More Indian Women Are Working. The Harder Question Is What Kind of Work.
Between 2017-18 and 2023-24, the share of Indian women aged 15 and above who were working or looking for work rose from 23.3% to 41.7%. That is an increase of 18.4 percentage points in six years, and the rate is now about 1.8 times what it was.
The official reading is a good-news story. Some economists read the same numbers as a sign of distress. Both camps are looking at the same survey, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) run by the statistics ministry, so the useful question is what kind of work lies behind the rise.
The numbers
The table shows women's and men's rates on the PLFS usual-status measure for people aged 15 and above. The gap between men and women narrowed from 52.5 points to 37.1.
Year | Women | Men | Gap in points |
2017-18 | 23.3% | 75.8% | 52.5 |
2018-19 | 24.5% | 75.5% | 51.0 |
2019-20 | 30.0% | 76.8% | 46.8 |
2020-21 | 32.5% | 77.0% | 44.5 |
2021-22 | 32.8% | 77.2% | 44.4 |
2022-23 | 37.0% | 78.5% | 41.5 |
2023-24 | 41.7% | 78.8% | 37.1 |
Most of the rise came in rural India, where women's participation reached 47.6% in 2023-24, against 24.6% in 2017-18, according to Business Standard's reading of the PLFS. In urban India it reached 28.0%.
One caution on measures. You may see 40.3% in news reports. That is the employment rate, the share of all women who are employed, not the labour force participation rate. The PLFS reports several measures and they should not be mixed.
What kind of work
Among employed women, the self-employed share rose from 51.9% to 67.4%. Regular salaried work fell from 21.0% to 15.9%, a seven-year low. In rural India 73.5% of employed women were self-employed in 2023-24, up from 57.7%. In urban India the share rose from 34.7% to 42.3%.
Type of work | 2017-18 | 2023-24 |
Self-employed | 51.9% | 67.4% |
Regular salaried | 21.0% | 15.9% |
Casual labour (calculated as the remainder) | 27.1% | 16.7% |
Self-employed covers two very different things. An own-account worker or employer runs an enterprise, however small. An unpaid helper works on a family farm or in a family business and receives no wage. In rural India the unpaid helper category is the largest single one: 42.3% of employed rural women in 2023-24, up from 38.7%. Casual labour, which at least pays a daily wage, fell from 31.8% to 18.7%.
Two ways to read it
A finance ministry report led by Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran attributed the rise partly to strong agricultural output growth and described the feminisation of agriculture as a much-needed structural shift within farming. P. C. Mohanan, a former acting chairman of the National Statistical Commission, has said the rise does not reflect new job creation. He linked it to women having more time after better access to basic amenities and suggested it adds surplus labour to agriculture. Santosh Mehrotra of the University of Bath reads female work in agriculture and unpaid household help as a sign of household distress, with women working to add to household income.
Participation data cannot settle that argument. Earnings can help. C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, writing for Macroscan in January 2025, found that rural women's real regular wage was ₹12,109 a month in 2017-18 and ₹11,914 in 2023-24 (in 2023-24 prices), a small fall. They also found that women get only about a third of men's income from self-employment. By our calculation from their table, women's average self-employment earnings in rural India fell from about 46% of men's to about 35% between 2017-18 and 2023-24, and in urban India from about 44% to about 37%.
Claudia Goldin, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for her work on women's labour market outcomes, described a U-shaped link between a country's development and women's participation. It falls as families move out of farming and rises as education and salaried work spread. Much of India's new work looks like farm and household enterprise work, not salaried jobs, and the salaried share of working women is falling. Whether the rise is progress depends on what the work pays, and the earnings data so far is not encouraging.
The inclusion angle
Work is how most people enter the financial system. A salary arrives in a bank account and leaves a record. An unpaid helper on a family farm has no income of her own to record. A self-employed woman who earns a third of what a man in the same category earns is a thinner borrower. Credit, insurance and pensions are all built around steady, visible income, so the type of work decides what a woman has to show a lender, an insurer or a pension fund.
Our view is that the rise in participation is real and welcome, and that the data does not yet show it is good news. Three things would settle it:
Women's real earnings by type of work, year by year, from the next PLFS rounds.
Whether regular salaried work starts to grow as a share of women's employment.
The unpaid-helper share. A fall, alongside rising own-account work and earnings, would be a good sign.
Related reading on The Money Clause: India's Informal Economy: 90% of Workers, 0% of the Safety Net and India's Agriculture Crisis: When Feeding a Nation Doesn't Pay.
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