The Effects of Neoliberalism on Indian Women Workers

When India opened its economy in 1991, the country took a sharp turn from state-led planning toward markets, privatisation, and global trade. This shift, broadly called neoliberalism, was sold as a story of growth, opportunity, and modernisation. But for women workers, the story has been far more complicated. Some found new factory jobs in garment hubs and food processing units. Many others were pushed deeper into informal, low-paid, and insecure work. Understanding how neoliberalism reshapes women’s labour helps us see why economic reforms can look like progress on paper while feeling like precarity in real lives.

What is neoliberalism?
Key characteristics of neoliberal policy
The global picture
Neoliberalism’s impact on women’s employment
Job loss from outsourcing and restructuring
Women-dominated industries under pressure
The puzzle of falling female participation
Export-Oriented Industrialisation and women workers
Why employers prefer women workers
Garments, food processing, and the global assembly line
The dark side of feminised export work
Empowerment or exploitation?
Looking ahead: what kind of work, for whom?

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is an economic and political framework that puts markets at the centre of social life. It favours privatisation of public enterprises, deregulation of industries, liberalisation of trade and finance, cuts to public spending, and a shrinking role for the state in welfare. The idea is that competition and private investment will allocate resources more efficiently than government planning.

Globally, neoliberalism took off in the 1980s under leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and through structural adjustment programmes pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. India joined this turn in 1991 through the Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation (LPG) reforms. The Indian economy entered a long process of trade liberalisation, domestic deregulation, and privatisation of public sector units, and per capita output grew several times over the next three decades.

Key characteristics of neoliberal policy

Neoliberalism tends to share a few recurring features across countries. These include opening borders to foreign investment, lowering tariffs, weakening labour protections in the name of “flexibility”, reducing subsidies on food, fuel, and fertilisers, encouraging contract and casual work over permanent jobs, and promoting self-employment and entrepreneurship as solutions to unemployment. Public services like healthcare, education, water, and electricity are increasingly handed over to private players or run on cost-recovery models.

The global picture

On the surface, neoliberal globalisation lifted millions out of absolute poverty, especially in East and South Asia. But it also widened income inequality, concentrated wealth at the top, and made workers more vulnerable to global shocks. The 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic both exposed how thin the safety net had become for ordinary workers, particularly women in the informal economy.

Neoliberalism’s impact on women’s employment

The effect of neoliberal reforms on women workers has been deeply contradictory. Reforms created new openings in export sectors and services, but they also dismantled secure public sector jobs, weakened unions, and pushed more women into precarious work. Researchers describe this pattern as the feminisation of informal and precarious labour.

The 1991 economic reforms led to the feminisation of informal and precarious work, reduced access to public services like healthcare and education, and reinforced disparities based on caste, class, and religion. In other words, women did not simply gain or lose jobs. They were sorted into the parts of the economy with the lowest pay, least protection, and weakest bargaining power.

Job loss from outsourcing and restructuring

One of the earliest casualties of liberalisation was the organised public sector, which had once offered stable employment with benefits. As public sector units were sold or downsized, women in clerical, nursing, teaching, and manufacturing jobs lost the security they had earlier enjoyed. Banks, telecom, and insurance saw waves of restructuring that limited fresh recruitment of women into permanent posts.

Outsourcing further reshaped women’s work. Large companies started subcontracting tasks like stitching, embroidery, packaging, food processing, and electronics assembly to small workshops or home-based workers. This kept costs low because women working from home or in tiny units have no fixed wages, no provident fund, no maternity benefits, and no clear employer to hold accountable. More than 90 percent of working women in India are employed in the informal sector, which captures just how widespread this shift has become.

Women-dominated industries under pressure

Sectors that traditionally employed large numbers of women, such as handloom, beedi rolling, agro-processing, and small-scale textiles, faced fresh competition from cheaper imports and mechanised mills after liberalisation. Many small units shut down or shifted to contract-based production, pushing women either out of work or into lower-paying piece-rate arrangements.

The agricultural sector tells a similar story. As public investment in agriculture fell and input costs rose, men from poor rural households migrated to cities for non-farm work. The collapse of rural non-farm employment and the growing crisis in the agricultural sector led to massive long-term, long-distance migration by men, leaving women to survive through agricultural wage labour. This phenomenon, often called the “feminisation of agriculture”, left women with more work but no extra land, credit, or social security.

The puzzle of falling female participation

One of the most striking trends after reforms is that women’s labour force participation has fallen, not risen, for long stretches. The female labour force participation rate in rural areas dropped from roughly 50 percent in 2004-05 to 25 percent in 2017-18, while it remained stagnant at just above 20 percent in urban areas. Recent years have shown some recovery, but the gap with men remains large.

Economists offer several explanations: rising household incomes allowing women to step back from distress work, more girls staying in education, mechanisation of farming, and the lack of suitable non-farm jobs near rural homes. The neoliberal model added another layer to this puzzle by creating “jobless growth” in many phases, where output expanded without generating enough decent jobs for women.

Export-Oriented Industrialisation and women workers

Export-Oriented Industrialisation (EOI) is a development strategy in which a country focuses on producing goods for foreign markets rather than just for domestic consumption. Countries set up Special Economic Zones, offer tax breaks, and invite multinational buyers to source their products locally. EOI took off across Asia from the 1970s and gained momentum in India after 1991.

Why employers prefer women workers

Labour-intensive export industries like garments, leather, toys, electronics assembly, and packaged food rely heavily on women workers. The reasons are not flattering. Employers often assume women are more “docile”, less likely to unionise, more willing to accept lower wages, and more suited to repetitive, fine-detail work.

Garment manufacturing constitutes 2 percent of India’s GDP and 17 percent of its exports and employs 45 million people, of whom women workers form more than 60 percent of the workforce. In many factories, especially in southern hubs like Tiruppur and Bengaluru, the workforce is overwhelmingly young, female, and migrant.

Garments, food processing, and the global assembly line

The garment industry is the clearest example of how EOI draws women into wage work. Stitching units in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and the National Capital Region produce clothes for major global brands. Food processing units in states like Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra hire women to peel, sort, pack, and label shrimp, cashews, mangoes, and ready-to-eat meals.

These jobs do bring cash income, some independence, and exposure to new social worlds. For young women from poor rural families, a factory job can mean delaying marriage, supporting siblings’ education, or saving for their own future. But the working conditions are often harsh. Long shifts, denial of toilet breaks, wage theft, sexual harassment, and abrupt dismissals are common complaints.

The dark side of feminised export work

The same features that make women attractive to export employers also make them easy to exploit. Schemes like the Sumangali system in Tamil Nadu, where young women were recruited into spinning mills on the promise of a lump-sum dowry payment after three years, illustrate how poverty and patriarchy combine with neoliberal supply chains. The Ethical Trading Initiative has worked specifically to eliminate exploitative practices, including the Sumangali scheme, in the garment and textile industry in southern India.

Researchers studying the Indian garment sector argue that neoliberal policies that gained ground with the industry’s increasing export orientation exacerbated the precarious working conditions rooted in earlier policy-making and social mindset. The shift of factories to the rural outskirts of cities also made it harder for unions to reach workers, weakening collective bargaining further.

Empowerment or exploitation?

The debate about EOI and women is not simply “good” versus “bad”. A garment worker earning her own wage in Bengaluru may have more say at home than her mother did. At the same time, she may be paying for that say with twelve-hour shifts, no social security, and the constant fear of being fired if she falls ill or gets pregnant. India’s aggressive neoliberal growth strategy has involved the extension and intensification of women’s labour framed in familiar neoliberal terms of “inclusion” and “empowerment”, while the deeper structures of patriarchy and class continue to shape what that inclusion actually feels like.

Looking ahead: what kind of work, for whom?

The neoliberal era reshaped Indian women’s work in three big ways. It pulled them into global supply chains as cheap, flexible labour. It pushed many out of secure public sector and small-scale employment. And it shifted the burden of social reproduction, including care for children, the elderly, and the sick, back onto women’s unpaid time as public services were cut. Any honest assessment of reforms has to weigh new opportunities against these losses.

Policy responses now focus on raising female labour force participation, formalising informal jobs, expanding social security, and enforcing minimum wages in export sectors. Whether these efforts can correct the deeper imbalances of the neoliberal model, or whether they simply patch over its cracks, remains an open question.

What do you think? Has neoliberalism made Indian women freer as workers, or has it mostly transferred their unpaid household labour into underpaid factory labour? If you had to redesign labour policy for women in export industries, what would you protect first: wages, working hours, or the right to organise?

References

PDF 📄

The Effects of Neoliberalism on Indian Women Workers

Table of Contents

What is neoliberalism? 🔗

Key characteristics of neoliberal policy 🔗

The global picture 🔗

Neoliberalism’s impact on women’s employment 🔗

Job loss from outsourcing and restructuring 🔗

Women-dominated industries under pressure 🔗

The puzzle of falling female participation 🔗

Export-Oriented Industrialisation and women workers 🔗

Why employers prefer women workers 🔗

Garments, food processing, and the global assembly line 🔗

The dark side of feminised export work 🔗

Empowerment or exploitation? 🔗

Looking ahead: what kind of work, for whom? 🔗