Women’s career preferences are frequently interwoven with family-centred needs and social mobility plans.

We have amongst the lowest work participation rates amongst women globally, with only parts of the Arab world being lower than India.

It shows that women are not working in even part-time jobs, and are not seeking out employment. It also shows that the female labour force participation saw a dip in some cities in comparison to the percentage in the 2011 Census.

A Delhi government report revealed that a total of 19.6 lakh workers work in trading, service and the manufacturing sector in the capital and only 11.4% among them are women. Close to half of these women work as “informal hired workers”. The report on unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises (excluding constructions) in the capital is based on […]

The World Bank’s Reassessing Patterns of Female Labor Force Participation in India report begins with a rather unsettling truth, “Jawaharlal Nehru once remarked, ‘I have long been convinced that a nation’s progress is intimately connected with the status of its women’ (Parthasarathi, 1985). In the wake of successive waves of economic liberalization, the ‘condition’ of […]

In India, the proportion between educated women and working women is unfortunately not the same. The contribution of women in the workforce of the country remains highly imbalanced. Female labour force participation is a driver of growth and therefore, participation rates indicate the potential for a country to grow more rapidly. DATA SPEAKS Economic growth […]

A new World Bank Paper on the patterns of labour force participation in India has found that female labour force participation has dropped by 19.6 million women from 2004-05 to 2011-12.