The Participation That Is Not Yet Employment

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 8 February 2026

India’s female labour force participation rose eighteen percentage points in six years — the fastest improvement of any major economy. Almost none of it arrived as a wage.

The number went up, and the number is real. What it measures is women entering the labour force. What it does not measure is women entering jobs — and in India, between 2017 and 2024, those two things came apart.

India has a genuine achievement to report on women’s work, and it is being reported in the wrong unit. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the female labour force participation rate for those aged 15 and above rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s press note of 22 September 2024 records the male rate over the same period moving from 75.8 per cent to 78.8 per cent — three percentage points against eighteen. On the face of it, a gap that had defined the Indian labour market for a generation began closing at speed.

It is worth being precise about what closed. Labour force participation counts anyone working or seeking work. It does not ask what the work pays, whether it pays at all, or whether it will still exist next quarter. When the composition of the eighteen points is examined, the achievement narrows considerably — and the policy response it implies changes entirely.

Five findings anchor this analysis:

1. The rise is real and steep. Female LFPR (usual status, principal plus subsidiary) went from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 37.0 per cent in 2022-23 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24 (MoSPI, PLFS Annual Report 2023-24). The single-year jump of 4.7 percentage points was the largest in the PLFS series.
2. It is overwhelmingly rural. Rural female LFPR rose from 24.6 per cent to 47.6 per cent over those six years. Rural areas now report female participation above the national average — an inversion of the pattern in most economies, where urbanisation drives women’s employment.
3. It is overwhelmingly self-employment. A Business Standard analysis of PLFS data puts the self-employed share of employed women at 67.4 per cent in 2023-24, against 51.9 per cent in 2017-18. In rural areas the share went from 57.7 per cent to 73.5 per cent. Over the same period the shares in regular salaried work and casual labour both fell.
4. Unemployment among women rose while participation rose. The female unemployment rate moved from 2.9 per cent to 3.2 per cent (PLFS 2023-24). More women looking is not the same as more women placed.
5. A different measure gives a different answer. On the Current Weekly Status basis — which asks about the preceding seven days rather than the preceding year — female LFPR rose from 21.1 per cent to 35.6 per cent. That is six percentage points below the usual-status figure, and the gap is itself the finding: a substantial number of women counted as in the labour force annually are not in it in any given week.

What the survey counts, and what it was designed to count

PLFS classifies a person by the activity pursued for a majority of the reference period, with a subsidiary activity captured alongside. The self-employed category includes own-account workers and helpers in household enterprises, whether paid or unpaid. This is a defensible statistical choice, consistent with international practice: unpaid family labour in a household farm or shop is economic activity, and excluding it has historically erased a great deal of women’s work from the record.

But a category built to capture work is being read as a measure of livelihoods. A woman who spends part of the year assisting on a family plot without wages, and who would take paid work if it were available, appears in the same aggregate as a woman in a salaried post. Both are in the labour force. Only one has an income of her own.

Rural, self-employed, and increasingly unwaged

The direction of the compositional shift is what should concern a practitioner. Between 2017-18 and 2023-24, the female workforce grew and became less waged. Regular salaried employment — the category associated with social protection, written contracts, predictable hours and the possibility of promotion — lost share. Casual labour, for all its precariousness, also lost share. Self-employment absorbed the difference.

There are two readings of this, and they are not mutually exclusive. One is that rural households found more room for women to contribute to family enterprise as agricultural incomes and allied activity recovered. The other, argued by economists including Santosh Mehrotra in comment on the 2023-24 release, is that this is distress participation: households under income pressure putting more members to work, with women absorbing the least remunerative end. The data cannot adjudicate between them, because PLFS does not publish earnings for the self-employed in a form that would settle it.

Why the unit of measurement changes the policy

If the target is participation, the policy set is one thing: awareness, skilling, mobility, safety. If the target is waged employment for women, the policy set is another: demand-side incentives for formal hiring, childcare that permits fixed hours, enforcement of maternity and equal-remuneration provisions, and industrial policy that creates jobs women can actually take.

India is currently reporting against the first and being congratulated as though it had achieved the second. The Ministry of Labour and Employment’s own public communication in October 2025 described the rise from roughly 23 per cent to roughly 42 per cent as evidence of transformation in women’s economic inclusion. It is evidence of something. It is not yet evidence of that.

The counter-case, honestly stated

Three arguments cut the other way, and each has force.

First, part of the increase is better measurement, not new work. PLFS questionnaires have been revised over the series to probe more carefully for activities women often do not self-report as work. If the survey is now capturing labour that was always occurring, the earlier figures were understated and the trend line overstates the change. That is a criticism of the 23.3 per cent, not of the 41.7 per cent.

Second, the Worker Population Ratio — which counts only those actually employed, not those searching — also rose sharply, from 22.0 per cent to 40.3 per cent. Whatever else is true, this is not a story of women queuing fruitlessly.

Third, participation may be a necessary precursor. In most economies women’s employment follows a U-shape against development: high in subsistence agriculture, falling as households gain income, rising again with education and services. Entry into the labour force, even unwaged, can be the step that makes later waged work thinkable within a household. Dismissing it as illusory would be its own error.

None of this rescues the reporting. A government may reasonably claim credit for participation. It should not describe participation as employment.

What we would do

The gap here is not ambition or resources. It is an indicator that flatters, and a published table that stops one column short of the truth.

1. Split the self-employed line in the headline release. PLFS already distinguishes own-account workers from helpers in household enterprises, and paid from unpaid helpers. That split belongs in the press note and the Economic Survey table, not only in the annexures. A single published column would end this ambiguity permanently.
2. Report a second headline number: female regular salaried employment as a share of the female population aged 15 and above. One figure, published annually, state by state. It is the number that moves only when a woman gets a job with a wage attached, and it is therefore the number worth being accountable for.
3. Publish earnings for the self-employed. Until net earnings from self-employment are published with the same regularity as wages for salaried and casual workers, no one can say whether two-thirds of India’s working women are entrepreneurs or unpaid labour. The survey collects enough to make a start.
4. Set the target on the weekly measure, not the annual one. Current Weekly Status is the harder test and the more honest one. A state that raises female CWS participation has raised something durable.
5. Give the childcare question an owner. Anganwadi timings, creche provision under the Maternity Benefit Act, and the childcare component of state labour policy sit with three different departments in most states and are nobody’s reported outcome. Name a secretary, set a coverage target for children under three in the ten districts with the widest gap between female participation and female salaried employment, and publish attendance monthly.

India has moved a number that had not moved in thirty years. That is worth saying plainly. It is also worth saying what the number is — because the next eighteen points will not come from measurement, and they will not come at all if the problem is declared solved.