Explaining the decline in women’s role in workforce

Women’s participation in India’s labour force is low and has been declining this century, official employment surveys have shown. However, these surveys – the Employment and Unemployment Survey (EUS), and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) – do not sufficiently explain the reasons for this trend or offer clues on how this trend can be changed. A survey conducted by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania has tried to solve this problem. The survey was conducted in January-August 2019 in around 15,000 households in four cities: Dhanbad in Jharkhand, Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Patna in Bihar, and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. The survey was done in the core city, and their peripheral rural and urban areas. While its results may not apply uniformly across the country, they offer important pointers to understand India’s falling female labour force participation. Here are four charts that explain this.