One of the biggest labour stories of the last eight years is the increase in women in India's manufacturing workforce. As I pointed out in an earlier edition of The Big Shift, that growth, as my colleague Nileena Suresh finds, is heavily driven by one activity alone - 'custom tailoring'. India now has 12 million custom tailors, and one in six manufacturing workers is a custom tailor. Of the 14 million new manufacturing jobs added between 2018 and 2024, five million were in custom tailoring alone. The majority of these were women.
One of our guiding principles at Data For India is to get to the heart of the story, because what the overall numbers tell you is often misleading. With custom tailoring, it's important to understand what sort of work is underpinning this increase in women in the workforce.
The first thing that you see in this chart is that the share of women in the custom tailoring workforce is growing, and that's an important fact to acknowledge. The next thing that you see is that while self-employment in tailoring has been on the decline for men, it has grown steadily for women. "In 2018, when the number of male and female custom tailors was roughly the same, about 30% of the workforce consisted of self-employed men and another 30% of self-employed women," Nileena writes. By 2024, self-employed men made up around 25% of the custom tailoring workforce, compared to nearly 40% for self-employed women.
This means a few things. One, it changes how I, at least, picture what a custom tailoring job looks like. Two, it has an implication on wages, since self-employment pays far less than salaried employment. Third, it should affect how we think about the growth in India's manufacturing workforce, and in its female manufacturing workforce in particular.
It's a big shift, no doubt, for women to be entering the manufacturing workforce at all. But understanding who these women are beyond the stereotypes of how we picture manufacturing workers is the missing piece of the puzzle.
