India’s women workforce has nearly doubled in the past seven years, but the increase has been concentrated in agriculture, self-employment and unpaid family work, with shorter working hours and a widening pay gap with men, according to a new study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (Icrier).
The study, titled The Participation Paradox: Women’s Work and Time-use in India 2017-18 to 2025, finds that women have taken on more paid work without a corresponding fall in their unpaid responsibilities at home, leaving them with less time for rest and self-care.
Authored by Tanu M Goyal, Shravani Prakash, Ketaki Gaikwad and Arjun Tandon, the study said the number of working women rose from 104 million in 2017-18 to 201 million in 2025, citing Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data.
The increase was concentrated in rural India and in agriculture. The women worker population ratio in rural areas rose from 23.7 per cent to 44.9 per cent, against a rise from 18.2 per cent to 25.9 per cent in urban areas. Rural men’s share in the primary sector fell from 54.1 per cent to 47.2 per cent, while rural women’s rose from 70.7 per cent to 73.3 per cent. “Structural transformation is visible for men but has largely bypassed the women in the country,” the study noted.
Regular salaried jobs did not keep pace. Among rural women, own-account workers rose from 13.9 million to 56 million, lifting their share of rural women’s employment from 18.6 per cent to 37.2 per cent. Regular salaried employment rose from 7.9 million to 13.9 million, but its share slipped from 10.5 per cent to 9.3 per cent. “The additional women drawn into the workforce, therefore, have entered predominantly through self-employment and unpaid family labour, the most insecure and lowest-paid categories,” it said.
The authors say a surge of this scale in rural India is difficult to read as a response to improving opportunities and is more consistent with rural women being “drawn in by necessity, whether agricultural or household enterprise-linked”. The report notes a rival view, held by the Economic Survey 2023-24 and some researchers, that the rise was opportunity-led.
Average weekly hours fell for every group between 2017-18 and 2025, but rural women’s working week shrank the most, by a little over six hours. “Rising participation alongside falling hours per worker implies an expansion of the workforce into increasingly marginal, low-intensity activity,” the study said.
The pay gap has widened, too. Nominal monthly wages rose about 65 per cent for rural men between 2017-18 and 2025, against 41 per cent for rural women. Rural women earned about 45 per cent of rural men’s monthly wages in 2025, down from 53 per cent. In nominal terms, the monthly rural gap nearly doubled, from about ₹4,200 to over ₹8,000.
Women’s unpaid work has barely eased. Time-use surveys for 2019 and 2024 show the gap in unpaid domestic work was broadly unchanged, at about 223 minutes a day among participants in 2024, while the gap in care work edged up from 58 to 63 minutes. In 2024, working women also had less self-care time than women overall, about 18 minutes less a day in rural areas and 31 minutes in urban areas, while working men had slightly more than men overall.
Six in 10 women outside the labour force cited childcare and household commitments as the main reason, against virtually no men.
The authors call for a shift from maximising participation to enabling structural transformation. They recommend more childcare, enforced creche rules, paid paternity and shared parental leave, employment targets for women in production-linked incentive schemes, social protection for women in gig work, and regular time-use surveys alongside the PLFS.
