Earlier this month, I attended a conference on women's participation in the workforce. Now, let me be honest. I'm less workforce, and more of a 'forced to work' girl.
The first time I confronted the realities of Indian working women was in 2018 in a magazine I regularly pick up at airports to impress the person I buy it from. It had a cover story about India's poor female labour force participation rate (LFPR). For July 2026, according to periodic labour data, it was 34.4%, slightly above Saudi Arabia's 33.6% for 2025.
The data were paradoxical in the way only India can be with its clash of incentives, markets, and gender attitudes. One finding said richer households flex their social status by discouraging women to 'work' outside the home. Another finding suggested that increased schooling among women was actually a societal ploy to become more attractive in the marriage, not the labour, market.
Another study scolded India for not evolving its labour markets to accommodate more women. It concluded with an interesting data point: if more women are brought into the workforce, India could be 26% richer than it is. Even though I didn't like the tone of this last study, the larger points made sense. How can a country reap its demographic dividend if it cannot reap its gender dividend?
The second time I encountered this subject was in 2019. A journalist messaged by on Facebook asking me whether I knew about declining female LFPR in India as cited in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) that had just come out? I was, like, wait, is this someone trolling me for being jobless? Instead, it sparked a 2-season podcast, 'Women in Labour' that I co-hosted with her, interviewing various professional women, who had already spent considerable time trying to demystify the clash of markets, incentives, and gender attitudes that made this problem so unique to India.
One finding from that 2019 PLFS that sticks with me 7 years later is the fact that even the way the data point of '26% richer' was arrived at was at best, well, haphazard. But it was the first PLFS. There were bound to be some hiccups. For example, many women working in the rural, informal sector, didn't even consider themselves as working - they would just be at the shop, on the field. It wasn't 'work' to them, certainly not in the way that they reported when a government official asked.
Even in 2026, the jury is still out on if housework and carework, two deeply 'feminised' realms of activity, can even be counted as contributing towards the economy. The activity that goes into making India's labour force ready for 'economic' value creation should also have economic value, no? And how would we collect and evaluate that data?
At last month's conference, I was in for some good news. According to collected data, the female LFPR was up from before. According to Ashoka University economist Ashwini Deshpande, this apparently signals that more women are becoming self-employed.
Other analysts lament that turning to self-employment in large numbers is a sign of a job market in distress. That the lack of opportunities 'outside' makes women turn 'indoors'. Then there are downright sceptics who think the government has merely changed the metrics with which it measures female LFPR to boost the numbers. In other words, somehow manipulating alarm bells set off to sound like temple bells.
'How does it matter, Aditi, what some data says or doesn't say? When is a woman not working? You'll believe your eyes, or you'll believe some numbers?' says my mother dismissively.
I loiter in the kitchen to argue about the importance of data collection. 'It means you're being counted, Ma, that you matter. We could be 26% richer!' Without looking up from the sizzling pan, she mutters, 'You don't have any work to do or what?'
