wl-6992-Decoding Rising Female Labour Force Participation in India: Evidence from PLFS Data

India, a country of around 1.4 billion people of which nearly half are women, has been facing challenges of substantial gender gap in the labour market since Independence. Female Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in India is still half of the LFPR of men and far below than the global average of female LFPR of 47.2 percent. However, recent rounds of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data reveals that there has been significant uptick in the female LFPR, especially in the post Covid-19 pandemic period. In this broader context, this paper tries to analyse whether this surge in LFPR of women is driven by improvement in labour market opportunities or by distress situation induced by the pandemic. The findings of this paper suggest that increase in female LFPR in India is largely driven by female work participation in rural areas and in own-account and unpaid work category of self-employment activities in agriculture and unorganised sector. There has been significant reduction in the share of women workers in regular salaried jobs, organised sector and in industry and services sector over last few years. Besides these, quality of jobs available to women workers has somewhat improved but still more than half of the regular salaried women workers in India did not have written job contracts and were not entitled paid leave and not eligible for any kind of social security benefits in 2023. Further, real earnings of female workers have also declined in the post pandemic period, especially in the self-employment activities. Around two third of the self-employed female workers and one-quarter of regular salaried female workers were working poor in 2023. These indicators clearly reveal that qualitative challenges of female employment are much more severe in India. In view of this, the paper suggests the policy measures for bridging gender gap in the labour market and promoting decent jobs in India.