Tracing the Status of Women Workers in India: A Historical Background

If you look around your home, community, or even in rural landscapes, you’ll see women working. They are managing households, tending to livestock, carrying water, helping in family shops, and working on farms. This visible reality often clashes with a starkly different story told by national data, which, for decades, has shown a surprisingly low and even declining rate of female labour force participation in India. This isn’t a new issue. It’s a complex story that begins with our nation’s founding principles and runs headlong into a statistical battle over a simple, powerful question: What does it truly mean to ‘work’?

The Nehruvian vision: A foundation of rights 🔗

In the early days of independent India, there was a strong, clear-eyed focus on building a new nation, and women were central to this vision. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a vocal champion of women’s rights. He famously linked the progress of the nation directly to the status of its women. He believed that to build a modern, democratic, and equitable society, the chains of tradition that held women back must be broken.

This perspective was revolutionary for its time. It led to the enshrinement of gender equality in the Constitution and drove the passage of progressive (and controversial) laws like the Hindu Code Bills, which granted women rights in marriage, inheritance, and adoption. Nehru’s belief was that legal and social empowerment was the first step. He argued that “Freedom depends on economic conditions, even more than political and if woman is not economically free and self-earning she will have to depend on her husband or someone else, and dependents are never free.”

His vision was clear: education and legal rights would equip women to break free from economic dependence and participate in nation-building.

The ‘blurred vision’ on economic contribution 🔗

Despite this powerful foundation of legal rights, the Nehruvian-era economic *planning* took a different path. The focus was on heavy industrialisation and large-scale public sector projects. While women were seen as important beneficiaries of social welfare programs-in health, education, and community development-their role as active, independent *economic agents* was less clear in policy.

As the eminent academic and activist Vina Mazumdar, a key figure in the women’s movement, later pointed out, this era often overlooked the “millions of Indian women who formed the back-bone of the Indian economy”-the spinners, weavers, agricultural labourers, and home-based producers. The dominant image of a ‘worker’ was male, either in a factory or a public office. This “blurred vision,” as Mazumdar termed it, meant that while women were being given rights, their existing, massive contribution to the economy remained largely unrecognised and unvalued in the new economic framework. This set a pattern that would have profound consequences for decades.

The great awakening: The 1974 ‘Towards Equality’ report 🔗

For the first 25 years after independence, the national consensus was one of cautious optimism. It was assumed that with the Constitution, new laws, and a focus on development, the status of women was steadily improving. In 1971, the government established the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) to evaluate the impact of these changes and prepare a report for the upcoming UN International Women’s Year (1975). The committee was expected to document this progress.

Instead, what they found was a national shock. The report, titled ‘Towards Equality’, was a bombshell. It systematically dismantled the assumption of progress and revealed a grim, complex, and often deteriorating situation for the majority of Indian women. It became the single most important benchmark document for understanding the status of women in modern India.

Uncovering the decline and the ‘missing’ workers 🔗

The report’s findings were startling across the board, highlighting a declining sex ratio, wide gender gaps in life expectancy and health, and stubbornly low literacy rates. But the most stunning revelation was in the economic sphere. The committee’s analysis of census data uncovered a massive, unexplained, and deeply troubling trend: a sharp decline in women’s work participation.

The data was undeniable. As per the report’s analysis of census figures, the percentage of women in the total labour force had fallen from 34.44% in 1911 to just 17.35% in 1971. In the agricultural sector, which was (and is) the largest employer of women, their numbers had also plummeted. This was a catastrophic finding. How could a developing nation, in its flagship “development decades,” be pushing women *out* of the workforce? The report forced policymakers and academics to confront a reality they had completely missed.

The discovery of ‘invisibility’ 🔗

The CSWI report did more than just present data; it offered a devastating critique of *how* that data was collected. The committee argued that the decline was not just a real phenomenon but also a statistical blind spot. The problem, they argued, was one of invisibility.

They found that the work women did-which was predominantly in the unorganised sector, in subsistence agriculture, in home-based production, and in family enterprises-was systematically undercounted or ignored by census enumerators. The very definitions of ‘work’ and ‘worker’ being used were biased towards formal, paid, male patterns of employment. A man working on his farm was a ‘cultivator,’ but his wife working alongside him was often dismissed as a ‘housewife’ engaging in ‘domestic duties.’

The ‘Towards Equality’ report was the first official, high-level document to state that women’s immense contribution to the subsistence and commodity economy was simply not being seen. It revealed that millions of women had not *stopped* working; the system had simply stopped *counting* them.

What does it mean to ‘work’?: The great statistical debate 🔗

The 1974 report threw down a gauntlet that economists and statisticians are still grappling with. If the data is wrong, it’s because the very concept of ‘work’ is flawed. At the heart of India’s low female labour force participation rate is a decades-long struggle over definition.

The conventional economic definition of ‘work’ is an activity that is ‘economically productive’-something that contributes to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This typically means activity for which one receives a wage, or activity that produces goods for sale. The problem, as gender economists have pointed out, is that this definition excludes a vast range of activities that are essential for the economy and human survival, and which are performed disproportionately by women.

[Image: A split-screen showing a woman in an office labeled 'Worker (GDP activity)' and a woman tending to cattle and a kitchen garden labeled 'Non-Worker (Not GDP activity?)']

Is a woman who spends three hours a day collecting firewood for her family ‘working’? By the conventional definition, no, because no money changes hands. But she is producing economic value (saving money on fuel). Is a woman who maintains a kitchen garden, processes grains, and tends to the family’s livestock ‘working’? Again, she is often classified as a ‘housewife,’ not a ‘farmer’ or ‘producer’.

The problem with ‘principal activity’ 🔗

This definitional crisis is at the heart of the data collection challenges faced by agencies like the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). For decades, the NSSO’s surveys on employment (the EUS) classified people based on their ‘principal activity’ over the past year. When an enumerator asks a woman in a rural household what her ‘main job’ is, the most common, socially conditioned answer-from her or her family-is “domestic duties.”

Once she is classified under the activity codes for domestic work (like 92 or 93), she is officially considered ‘out of the labour force’. This happens even if she also engages in multiple ‘subsidiary’ activities-like weaving, sewing, or helping in the family shop-that are clearly economic. This “massive underestimation” is a direct result of a methodology that fails to capture the multi-tasking, informal, and often unpaid nature of women’s work. This problem is often referred to as a “measurement fallacy” by scholars; the numbers are low not just because participation is low, but because our rulers are broken.

The challenge for the NSO: Seeing the unseen 🔗

The National Statistical Office (NSO, which now includes the NSSO) is well aware of these critiques. The challenge of accurately capturing women’s work is one of the most significant issues in national-level statistics. Over the years, efforts have been made to refine the process.

Refining the definition 🔗

One major area of contention is the set of rules India uses for its national accounts. The Indian System of National Accounts (ISNA) has, for instance, a narrower definition of the ‘production boundary’ than the UN System of National Accounts (UNSNA). The UNSNA, for example, would count activities like producing and processing primary goods (like husking paddy) for one’s *own* consumption as an economic activity. The ISNA historically excluded many of these, instantly rendering a huge chunk of women’s subsistence work invisible.

While the NSSO surveys (now the Periodic Labour Force Survey or PLFS) have tried to add questions to capture subsidiary work, the primary ‘principal status’ classification remains a powerful filter that pushes women out of the labour force count. This statistical challenge is why the official work participation rate for women continued to fall, reaching a historic low of 16.5% in the PLFS 2017-18, even as the economy grew.

The promise of Time Use Surveys (TUS) 🔗

So, how do we get a more authentic picture? One powerful tool that is changing the conversation is the Time Use Survey (TUS). Instead of asking “what is your main job?”, a TUS asks a person “what did you do in the last 24 hours?” in 30-minute intervals. This method captures *everything*-from paid work to cooking, cleaning, childcare, and even sleeping.

The results from India’s 2019 TUS were illuminating. They confirmed that women perform the overwhelming majority of unpaid domestic and caregiving work. But they also showed, in clear, quantifiable terms, the sheer volume of time women spend on activities that *should* be counted as economic but are not. This data provides undeniable evidence that women are, in fact, working far more than men, but a large portion of their work remains unpaid and unrecognised.

Tracing the status of women workers in India is not a simple story of rising or falling numbers. It is a 50-year journey of discovery. It began with the Nehruvian belief in legal equality, was shattered by the CSWI’s 1974 discovery of economic ‘invisibility,’ and now continues in the technical, high-stakes debate over statistical definitions. The ‘Towards Equality’ report cracked open a door, forcing the nation to see the millions of women who were holding up the economy. The challenge today, armed with new tools like the TUS, is to finally, authentically, and fully count them in.

What do you think? Think about the work you see around you in your own home or community. What are some activities, performed mainly by women, that you believe provide real economic value but are not typically counted as ‘work’?

References

1. https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/api/file/viewByFileId/274806
2. https://www.cwds.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/An-Unfulfilled-1.pdf
3. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/towards-equality-report-of-the-committee-on-the-status-of-women-in-india/
4. https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstreams/78b6cec8-f6b1-4afe-9070-7377efe30a21/download
5. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/reconceptualising-womens-work-national-sample-survey
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7539753/