The Way Forward for Women’s Employment in India

Women’s employment in India is at an interesting inflection point. After decades of stagnant or even declining participation, the numbers have started to climb, schoolgirls are staying in classrooms longer, and policy conversations have shifted from “why aren’t women working” to “how do we create the right kind of work for them”. Yet behind the encouraging headlines lies a more complicated story of gendered workplaces, unpaid care, and a long road from rural self-employment to formal jobs. The way forward is not a single policy fix but a layered transformation across education, organisations, and social norms.

Where India stands today 🔗

The Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) has shown a sharp turnaround in recent years. According to the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, female LFPR rose significantly across most states after 2017-18, with rural areas seeing larger gains than urban ones. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows female participation climbing from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, with rural women driving most of this increase.

However, the rise comes with caveats. A large share of the new workforce is in self-employment in agriculture, much of it unpaid family labour. The gender gap in participation still hovers around 40 percentage points, and around 78 per cent of women in the labour force are in vulnerable employment without contracts, social security, or union representation. So the journey forward is less about pulling women into work and more about pulling them into good work.

Education as a key driver 🔗

Education is the single most reliable predictor of whether a woman will eventually join the paid workforce and stay in it. The good news is that India has made remarkable progress in keeping girls in school. The Gender Parity Index now sits above 1.00 across primary, upper primary, and higher secondary levels, meaning girls’ enrolment matches or exceeds boys’ at these stages.

Declining dropout rates 🔗

Dropout patterns have shifted dramatically. The latest UDISE+ data shows that at primary and upper primary levels, boys are now slightly more likely to drop out than girls. At the secondary level, where dropout remains highest, rural figures have improved significantly, with the secondary-level dropout rate falling from 13.8% to 8.2% between 2022-23 and 2024-25 according to a MoSPI report. Cash transfer schemes, free uniforms and textbooks, mid-day meals, separate sanitation facilities, and campaigns like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao have collectively chipped away at the cultural and economic pressures that once pulled girls out of classrooms.

Skills training and the missing bridge 🔗

Education alone, however, has not automatically translated into employment. India has one of the world’s largest pools of educated women who do not work, a paradox sometimes called the “U-shaped” female labour curve. The reasons range from a lack of jobs that match women’s qualifications, to social norms about which jobs are “appropriate”, to safety and mobility constraints. This is where skills training becomes crucial. Region-specific, demand-driven skilling programmes in health, education, logistics, digital services, and the gig economy can help bridge the gap between a degree and a paycheck. The National Education Policy 2020 has tried to embed vocational training within the school system itself, which could matter most for girls who would otherwise leave education with no clear pathway to work.

Programmes like the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana, where nearly 70 percent of beneficiaries are female, show that when credit and skills meet, women are willing and able to take entrepreneurial risks.

Addressing gendered organizations 🔗

Even when women clear the hurdles of education and skilling, they often run into a workplace built around male norms. The concept of the gendered organisation, popularised by sociologist Joan Acker, describes how seemingly neutral structures, like full-time hours, after-work networking, or expectations of constant availability, quietly disadvantage women. In the Indian context, this shows up in stark ways.

Hostile and benevolent sexism 🔗

A 2023 McKinsey report cited by corporate India observers found that 42% of women in India’s corporate sector feel excluded from informal networks and mentorship opportunities, and 55% reported facing microaggressions such as being interrupted in meetings or having their contributions undervalued. Research published in Culture & Psychology highlights how Indian workplaces remain gendered domains where women navigate both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism, the kind dressed up as protectiveness or compliments but still rooted in beliefs about women’s inferiority.

The double burden 🔗

The most stubborn structural barrier is unpaid care work. About 53 per cent of women outside the labour force cite care responsibilities as their primary reason for not working, compared with just 1.1 per cent of men. The Economic Survey 2024 estimates that women’s unpaid care work contributes 3.1% to GDP, an enormous invisible subsidy to the economy that no one pays for. Until childcare, eldercare, and domestic chores are shared more equally, or supported by public infrastructure, women’s “choice” to opt out of work is really a constrained one.

What inclusive workplaces look like 🔗

Fixing gendered organisations needs more than HR posters. It requires hiring women in clusters rather than as token individuals, as gender economist Vibhuti Patel has argued, so their voices are not isolated. It needs functioning Internal Complaints Committees under the POSH Act, transparent promotion criteria, and pay equity audits. It needs flexible work, parental leave for both parents, and on-site or subsidised childcare. Interestingly, recent research on India warns that even well-intentioned policies like extended maternity leave can backfire by reducing employer demand for women, so design matters as much as intent. Mandatory leave for fathers may be one part of rebalancing the equation.

Promising trends for women in the workforce 🔗

Despite the structural barriers, several trends point in a hopeful direction.

Migration for employment 🔗

Historically, women in India migrated almost entirely for marriage. That is slowly changing. Younger, more educated women, especially in southern and western states, are migrating independently for jobs in IT-enabled services, manufacturing clusters, healthcare, and retail. The research evidence suggests that women’s access to higher-paying formal sector jobs, more widely available in urban areas, increases their career aspirations while also delaying marriage and childbearing, both of which improve outcomes for women and their families.

A shift towards salaried and services work 🔗

The share of women in agriculture is gradually shrinking while the proportion in services is rising. Urban data from the PLFS shows that the share of women in salaried employment climbed from around 50 percent in early 2021 to nearly 55 percent by late 2024. The service sector now accounts for nearly 64% of total women workers in urban areas, with regular salaried jobs in education, healthcare, IT, and financial services driving the change.

State-led models worth scaling 🔗

Several states have built ecosystems that have measurably moved the needle. Kerala’s Kudumbashree mission has built women’s cooperatives and childcare infrastructure that help women re-enter work after childbirth. Tamil Nadu’s Mahalir Thittam links self-help groups to microcredit and entrepreneurship training. Odisha’s Mission Shakti has mobilised over 70 lakh women into federated SHG networks. Rajasthan’s Indira Gandhi Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme reserves 50% of urban employment opportunities for women, as documented in state-level analyses.

A national target on the horizon 🔗

The government has set an explicit goal of taking female workforce participation to 55% by 2030. Hitting that figure will require gender-sensitive design within flagship schemes like Production-Linked Incentives, Make in India, and MSME support, along with deep investment in care infrastructure, safe public transport, digital literacy, and behavioural campaigns that promote shared domestic responsibility.

The road ahead 🔗

The story of women’s employment in India is shifting from one of exclusion to one of uneven inclusion. More girls are finishing school, more women are entering the labour force, and more states are showing that the right mix of policy and infrastructure can change outcomes. But the next leap, from informal subsistence work to formal, dignified, well-paid employment, depends on three things working together: high-quality education that connects to real jobs, organisations that are genuinely redesigned rather than cosmetically diversified, and a public investment in care that finally treats unpaid domestic work as the economic infrastructure it has always been.

What do you think? If India hits its 2030 target of 55% female workforce participation but most of those jobs remain informal and low-paid, will it count as real progress? And in your own family or community, what is the single biggest barrier still keeping women out of the kind of work they would actually choose?

References

1. https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/EACPM-WP-Female-LFPR-India.pdf
2. https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets/markets-marriage-and-norms-understanding-female-labour-force-participation
3. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/datanomics-women-s-participation-rate-in-india-s-workforce-remains-low-126030500638_1.html
4. https://www.21kschool.com/in/blog/school-dropout-rates-in-india/
5. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-female-workforce-in-india-emerging-trends-and-insights
6. https://www.directors-institute.com/post/why-women-still-struggle-for-a-seat-at-india-s-corporate-power-table
7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354067X251340201
8. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.03.22275964.full.pdf
9. https://ceda.ashoka.edu.in/too-good-to-be-true-steadily-rising-female-labour-force-participation-rates-in-india/
10. https://yourstory.com/herstory/2025/11/india-female-labour-force-target-ambitious-but-possible
11. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/india-targets-55-female-workforce-participation-by-2030