Women and work in India

For decades, one of the most striking facts about India's labour market was how few women were counted as working. That has changed sharply in recent data. The Periodic Labour Force Survey reported female labour force participation for women aged 15 and above rising from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24, with the female worker population ratio rising from 22.0 per cent to 40.3 per cent. The increase was driven mainly by rural women, and male participation in the same year was far higher, at about 78.8 per cent, leaving a gap of more than 35 percentage points.

The headline rise needs careful reading. Analysts, including a UNFPA analysis of the same survey, note that much of the increase is concentrated in informal, self-employed and unpaid family work, particularly in agriculture, where the share of rural women working in farming rose from 71.1 per cent in 2018-19 to 76.9 per cent in 2023-24. Such work is real — it feeds families and produces output — but it is often unpaid, insecure and without social protection, and it may partly reflect distress: when household incomes are squeezed, more family members, including women, take up available work.

The barriers to better-paid, formal work for women are well documented. Unpaid care work — childcare, elder care, cooking, fetching water and fuel — falls mostly on women and limits the hours and distance they can work. Safety on transport and at workplaces, the absence of childcare, and social norms about suitable work all narrow choices, especially in towns and cities, where female participation remains much lower than in villages. Legal protections exist, including the Maternity Benefit Act, amended in 2017 to provide 26 weeks of paid maternity leave in covered establishments, but most women work outside the establishments the law reaches.

The stakes are large. Raising women's participation in quality work is not only a fairness issue: it raises household incomes, improves children's health and schooling, and adds to national output. Policy levers include childcare, safe transport, skills training, credit for women entrepreneurs, and enforcement of workplace safety. The test of progress is not only the participation rate, but the share of women in regular salaried work, in higher-paying occupations, and in decision-making roles.