What Explains the Stagnation of Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India?

By Stephan Klasen, Janneke Pieters. Social Science Research Network, 2015

492 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2011 are surprisingly low and have stagnated since the late 1980s. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, married women's labor force participation hovered around 18 percent. Analysis of five large cross-sectional micro surveys shows that a combination of supply and demand effects have contributed to this stagnation. The main supply side factors are rising household incomes and husband's education as well as the falling selectivity of highly educated women. On the demand side, the sectors that draw in female workers have expanded least, so that changes in the sectoral structure of employment alone would have actually led to declining participation rates.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dcc6233a1d89edf1f8a0ba96f488cfe83a572855

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Citations in the corpus

What Explains Uneven Female Labor Force Participation Levels and Trends in Developing Countries? (2019, unknown): “…secondary education and above concentrate in very few sectors, with typically more than 70–80 percent of working women in urban areas concentrated in white collar services such as health, education, public service, and financial and business services (Klasen and Pieters 2015; Klasen et al. 2018).”
Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India (2018, background): “Early marriage and childbearing are common, and many women have limited agency and physical mobility and face barriers to labor force participation (Field et al., 2010; Klasen and Pieters, 2015; Afridi et al., 2018; Calvi, 2020).”
Employment transitions of women in India: A panel analysis (2019, background): “The sectors that tend to hire female workers have expanded the least during the last decades (Klasen and Pieters, 2015; Chatterjee, Murgai and Rama, 2015).”
The Unexpected Entry and Exodus of Women in Computing and HCI in India (2018, background): “India has one of the lowest participation rates of women in the labor market at 27 % [3, 37, 16].”
The Impact of Gender Inequality on Economic Performance in Developing Countries (2018, background): “This might, for example, be particularly relevant in the Middle East and North Africa but most recently also in South Asia where education gaps have narrowed but employment gaps remain wide (see Gaddis and Klasen, 2014; Klasen and Pieters, 2015).”
Women and Work in India: Descriptive Evidence and a Review of Potential Policies (2017, background): “Male LFP averages 96% while FLFP averages only 27%, and, as documented elsewhere (Klasen and Pieters, 2015), FLFP is lower in urban areas relative to rural areas.”