The rise in women at work in India is not a statistical illusion but a cause for optimism over income growth

The rise is now widely acknowledged, but its interpretation remains contested. Two criticisms deserve particular attention.

The first is methodological: changes in the instructions given to PLFS field investigators in 2023-24 may have improved the identification of subsidiary economic activity among women otherwise reporting domestic duties. This could have raised measured participation.

But it is difficult to attribute the broader trend to this change. Female participation was rising for several years before 2023-24 and continued to rise thereafter. Better probing may affect the level at the margin, but it cannot plausibly explain an eight-year trend.

The second criticism is more substantive. Much of the increase in women’s work has occurred in self-employment, including women classified as helpers in household enterprises. Since these women may not receive a separate wage, the increase is sometimes interpreted as evidence of distress rather than an improvement in employment opportunities.

That interpretation is too quick.

‘Unpaid’ is a description of how income is distributed within a household enterprise; it is not a statement that the work produces no economic value. A woman working in a family enterprise can contribute directly to output and household income without receiving a wage paid to her separately.

Consider dairy farming.

In many rural households, women feed and care for cattle, clean sheds, milk the animals and may even take the milk to a collection centre. Yet, historically, membership of a dairy cooperative, the relevant bank account or formal identity of the enterprise has often been in the name of a male household member.

The man may principally work in farming, construction or another occupation, while the woman performs much of the day-to-day dairy activity. In labour statistics, she may thus appear as a helper in a household enterprise rather than as a wage earner.

There is an additional reason to look beyond the distress explanation. Independently of the PLFS, India has spent more than a decade encouraging precisely this kind of women-led livelihood activity.

The National Rural Livelihoods Mission, launched in 2011 and later incorporated into the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM), has organized rural women into self-help groups and promoted livelihood activities through credit, training and collective institutions.

By mid-2025, ministry of rural development administrative data reported more than 100 million rural women mobilized into roughly 9.1 million self-help groups. This marks an increase from around 46 million rural households mobilized in 2017-18.

Livestock (primarily dairy, poultry and goat-rearing), food processing and other farm and non-farm enterprises have been important parts of this livelihood strategy.

Similar trends are visible in India’s Time Use Survey, which shows an increase in time devoted to employment and production of goods for own final use from 84 minutes per day in 2019 to 94 minutes per day in 2024.

This matters for interpreting the PLFS numbers. The labour survey, time-use survey and the NRLM administrative system are different sources. Yet they all point towards an expansion of women’s economic activity in rural India.

Animal husbandry provides an especially plausible connection. Government programmes have supported households in acquiring milch animals, goats and poultry, while women provide a substantial share of the labour involved in caring for them. The resulting income may accrue to the household enterprise even if no explicit wage is paid to the woman.

This does not mean that distress is absent from rural India, or that every increase in female self-employment represents a high-quality job. Nor does a rise in labour force participation tell us enough about women’s control over the income they help generate. Those are important qualifications. But they are different from concluding that the measured increase in women’s work is merely statistical or is necessarily a sign of distress.

Indeed, the convergence of survey and administrative evidence suggests another possibility: a long-term policy effort to expand women’s livelihood opportunities may finally be becoming visible in aggregate labour-market statistics. Future data on farm household incomes and the contribution of livestock and allied activities to it should allow this proposition to be tested more directly.

There is also a larger policy implication. Even after the recent increase, women’s labour force participation remains far below men’s. This represents a large reservoir of potential household income and economic output.

One social constraint is that many rural women cannot easily spend long stretches of the day away from household responsibilities. Livelihood opportunities therefore need not all resemble conventional salaried employment. Animal husbandry, food processing and other home- or village-based enterprises can allow productive work to be combined with constraints on women’s time.

As India plans to achieve Viksit Bharat by 2047, the main challenge is not simply to get more women counted as workers. It is to raise the productivity, earnings and agency associated with the work they are already doing: through better access to credit and markets, stronger producer organizations, improved technology and greater ownership and control of productive assets.

The rise in women’s work, captured in India’s Periodic Labour Force Survey, should be seen not as a statistical curiosity but as an opportunity to accelerate one of the country’s most important sources of future income growth.

The author is a visiting professor at the Institute for Studies of Industrial Development and Institute for Human Development, and former chief statistician of India