As India pushes toward a $5 trillion economy and expands manufacturing and modern services, half its talent remains on the sidelines. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024 ranks India 129/146 overall and 142 on Economic Participation and Opportunity.
PLFS 2023–24 shows female labour force participation rising to 41.7 per cent (from 37 per cent), but much of the increase reflects rural unpaid family work or low-productivity self-employment; urban female participation is still just 25.8 per cent. IMF research estimates that closing the gender gap in labour force participation could raise India’s GDP by up to 27 per cent, making this central to long-run growth, not just equity.
Progress remains elusive because women face a 'triple lockdown' on work: at home, in the law, and in the labour market.
The home factor: The unpaid work trap
The most pervasive barrier lies inside the household. The Time Use Survey 2019 shows Indian women spend nearly five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with just over one and a half hours for men.
This gap is far larger than in OECD countries, where women spend roughly twice as much time as men on domestic work. Time poverty limits women’s ability to take up and sustain paid jobs, and weak childcare supply makes the trade-off starker: for many urban families, private crèche fees can wipe out blue-collar or entry-level service wages.
If India is serious about raising female employment, childcare must be treated as economic infrastructure, not welfare. Just as growth needs reliable power and transport, labour markets need a functioning care ecosystem. Creating and expanding quality public childcare, strengthening anganwadis, and incentivising employer-supported care should be core economic policy, not merely social support.
Regulatory roadblocks: The legacy of protective laws
Indian labour regulation has long prioritised protection, often at the cost of women’s economic freedom. Restrictions on working night shifts and bans in sectors such as mining and heavy manufacturing, framed as safety measures, narrowed women’s access to higher-paying industrial jobs.
In recent years, several states have relaxed night-work restrictions, typically with safety and transport conditions, and the new labour laws remove these shift restrictions altogether. Evidence suggests that such reforms increase women’s employment, especially in larger factories and formal-sector jobs.
But the legacy persists. Special restrictions can inadvertently signal to employers that women are less flexible or costlier to employ, reinforcing stereotypes that shape hiring.
Demand-side barriers: Discrimination and the scarcity of good jobs
Women are more likely to seek formal contracts, predictable hours, and basic workplace amenities, yet much of India’s employment remains informal, particularly in small enterprises where these conditions are rare. But job availability alone does not explain the gap. Discrimination matters too, which not only leads to lower hiring of women but also occupational segregation.
In an audit study using identical CVs with male and female names, women were about 25 per cent less likely to receive a callback for the same jobs. Additionally, when employed, women remain concentrated in care-related occupations, accounting for 94.2 per cent of nursing and midwifery associate professionals and 85 per cent of childcare and personal care workers.
In contrast, they represent only 6.1 per cent of engineering professionals. This segregation reflects multiple forces: education pipelines, social norms, and caregiving expectations that steer women toward roles seen as 'family compatible', narrowing opportunities and shaping earnings and mobility.
Increasingly, this discrimination is embedded in digital hiring design. In our review of 34 major job portals in India, nearly 40 per cent allow employers to specify gender preferences in job ads. A World Bank study finds that when platforms provide a 'preferred gender' field, about one-third of ads use it (21 per cent preferring men, 14 per cent preferring women).
Even without explicit fields, employers often signal preferences in text; our study of over 150,000 Indian job ads finds that about 8 per cent explicitly state a gender preference in the job descriptions. Some portals also let job seekers filter searches by gender, further funneling applicants into already feminised, lower-wage roles perceived as 'female-friendly'. Together, explicit preferences and gendered wording, such as emphasis on inflexible hours or frequent travel, shape who applies and at what wage, accounting for nearly 17 per cent of the gender wage gap at the application stage.
What global experience shows
Several countries have long prohibited gender-specific job advertisements. The United States introduced such restrictions under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the United Kingdom followed with the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. Similar rules are enforced across Canada, Australia, Germany and South Korea through equal employment and anti-discrimination laws.
More recent evidence illustrates the impact of such reforms. When a major Chinese job board removed its 'preferred gender' field, women’s callbacks for jobs previously labelled male-preferred increased by 61 per cent. A study of a policy intervention in Austria found that when employers were notified that gender-specific job advertisements violated anti-discrimination rules, the share of such ads fell sharply and more women were hired into jobs previously targeted at men.
These findings suggest that many gender preferences are not genuine job requirements but reflect outdated stereotypes that persist simply because employers are allowed to express them. Should India consider a similar step? Banning explicit gender preferences on public and private job portals would be a low-cost, high-impact reform that removes a formal channel legitimising discrimination, thus broadening access to opportunities for women.
But reform must go beyond digital platforms. Expanding childcare, harmonising labour regulations to focus on safety rather than exclusion and creating more formal-sector jobs are essential complements. These constraints reinforce one another: when stable jobs are scarce and care work falls only on household members, families fall back on traditional divisions of labour; when women carry the bulk of unpaid care work, employers assume lower availability; when laws restrict working hours, firms favour male workers.
The question is no longer whether Indian women are ready to work. It is whether India is ready to let them.
Sugat Chaturvedi
(The author is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Kanika Mahajan, Associate Professor at Ashoka University and co-lead employment at Isaac Centre for Public Policy)
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
