Mapping Women’s Occupations: From Pink-Collar Jobs to Global Job Ghettos

Walk into almost any school staffroom, hospital ward, or government dispensary in the country, and you’ll notice a pattern. The teachers, nurses, receptionists, and helpers are mostly women. The principals, surgeons, and senior officers are mostly men. This isn’t coincidence. It’s the result of decades of occupational segregation, a phenomenon where work itself gets colour-coded by gender. To understand where women actually work, and why, we need to map the terrain, from the rise in female employment numbers to the persistence of so-called “pink-collar jobs” and the troubling existence of “job ghettos” worldwide.

The big picture: women’s occupational trends 🔗

For most of the last two decades, the headline story about women and work in India was a worrying one: female labour force participation was falling. Then, suddenly, the numbers reversed. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023-24, the Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) for women aged 15 and above rose from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24. In rural areas, the jump was even sharper, from 24.6% to 47.6%.

On paper, this looks like a celebration moment. More women are working than ever before. But scratch the surface, and the story gets complicated. A closer reading of the PLFS data shows that the share of self-employed women rose to 67.4% in 2023-24, while the share of women in regular salaried jobs dropped to a seven-year low of 15.9%. In other words, more women are working, but fewer are getting stable, well-paying jobs with benefits.

Analysis by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis points out that the rise in female participation has not been accompanied by increases in earnings, regular wage employment, or access to well-remunerated jobs with benefits. Much of the increase is concentrated in agriculture and unpaid family enterprise work. Many of these new “workers” are women helping on family farms or in tiny home-based units, often without a salary slip or a written contract.

Why the numbers are rising 🔗

Researchers offer several explanations. Some credit better measurement: the new PLFS captures unpaid contributions to household enterprises more carefully, so work that was always happening is finally being counted. Others point to economic distress, where families need a second income to cope with inflation, agricultural stress, or job loss among male earners. And a section of policymakers argues this reflects genuine empowerment through schemes like self-help groups, Mudra loans, and rural employment guarantees.

The reality probably blends all three. But the crucial question isn’t just “how many women are working?” It is “what kind of work are they doing?” That’s where the concept of occupational segregation enters the story.

Pink-collar jobs: the colour-coding of work 🔗

The term pink-collar emerged in the late 1970s as a counterpart to “blue-collar” (manual labour) and “white-collar” (clerical and professional) classifications. It refers to occupations that are historically and overwhelmingly held by women, typically those involving care, communication, and service. Think of nurses, primary school teachers, receptionists, secretaries, beauticians, childcare workers, and customer service representatives.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development describes pink-collar jobs as historically feminised sectors and occupations experiencing both horizontal segregation (concentration in particular sectors) and vertical segregation (concentration in lower hierarchical roles). Even within these female-dominated fields, men tend to occupy the leadership roles.

What makes a job “pink”? 🔗

Three features typically characterise pink-collar work:

Caring and service orientation: The job involves nurturing, teaching, healing, or assisting others. Society often labels these as “natural extensions” of what women do at home, which is one reason they get sorted into these roles.

Lower pay and prestige: Despite requiring real skill, emotional labour, and long hours, these jobs typically pay less than comparable male-dominated work. The wage gap is partly explained by this very devaluation, when a profession becomes feminised, its perceived worth often drops.

Limited career mobility: Promotion ladders in pink-collar fields are short. A nurse can become a head nurse, but the hospital director is still likely to be a male doctor. A primary school teacher may become a headmistress, but the District Education Officer is usually a man.

Pink-collar work in the Indian context 🔗

India has its own distinctive pink-collar landscape. School teaching, especially at the primary level, is dominated by women. Nursing is so overwhelmingly female that “nurse” is often used as a feminine noun in everyday speech. Beyond these, there is a vast army of women working as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Anganwadi workers, the backbone of rural maternal and child health services.

According to government data, the country has approximately 1.3 million Anganwadi workers and around 971,000 ASHA workers, plus another 1.2 million Anganwadi helpers. These women run preschools, monitor child nutrition, organise immunisation drives, and counsel pregnant women, essentially keeping a chunk of the public health system running.

Yet, despite their workload, they are classified as “voluntary” or “honorary” workers, not government employees. They earn less than minimum wage and do not enjoy the benefits or job security of permanent government employees. Research from Rajasthan shows that women take up these positions despite poor pay because there are simply not enough other jobs available for educated women in rural areas, and because they hope the role will eventually be regularised. This is pink-collar work in its starkest form: essential, skilled, gendered, and chronically undervalued.

From pink collars to job ghettos 🔗

The concept of a job ghetto, sometimes called an “occupational ghetto” or “pink-collar ghetto”, takes the idea of pink-collar work a step further. Sociologists Maria Charles and David Grusky introduced the term prominently in their landmark book Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (2004). Their argument was striking: even as women streamed into the formal labour force across the industrialised world, they were not joining men in the same jobs. Instead, they were being funnelled into a narrow set of female-dominated occupations, what the authors called occupational ghettos.

A job ghetto has specific features: it is female-dominated, low in status, poorly paid, narrow in job content, and offers few prospects of promotion. The word “ghetto” is deliberately chosen, it evokes the idea of being confined to a marginal space, with limited mobility, regardless of merit or aspiration.

Charles and Grusky also raised a paradox that still puzzles policy researchers: occupational segregation is often more severe in countries with strong gender-equality policies, like the Nordic states. Free childcare and generous maternity leave have helped more women enter the workforce, but those women have concentrated heavily in public-sector care work. So women work in larger numbers, but in even more segregated fields than before. This is sometimes called the “welfare-state paradox”.

Global job ghettos: a tour 🔗

If you mapped the world by gender and occupation, certain patterns would jump out. These are the global job ghettos, and they tell us that economic necessity, not career choice, often determines where women end up.

Garment and textile manufacturing 🔗

Across South and Southeast Asia, the garment industry is overwhelmingly female. According to the International Training Centre of the ILO, women represent over three-quarters of workers in the garment sector globally, with 90% in Cambodia, 85% in Bangladesh, 70% in China, and 63% in Jordan. Yet within these factories, women are concentrated at the bottom, as line workers, stitchers, finishers, while supervisory and managerial roles are almost entirely male.

This is not because men cannot sew or women cannot manage. It is because the work has been culturally coded, and the wage structure reflects that coding. Garment work pays poorly precisely because it is women’s work; and it remains women’s work partly because it pays so poorly that men with options choose other jobs.

Domestic and care work 🔗

Globally, domestic work, cooks, cleaners, nannies, eldercare aides, is one of the most female-dominated sectors. In many countries, including India, it is also one of the least protected by labour law. Wages are low, hours are unregulated, and social security is rare. The Bangladeshi garment industry case study published in the IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science shows how globalisation, while expanding women’s access to paid work, has also intensified gendered divisions of labour and income inequality at the same time.

Retail and grocery 🔗

In North America and Europe, retail work, especially in grocery stores, has long been documented as a female job ghetto. Part-time hours, cash-counter jobs, and shelf-stocking are female-coded, while managers, butchers, and warehouse staff are usually male. Academic research on Canadian grocery stores has framed this as a textbook case of occupational segregation perpetuated by both employer practices and union structures.

Care and health work 🔗

Nursing, midwifery, and community health work are overwhelmingly female across the world. The feminisation of the health and care workforce in India and South Asia has implications for women’s labour rights: precarity, inadequate compensation, and weak support systems are common, even in roles considered essential to public health.

Why this matters 🔗

Occupational segregation is not just a curiosity. It has real consequences. It drives the gender wage gap, because female-dominated jobs systematically pay less than male-dominated ones, even when skill requirements are comparable. It limits women’s economic mobility, because pink-collar career ladders end early. And it reinforces stereotypes, by making it seem “natural” that women teach kindergarten while men design semiconductors.

It also shapes whole economies. When women are confined to a narrow band of low-paid roles, the economy loses talent that could otherwise contribute to research, leadership, and innovation. Research from the Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE) shows that India’s female labour force participation gains have been uneven across states, and that marriage and motherhood remain significant deterrents for women aged 20-29, the very years when careers are usually built.

Can the mapping change? 🔗

There are signs of movement. Women are entering medicine, law, IT, and finance in record numbers. But within these fields, vertical segregation persists, women cluster in certain specialties (paediatrics over surgery, HR over engineering, family law over corporate litigation) and rarely break into top leadership. Closing this gap requires more than just letting women into the room; it requires reshaping how we value work itself. As long as “caring” work is paid less than “building” work, the colour-coding of jobs will continue, no matter how many women officially enter the workforce.

What do you think? If pink-collar jobs are essential to society, why do they consistently pay less than male-dominated work, and what would it take to change that? When you look at the occupations of women in your own family or neighbourhood, do you see the patterns of pink-collar work and job ghettos repeating, or breaking?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2057970
2. https://www.business-standard.com/economy/news/share-of-self-employed-women-increased-to-67-in-2023-24-plfs-data-124092601012_1.html
3. https://ceda.ashoka.edu.in/too-good-to-be-true-steadily-rising-female-labour-force-participation-rates-in-india/
4. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/03/beyond-pink-collar-jobs-for-women-and-the-social-economy_e34e09c7/44ba229e-en.pdf
5. https://chwcentral.org/indias-auxiliary-nurse-midwife-anganwadi-worker-and-accredited-social-health-activist-programs/
6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2021.1970206
7. https://gbv.itcilo.org/index.php/briefing/show_paragraph/id/40.html
8. https://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.26-Issue5/Series-9/C2605091722.pdf
9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383519028_Feminization_of_the_Health_and_Care_Workforce_in_India_and_South_Asia_Implications_for_Women's_Labor_and_Decent_Work
10. https://iwwage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Women-and-Work-2024.pdf