Smoke and mirrors — women’s participation in employment

‘India has a unique opportunity to evolve its approach to labour statistics’
| Photo Credit: THE HINDU/RITU RAJ KONWAR

India’s labour market statistics reveal many contradictions and ironies. The most recent one that has surfaced is that an increase in the female labour force participation coincides with time poverty. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) recently released key highlights from the 2024 Time Use Survey (TUS), which revealed that women’s employment-related participation has increased from 21.8% to 25% among those aged 15 to 59 since 2019. However, beneath this apparent progress lies a more complex reality that requires disentanglement.

While more women participated in employment-related activities in 2024, the overall distribution of unpaid work remains unchanged when we compare 2019 time-use data with 2024 data. For the population aged six years and above, the average time spent in a day by a participating woman in employment related activities increased only by eight minutes (from 333 minutes to 341 minutes per day) whereas men’s time increased by 14 minutes from 459 minutes to 473 minutes. Women’s time in domestic work also decreased slightly from 299 to 289 minutes whereas their time in caregiving activities increased from 134 minutes to 137 minutes. Women’s contributions to unpaid work remains substantially higher than men’s, whose contributions have not only stagnated in care work from 76 to 75 minutes, but have also actually decreased from 97 minutes to 88 minutes in domestic work. This raises a fundamental question. Does augmenting workforce participation without necessary domestic redistribution of unpaid work constitute a favourable scenario for overall female empowerment?

Measuring ‘work’

The deeper issue is how we measure “work” itself. According to a recent article by Bharat, Bishnoi, and Jakhar in the Economic and Political Weekly, India’s primary labour survey, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), systematically underestimates the female workforce due to its restrictive definitions. The PLFS categorises only market-oriented production and primary good production for personal consumption as economic activities. This excludes services produced for personal consumption and other secondary activities, all of which are performed primarily by women in Indian households. This choice of definition is more than merely academic as it leads to a statistical undercounting of millions of working women in India. Researchers using the UN System of National Accounts (UN-SNA) framework to analyse TUS data, have found that the female labour force in rural India was 1.5 times higher than PLFS estimates. This leads to a serious concern regarding the statistical invisibility of working women in India. In an era of evidence-based policies, invisibility in data can ultimately lead to policy invisibility.

The issue of unpaid labour

Low employment participation rates of women and prevalence of high levels of ‘invisible’ work have evoked a variety of policy responses from both the Centre and State governments. Current popular policy responses include women’s rights schemes that recognise unpaid work and provide cash transfers, as well as zero-fare bus travel intended to increase their mobility. These, however, may do very little to redistribute domestic responsibilities, especially in care work. In such a scenario, the outcome is that women would enter the workforce while maintaining domestic responsibilities, worsening their time poverty. While one has to wait for the unit-level TUS data to unravel the intersectionality of time poverty by age, caste, and economic category, a fundamental question remains: as women’s work participation rises, does unpaid work gets redistributed within households, or does it shift to women in the low-income strata? Women in a higher income strata can alleviate time poverty by employing domestic workers, who remain underpaid and informal. This leads to a situation where the devaluation of unpaid labour, especially care work, does not end, but rather shifts downward along socioeconomic lines.

Unlike India’s approach to time data, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a two-decade longitudinal survey, is directly linked to national labour statistics. ATUS draws on a subsample of households from the Current Population Survey to establish a methodological link between time use and employment status. Because of this integration, the “Household Production Satellite Accounts” have been developed, which effectively estimate the economic value of unpaid work. This connection allows policymakers to answer critical questions about how unemployment affects time allocation, the relationship between working and leisure hours, and the economic implications of flexible work arrangements — insights that policymakers in India currently lack.

Reform in labour statistics

With MoSPI now producing both regular PLFS rounds as well as TUS data, India has a unique opportunity to evolve its approach to labour statistics. Three reforms in this area are necessary: first, TUS methodologies need to be combined with the PLFS to generate more comprehensive workforce estimates, particularly for the informal sector and unpaid family and domestic work pertaining to women. Second, definitions of “work” should be broadened beyond the narrow framework of the PLFS to align with the UN-SNA standards of productive activities. Third, India’s own Household Production Satellite Accounts, using time-use and employment data, is needed to quantify and acknowledge the economic value of unpaid labour in national accounting. These reforms would not only produce more accurate labour statistics but also fundamentally alter policy approaches. Rather than have compensatory schemes that acknowledge women’s work and potentially reinforce women’s disproportionate domestic burden, policies should prioritise a redistribution of unpaid work and develop employment structures that accommodate domestic and care responsibilities. The question no longer is whether women are working. They clearly are, and most often, more intensively than men in some sectors when all forms of work are taken into account. The more critical question is whether our statistics, and consequently our policies, will eventually make this work visible.

Gargi Sridharan is Researcher, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. M. Suresh Babu is Director, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. The views expressed are personal