress, not necessarily out of empowerment. It’s a reality that the guest speaker, journalist Namita Bhandare, along with hosts Christina MacGillivray and Aditi Mittal unravel, over the course of 33 minutes. But it’s not all grim. MacGillivray and Mittal remind us that if women everywhere, at their individual level, can lift each other up, then that’s something, isn’t it? 

This ray of actionable hope ties episodes of season two together. “‘Sweeping your own corner of the world’ — this is a reflection of who Christina is as a person. It’s one of the most powerful things that we can do, especially when the larger picture is so bleak. I can’t monitor the entire classroom. But if I keep my corner and desk clean, and enough of us keep our desks clean, the classroom will change,” Mittal shares.