In Uttar Pradesh (UP), 16 million additional women aged 15-64 had gained employment by the end of last year compared with eight years earlier. Between 2017 and 2025, as per official data, the proportion of women employed in India’s most populous state surged from 13.8% to 33.4%, a striking increase in less than a decade. Correspondingly, the proportion of women who were not looking for work declined sharply from over 72% to 53% over the period.
The rise in women’s employment was not driven by an increase in women’s participation in household enterprises as unpaid workers, a typical source of work for women, nor by a rise in women working for a public employment guarantee scheme. Nor was it that young women were forgoing higher education to start working.
At first glance, such a trend would appear to be a clear success. Dig deeper, however, and a different picture emerges.
Let us first understand how to interpret women’s employment data. The first question is the kind of work done. Is the person self-employed? If yes, is she an employer or working solo, or working as an unpaid worker in a household enterprise? If not, does she have a salaried or casual job?
The second question is about the place of work: is it a farm, livestock pen, factory floor, construction site or service-sector business? A doubling of women’s work means one thing if it reflects jobs in industry and services, and quite another if it is on farms or unpaid work in family enterprises.
Women’s non-farm employment in UP did rise over this period: in industry from 1.8% to 2.9% of working-age women, in services from 3.1% to a little under 7.6% and taken together, from just below 5% to about 10%. Even so, non-farm work accounts for only a modest share of the overall increase in women’s employment in UP.
So where are most of the state’s additional women workers to be found? The single largest contributor to UP’s rise in women’s employment is growth among those who are self-employed in the animal-rearing sector, mainly dairy farming. The share of working-age women employed in animal farming in UP climbed from 2.3% to 10.2%, more than quadrupling.
Further, employment in crop farming and mining roughly doubled, from under 7% to 13%. Overall, of the total increase in women’s employment, agriculture and livestock account for about three-quarters, with most of that increase in rural areas.
Why 12 million women moved into crop and animal farming and continue to do so remains unclear. The most likely trigger could have been a strain on household incomes in rural areas during the pandemic and its aftermath.
Dairy work offered an accessible fallback; most rural households already had cattle, so little additional investment was needed, and the extra milk output—once consumed at home—could now be sold in the market.
The central government’s cooperative-led White Revolution 2.0 aims to increase the milk procurement of dairy cooperatives and may bring many women in dairy farming into the organized sector.
If it delivers market access and steadier prices, UP’s own-account dairy work that has expanded so sharply could begin to earn more. With rising incomes and changing diets across India, demand for milk will remain strong, and the gains would be even larger if women’s cooperatives can move beyond raw milk into value-added products such as paneer, processed cheese and ghee.
Nonetheless, it is concerning that only 10% of working-age women in UP are employed in industry or the service sector, the two sectors that tend to offer better-paid work and social security.
Does the employment picture change if we consider the younger generation of better educated UP residents?
In 2025, just 2% of young women aged 15 to 29 were in regular salaried employment in UP, compared to 12% of young men in salaried jobs. Even when it comes to own-account work, the female rate is 6%, half the male rate of 13%.
Among single young women, who are less burdened by household work, only less than 9% were employed in non-farm sectors, compared with about 30% of young men. Young women in UP complete their education at nearly the same rate as young men, but their pathways clearly diverge sharply thereafter.
Overall, however, more women in UP now earn their own income—close to home, and with little capital. This is good, but the next gains must come from elsewhere. As education spreads, younger women will want work beyond crop or dairy farming. Such jobs will not always lie close to home. Where they do not, women need a safe commute or safe housing nearer their workplaces.
India’s most populous state currently has only eight functional working women’s hostels, far too few for its size. The Union government’s budget for 2026-27 promised a hostel in every district for women in higher education.
The same commitment is overdue for working women, and the two need not be housed separately. Tamil Nadu’s Thozhi hostels, for example, shelter students and working women under one roof. UP must build such boarding and lodging facilities for working women and students too, but the initiative’s success will turn on how they will be financed and run.
For a state this young and so large, every year of delay in creating non-farm opportunities and infrastructure to access them ages another cohort of educated women out of the workforce.
The authors are, respectively, Union Bank Chair professor of economics, Great Lakes Institute of Management, and assistant professor, Institute of Management Technology.