Understanding Occupational Segregation: How Gender Shapes Job Distribution

The labour market is not a neutral space where talent freely finds its match. It is shaped by centuries of social norms, economic structures, and unspoken rules about who belongs where. When we look at who drives the buses, who codes the software, who teaches in primary schools, and who sits in corner offices, a clear pattern emerges. This pattern is called occupational segregation, and it remains one of the most persistent features of the modern workforce.

What is occupational segregation? 🔗

Occupational segregation refers to the unequal distribution of women and men across different jobs, industries, and levels of authority. It is not just a statistical curiosity. It explains a large part of the gender wage gap, limits economic mobility, and shapes how societies value certain kinds of work. Scholars typically break this phenomenon into two distinct dimensions, each producing its own form of inequality.

Horizontal segregation 🔗

Horizontal segregation describes the concentration of women and men in different occupations or sectors at roughly the same level of the hierarchy. Think of nursing, primary school teaching, garment stitching, and domestic service on one side, and construction, transport, mining, and heavy engineering on the other. A World Bank analysis notes that this horizontal dimension also extends to whether someone works in the formal or informal sector, in paid or unpaid jobs, and even to which crops women cultivate compared to men.

Vertical segregation 🔗

Vertical segregation, often described as the glass ceiling, refers to the uneven distribution of women and men across the rungs of the same occupation. Even when women enter a field in large numbers, they tend to cluster at the bottom and middle while men dominate senior positions. A comprehensive study of India’s tech industry covering 115 firms and over 80,000 employees found that while women hold close to half of junior-level jobs, they occupy only 13% of top-level roles. Out of 28 CEO positions and 51 president or vice-president positions in the sample, only two of each were held by women.

Why segregation persists 🔗

Occupational segregation is rarely the result of explicit rules. It is produced by a tangle of social expectations, educational pipelines, employer biases, and the unequal burden of unpaid care work. According to UN Women data, Indian women spend 9.8 times more time than men on unpaid domestic work, averaging about 4.5 hours each day on care responsibilities. This invisible second shift directly limits the kinds of jobs women can take, how far they can travel, and how long they can stay in the workforce.

Employer behaviour reinforces this. Hiring managers often assume women are unwilling to travel or more likely to take family leave, leading to discriminatory treatment in recruitment and promotion. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024, Indian women earn on average 20% less than men for comparable work, and the gap widens sharply in unorganised sectors where most women are employed.

Examples across traditional sectors 🔗

The clearest illustrations of horizontal segregation come from the sectors that employ the largest share of women.

Agriculture 🔗

Agriculture remains the single biggest employer of women. Estimates suggest that 52% to 75% of rural women depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and in 2011 women made up around 75% of the agricultural workforce. Yet the tasks they perform are systematically narrowed. Women are concentrated in sowing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting, while ploughing, operating machinery, and selling produce in mandis are dominated by men. On top of this, women earn on average only 70% of male wages for similar work, and many labour as unpaid family workers without any land rights of their own.

Domestic and household work 🔗

Few sectors are as starkly gendered as paid domestic work. E-Shram portal registrations indicate that women hold around 96% of domestic and household work positions, compared to roughly 4% for men. These jobs share common features: no written contracts, irregular wages, no social security, and little legal recourse. The result is that millions of women keep middle-class households running while themselves remaining in some of the most precarious employment in the country.

The wider informal economy 🔗

Horizontal segregation is amplified by informality. According to the International Labour Organization, about 81.8% of women’s employment in India is in the informal economy, meaning only a small share of women have contracts, paid leave, or pension coverage. Home-based piece-rate work, beedi rolling, agarbatti making, and garment finishing are dominated by women working inside their homes, invisible to most labour statistics and excluded from most labour laws.

Examples in newer sectors 🔗

One might expect modern, knowledge-based industries to escape these patterns. They do not. They simply reproduce them in new forms.

Information technology 🔗

India’s IT sector is often celebrated as a relatively gender-friendly industry. Women now make up around 36% of the IT workforce, and the sector has hired over a million women in the past decade. But the picture changes dramatically when we look upward. A TeamLease Digital report found that while women hold 34% of fresher-level positions, their share falls to 26% at the junior level, 18% at mid-senior level, 11% in leadership roles, and just 8% in the C-suite or boardroom.

Within IT, horizontal segregation also operates. Women are more concentrated in testing, user interface design, customer support, and human resources, while core development, cloud architecture, cybersecurity, and large-scale project ownership remain male-dominated. Industry data shows that the gender pay gap in high-demand tech roles reaches 22.2%, compared to less than 1% in non-tech roles within the same companies, reflecting how women get filtered into lower-paying job families even inside one industry.

Healthcare and education 🔗

Healthcare and education are sometimes seen as women-friendly sectors, but they show both forms of segregation simultaneously. Women dominate nursing, midwifery, ASHA work, and primary school teaching, but they are underrepresented among surgeons, hospital administrators, principals of elite institutions, and university vice-chancellors. Care work, broadly defined, is feminised at the base and masculinised at the top.

Corporate India at large 🔗

A study on leadership gender balance in NSE 200 companies reported that women executives in India earn an average of Rs 85 for every Rs 100 earned by their male counterparts, and the gap widens as one moves up the hierarchy. The combination of horizontal segregation (women clustered in HR, communications, and support functions) and vertical segregation (men dominating CEO, CFO, and tech leadership roles) produces a self-reinforcing system in which the highest-paid roles remain overwhelmingly male.

Women breaking barriers 🔗

Against this backdrop, the stories of women who have entered traditionally male occupations are not just inspiring; they are evidence that segregation is socially produced rather than naturally given.

Fighter pilots and combat roles 🔗

For decades, fighter cockpits in India were closed to women. That changed in 2016, when Bhawana Kanth, Mohana Singh, and Avani Chaturvedi were commissioned as the first women fighter pilots in the Indian Air Force. In May 2019, Kanth became the first woman fighter pilot to qualify for combat missions. Squadron Leader Mohana Singh later became the first woman to fly the indigenous Tejas Light Combat Aircraft, and Flight Lieutenant Shivangi Singh joined the Rafale squadron in 2020. In July 2025, Sub-Lieutenant Astha Poonia was inducted as the Indian Navy’s first woman fighter pilot for MiG-29K jets operating from aircraft carriers.

The armed forces have also opened up in other ways. Women cadets have been admitted to the National Defence Academy since 2022, the Agnipath scheme inducts women across all three services, and the Indian Coast Guard deployed its first women officers in combat roles in 2017. Officers like Captain Shiva Chouhan, the first woman posted at Siachen, and Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who played a public role in recent military briefings, have shifted the public image of who belongs in uniform.

Drivers, mechanics, and operators 🔗

Women metro drivers, bus drivers, auto-rickshaw drivers, and cab drivers are increasingly visible in cities. The Delhi Metro, Kochi Metro, Bengaluru Metro, and several state transport corporations now employ women in cabs that were once exclusively male spaces. Programmes like the Sakha cab service in Delhi have trained women from low-income households to become professional drivers, opening up a livelihood that combines decent earnings with a sense of public presence.

STEM and entrepreneurship 🔗

India produces one of the world’s largest shares of female STEM graduates. Women now lead space missions at ISRO, run technology startups, head research labs, and run banks. Each such appointment chips away at the assumption that certain jobs are naturally male. At the same time, these high-visibility breakthroughs should not distract from the fact that the average woman worker in India still labours in a field, a kitchen, or a home-based workshop.

Why this matters 🔗

Occupational segregation is not simply about individual career choices. Policy analysts argue that reducing vertical segregation across occupational hierarchies can contribute substantially to closing the gender wage gap, while reducing horizontal segregation requires longer-term investments in childcare, public transport, safer workplaces, and a redistribution of unpaid care work. Without addressing both dimensions, the economy continues to lose the productive contribution of half its population, and women continue to be channelled into the lowest-paid and most insecure corners of the labour market.

What do you think? If most women still work in agriculture, domestic service, and home-based piece work, can high-profile breakthroughs in cockpits and boardrooms genuinely change the structure of the labour market, or do they risk masking the everyday reality of occupational segregation? And which interventions, expanding childcare, regulating informal work, or quotas in leadership, would shift the needle the most in your view?

References

1. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/483621554129720460/pdf/Gender-Based-Employment-Segregation-Understanding-Causes-and-Policy-Interventions.pdf
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10301763.2025.2522012
3. https://gender.study/gender-and-governance/women-india-informal-sector-indispensable/
4. https://m.thewire.in/article/women/women-work-india-glass-ceilings-second-shifts
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_agriculture_in_India
6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1407054/india-share-of-workers-in-informal-sector-by-gender/
7. https://www.changeincontent.com/women-workers-in-the-informal-sector-india/
8. https://indbiz.gov.in/indias-it-sector-hired-over-1-million-women-since-fy23/
9. https://group.teamlease.com/tlmedias/womens-workforce-participation/
10. https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/india-tech-sector-women-workforce-gcc-gender-parity-125032600860_1.html
11. https://innovapolis.ca/socioeconomic-impacts-of-the-gendered-pay-gap-in-indias-labour-force/
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Indian_Armed_Forces
13. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/women-in-indian-armed-forces
14. https://iwwage.org/gender-based-occupational-segregation-a-barrier-for-womens-economic-empowerment/