India’s female workforce has nearly doubled over a seven-year span, reaching 201 million in 2025 from 104 million in 2017–18, but the increase is overwhelmingly concentrated in agriculture, self-employment, and unpaid family work, according to a study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (Icrier).
Authored by Tanu M Goyal, Shravani Prakash, Ketaki Gaikwad, and Arjun Tandon, the research paper—titled The Participation Paradox: Women’s Work and Time-use in India 2017-18 to 2025—relies on Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data. The overall women worker population ratio climbed from 22 percent to 38 percent during this period. However, the authors caution that comparisons require care due to a revised PLFS framework in 2025 that utilized a larger sample size and a calendar-year reference period.
Rural Realities and the Agricultural Concentration
The workforce surge belongs almost entirely to rural India. The women worker population ratio across rural districts jumped from 23.7 percent to 44.9 percent. Urban areas experienced a much more modest shift, moving from 18.2 percent to 25.9 percent.
This dynamic highlights a divergence in economic mobility between genders. While rural men successfully transitioned out of the primary sector—with their share dropping from 54.1 percent to 47.2 percent—rural women moved deeper into it, rising from 70.7 percent to 73.3 percent. “Structural transformation is visible for men but has largely bypassed the women in the country,” the study observed.
Regular salaried positions failed to keep pace with the influx of job seekers. Among rural women, own-account workers surged from 13.9 million to 56 million, expanding their share of rural female employment from 18.6 percent to 37.2 percent. Regular salaried jobs crept up from 7.9 million to 13.9 million, but their overall share slipped from 10.5 percent to 9.3 percent. The authors state that the additional women entering the workforce arrived predominantly through self-employment and unpaid family labor, characterized as the most insecure and lowest-paid categories.
While the Economic Survey 2023–24 and other researchers argue that this rapid rise is opportunity-led, the Icrier authors suggest the scale points elsewhere. They view the rural surge as a response to necessity, drawing women into agricultural or household enterprise-linked roles rather than flourishing market opportunities.
Shrinking Working Hours and the Widening Pay Gap
Average weekly hours contracted across every demographic group between 2017–18 and 2025. Rural women absorbed the sharpest drop, losing a little over six hours in their working week.
“Rising participation alongside falling hours per worker implies an expansion of the workforce into increasingly marginal, low-intensity activity,” the study noted.
At the same time, compensation disparities deepened. Nominal monthly wages for rural men grew by approximately 65 percent between 2017–18 and 2025, compared to just 41 percent for rural women. By 2025, rural women earned roughly 45 percent of rural men’s monthly wages, declining from 53 percent. In nominal terms, the monthly gap nearly doubled from about ₹4,200 to over ₹8,000.
Persistent Domestic Burdens and Unchanged Time Deficits
Entering the paid labor market did little to alleviate women’s responsibilities at home. Data from time-use surveys in 2019 and 2024 reveal that the gap in unpaid domestic work remained largely static, hovering around 223 minutes per day among participants in 2024. Meanwhile, the gap in care work increased slightly from 58 to 63 minutes.
Working women faced a stark deficit in personal time by 2024. Female workers recorded roughly 18 minutes less self-care time per day than women overall in rural areas, and 31 minutes less in urban areas. By contrast, working men enjoyed slightly more self-care time than men overall.
When asked why they remained outside the labor force, six in 10 non-working women pointed directly to childcare and household commitments. Virtually no men cited similar reasons.
To reverse these disparities, the authors urge policymakers to pivot away from merely maximizing participation metrics and toward enabling structural transformation. Their recommendations include expanding childcare access, enforcing strict creche regulations, instituting paid paternity and shared parental leave, setting mandatory employment targets for women in production-linked incentive schemes, establishing social protections for female gig workers, and integrating regular time-use surveys alongside future PLFS releases.
