New Delhi: India’s urban employment landscape has witnessed significant shifts in the past six years, with a 10 percent rise in women’s employment and reaching 28 percent among working-age women in 2023-24, says a latest report.
And yet, 89 million-plus urban women remained out of the labour market that year, higher than the population of Germany, France, or the UK, and triple that of Australia.
The report, analysing how “visible gains and leadership wins mask systemic and hidden barriers”, highlights that deep-seated systemic barriers continue to limit female workforce participation, revealing the stark paradox in gender employment trends.
Major factors hindering women’s employment in urban areas include spousal violence, residence relocation after marriage, and lower access to convenient modes of transport.
Released a day before International Women’s Day by Chennai’s Great Lakes Institute of Management, the report, ‘India’s Gender Employment Paradox’, is based on analysis of secondary data from the Periodic Labour Surveys, National Family Health Surveys, and Time Use Survey.
“In 2023-24, India failed to utilise the skills of over 19 million graduate-educated urban women due to personal choices or constraints from social norms such as childcare,commuting, or demanding ‘greedy’ jobs,” the report highlights, adding that 97 percent of urban men were employed in the 30-49 age group, suggesting a “strong male breadwinner norm”.
When it comes to spousal violence faced by employed women, the private business school says that education brings down the risks. This is seen in the last available data of 2019-2020, wherein the chances of highly educated working women in urban areas and those with merely primary education experiencing such abuse was 20 and 42 percent, respectively.
Paradoxically, data shows that employed women are more likely to justify domestic violence compared to non-working women—suggesting internalised patriarchal norms, or increased pressure to conform to traditional gender roles despite economic independence.
Prof. Vidya Mahambare, who teaches economics at the institute, told ThePrint that the wage disparity is still the same and it has not improved over the years.
“However, we cannot make a sweeping statement that there is a huge wage disparity between the genders as a lot of other parameters also have to be considered including their performance, experience, age etc,” she said, observing that there was a simmering issue over employing more women employees for the sake of including women in the workforce.
“Companies hire women to include more women at work and reject men who are equally qualified. So, those rejected men become unemployed and it is increasing now. But, what we also see is women after getting a job, over the years, they tend to leave over various reasons including marriage and children. This is being turned against them by the men as a reverse discrimination,” she said, adding that this would become a major issue in the next five or ten years.
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Employment challenges for women
Highlighting the impact of marriage and motherhood, the report highlights that a woman’s employment trajectory changes drastically after her marriage. Nearly 80 percent of urban women are married by the age of 25-29, while only 29.2 percent of them remain employed. This can be a result of increased domestic burdens, reversing the balance that unmarried women have with their work.
It suggests that married working women spend 5.3 hours per day on domestic and care work, three times that of single women, and only 4.7 hours in paid work.
The impact of motherhood is severe for women as employment among the 24-29 age group drops dramatically from 44.3 percent for single women to 32.9 percent for married women without children and to 18.9 percent for mothers.
Despite increasing employment opportunities, structural issues such as post-marriage relocations and inadequate public transport continue to hinder women’s workforce participation.
Data shows that 87 percent of all female migrants move due to marriage, whereas only 0.7 percent migrate for work. Limited access to private transport forces women to rely on costly cab services or inefficient public transport, adding another layer of financial and time-related constraints.
As women tend to take career breaks for childcare or other caregiving responsibilities, it often results in causing difficulties to re-enter the workforce, especially in a rapidly evolving job market. Moreover, older women usually struggle with outdated skills, lack of flexible work options and find the job search difficult.
To address these barriers, policymakers and corporations need to leverage platforms like the government’s Swayam Central online courses and private e-learning programs to facilitate reskilling. “AI tools can be used effectively for self-learning by anyone. However, greater awareness and information dissemination about these resources are needed,” the report says.
Gender norms & corporate culture
The corporate structure, the report says, disproportionately affects women, who bear the double burden of professional and household responsibilities resulting in many opting out of competitive career tracks not due to lack of ambition, but because of rigid workplace norms that prioritise presence over productivity.
A 2025 LinkedIn survey, quoted in the report, revealed that while 52.7 percent of working mothers found WFH increased their productivity, nearly half of them felt they had fewer promotion opportunities compared to office-based colleagues. Additionally, 86 percent reported spending up to three hours of workday on childcare, while 46 percent worried about working longer hours than their office-based counterparts.
Despite these challenges, a majority of women in remote work settings reported feeling that their work was not acknowledged. However, there was a significant disparity between work recognition and actual promotion opportunities—particularly for mothers, who faced a 20.4 percent recognition-to-advancement gap compared to 13.8 percent for women without children.
The report concludes that while women’s employment trends in urban India show promising signs, hidden barriers still persist and addressing these challenges will require collaborative action such as, “corporations rethinking workplace flexibility, governments overhauling infrastructure, and households redefining gender roles”.
True transformation, it says, will require men to be equal stakeholders in women’s economic and social advancement at home, in workplaces, and in society. “While policy discussions often focus on women-centric solutions, the role of male support and advocacy remains under emphasised yet crucial.”
Inputs by Prabhakar Tamilarasu
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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