While both men and women participate in India's workforce, they do so in ways that are distinct from each other. This piece examines what structurally limits women's work participation, how many Indian women are workers, how many of them remain outside the workforce, what keeps them out, and what women in the paid workforce do.[1]
Women out of the labour force
The labour force is made up of people who are either working (employed) or looking for work (unemployed). The rest are considered to be out of the labour force, meaning that they are of legal working age but do not participate in the paid workforce.[2] The share of people who are in the labour force is known as the labour force participation rate (LFPR).
India has an estimated 530 million women and 540 million men[3] over the age of 14 who can legally work.[4] Not all adults who are of legal working age work - old age, disability and other factors typically keep some adults out of the labour force in most countries. But there is also a distinctly gendered dimension to who is in the labour force.
Indian men have a higher LFPR than the world average. India's male LFPR is 77% against the global male average of 73%. Thus, India's low ranking in terms of labour participation comes down, evidently, to Indian women, whose LFPR is lower than the global mean (33% against 49%).
India's female labour force participation rate is lower than in many countries at comparable levels of income and development, although it has seen an improvement in recent years.[5]
As a result, women are significantly underrepresented in India's labour force. India's most recent labour statistics[6] show that while eight in ten men are in the labour force, only four in ten women are. India has an estimated 635 million-strong labour force out of which, a little more than 210 million are women.
The gender balance in the urban labour market is even more skewed. The LFPR of rural women is 46%, compared to merely 28% for urban women. Urban India, where 500 million people live, has less than 55 million women in the labour force.
Working - but in the home
Women who are not in the labour force are still working, but in a way that is different from how work is understood in economics.
In economics, "work" covers activities that produce an output which is either consumed by the household or is sold in the market for a price. In Indian and international labour statistics, activities that produce goods for self-use and sale are considered as work. So a farmer growing vegetables for the household to eat constitutes work, as does her selling those vegetables in the market.
But in terms of services, only those activities that produce an output which can be sold are considered work.[7] So transporting the harvested vegetables to the market for sale is work, but cooking those vegetables for the household members to eat, or the feeding of small children is not considered work.
This unpaid care and domestic work is mostly performed by women. Whether this unpaid care work should be counted as productive work is a widely debated topic in labour economics both in India and globally.[8]
While 110 million adult Indian men are out of the labour force, 320 million adult women stay outside of it. The majority of men who are out of the labour force are in higher studies, while most of the women who do not participate in labour activities are attending to "child care and personal commitments in home-making".[9]
Staying out of the labour force is not associated only with poorer women, rural women or those with lower levels of education. In fact, women who are graduates or have higher education degrees are more likely to be out of the labour force and attending to domestic responsibilities than women with no education.
Women in the workforce
Of the roughly 430 million men and 210 million women in the labour force, about 14 million men and 7 million women are unemployed. The rest make up what is called the workforce.
This translates to a little over 415 million men and 200 million women in India's workforce. For every female worker in India's workforce, there are two male workers. But the nature of work among women workers is also materially different from the work that men do.
Nature of employment
In India's labour statistics, workers are classified depending on their working arrangements into four categories - salaried, casual workers, self-employed, and unpaid helpers.[10]
More than one in four working women - or 55 million women - are doing economically productive work, but for no wages. These are women who work in a household enterprise that is engaged in crop cultivation, milk and livestock production, retail sale of food, or small-scale manufacturing, but do not get paid for their work. In Indian labour statistics, they are termed as "unpaid helpers in household enterprises", while they are termed as "contributing family workers" internationally. While some men do such unpaid work as well, women are twice as likely to be unpaid helpers.
In comparison, salaried work is rarer among women, with just one in five working women in salaried jobs. In urban areas, where most women work in the services sector, salaried jobs are most common. In rural areas, where most women work in agriculture, salaried jobs are least common.
Sectors of work
Agriculture employs about six in ten working women in India, the largest share. This share is even higher in rural areas, where nearly eight in ten working women are in agriculture. A third of women workers in agriculture work in the activity of growing cereals and pulses, either as farmers, or unpaid helpers, or farm labourers.
Apart from agriculture, working women are employed either in industry or in the services sector. About 70% of women working in the industry sector are engaged in manufacturing, while another 30% are in construction.
Within services, retail trade and education each provide employment to more than a fifth of working women. Health and domestic work account for 10% of women working in the services sector each.
Within these broad economic sectors, the specific occupations or jobs that men and women do have some uniquely gendered distinctions.
For rural workers, growing crops is the chief occupation for both men and women. But while rural men also work as construction workers and shopkeepers, all of the top five occupations for rural women are related to agriculture. Rural non-farm jobs go largely to male workers only.
In urban areas, shopkeeping or selling items in retail shops is the most common occupation for men. Driving vehicles and working at construction sites are common jobs at lower levels of education, while managerial and technology roles like software development are the top occupations as education levels rise among urban men.
The top occupations for urban women are garment work such as tailoring, and that of cleaners and helpers in homes and offices. While the least educated urban working women are most likely to be domestic workers, more educated urban working women are more likely to be tailors and garment workers. Urban women with a higher education are most likely to work as teachers.
[1] From 1972 to 2012, India's Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation carried out large, nationally representative household surveys called the Employment and Unemployment surveys roughly every five years. Since 2017-18, India has switched over to the Periodic Labour Force Surveys which track the size and characteristics of India's labour market every year by surveying more than 400,000 people in one annual cycle. The International Labour Organization uses estimates from the national surveys in its database, but also generates modeled estimates with uniform reference periods for better comparison across countries and regions. Indian government data and does some modelling for international comparisons. DFI uses these three data sources.
[2] For more on measuring employment, see this piece in our Measurement vertical.
[3] National employment surveys such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey produce ratios such as the labour force participation rate and the unemployment rate. To produce absolute numbers, DFI uses population projections from the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India National Commission on Population (based on the 2011 Census). We also obtain the share of adults (15+) in the population from PLFS.
[4] India is signatory to International Labour Organization conventions that bar children under the age of 14 from working. References to "men" and "women" in this piece refer to those over the age of 14.
[5] For international comparisons, we use International Labour Organization data which measures the labour force participation for countries by looking at a reference period of one week ("current weekly status"). For national estimates using the PLFS we use a reference period of one year ("usual status"). There are differences in estimates depending on the reference period used.
Additionally, while the ILO data uses the calendar year, India's national estimates until 2012 followed a survey year that ran from July to June. We use calendar year estimates from the PLFS. For 2018 to 2020, we have converted the July-June data to the calendar year using statistical methods.
[6] Periodic Labour Force Survey 2025 (2023-24).
[7] This definition follows from the System of National Accounts (2008), an internationally accepted statistical framework that is also used to define labour force and employment in employment surveys from the National Sample Survey Office.
[8] See work on this topic by ILO, OECD and UN Women.
[9] The Periodic Labour Force Survey 2025 asks respondents their "main reason for being out of the labour force".
[10] See this Data For India piece on employment for more explanation.
