A large share in female work takes the form of unpaid housework, which is not considered to be a job in official statistics Photo Credit: Ma Sriram
The degree of participation in women’s workforce (FLFPR) measures the proportion of women who are either employed or actively looking for a job. Higher FLFPR is often considered a sign of greater gender equality and a more dynamic labor market. FLFPR fell from 31.2% in 2011–12 to 23.3% in 2017-18, before 2023-24 climbed to 41.7%. Although this increase seems encouraging, it shows that women continue to face barriers – both in terms of earnings and in terms of available jobs.
In India, workers are widely classified into three categories: self -employed, regular paid and occasional workers. NSSO monitors earnings for each of these groups. It is surprising that during the very period when FLFPR increased, real earnings decreased for all categories, except for occasional workers in rural and urban areas. This shows the worrying reality – more women can enter the workforce, but do not find safe or rewarding employment.
The recent increase in FLFPR is largely driven by rural women. In order to better understand this trend, we will now turn to a closer examination of participation in the workforce and employment patterns in rural India.
Economic development is usually associated with a shift of labor from agriculture to non -agricultural sectors. Given the recent increase in rural FLFPR, more women could be expected to move from agriculture to industry or services. However, the data indicates the opposite. The proportion of rural women employed in agriculture increased from 71.1% in 2018-19 to 76.9% in 2023-24, while their presence in the secondary and tertiary sectors fell.
A large share of female work takes the form of unpaid housework, which is not considered to be a job in official statistics. Even in the employed category, there is a group called “Household Helpers” – a role that also falls into unpaid family work. Two categories are captured by women who participate in domestic duties, which are both unpaid activities.
Among the rural women aged 15 years and more, there was a sharp decline in those who showed “domestic duties” -Z 57.8% in 2017-18 to 35.7% in 2023-24 (almost 20 percentage points). This shift is reflected in the increase in women with 10.5 points for women considered “household helpers” (from 9.1% to 19.6%) and a 10 point increase in “workers and employers” in the same period (from 4.5% to 14.6%). In other words, a reduction in unpaid housework has mainly reflected in self -employment, not to expand the employment of wages.
In rural areas, it is often difficult – no if impossible – to separate the domestic duties of women from their role helpers in households. This blurring boundaries may partially explain the increase in FLFPR. Does it also raise the basic question: should such unpaid auxiliary roles be considered a job? At the same time, in the framework of self -employed categories, the apparent increase in workers and employers of their own accounts in time coincided with the decline in their actual earnings. In other words, the increase in self -employment did not improve women’s income.
The increase in FLFPR is therefore largely driven by the increase in women considered helpers in domestic companies and as self -employed workers. Wage employment has not expanded, and actual income for most female workers have actually decreased. This pattern by far the signaling dynamics shows deeper vulnerability in the labor market.
Source: Survey of periodic workforce (PLF) and the National Sample Office (NSSO)
Subhanil Chowdhary is a associate professor of economics at the University of St. Xaviers in Calcutta. Anushree Gupta is a student Ma at the Department of Economics, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata
Published – 4 October 2025 17:00
