Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural-Urban Gender Discrepancy in Indian Labour Force

Abstract

Women empowerment is intrinsically related to female participation in workforce. At the macro level, greater participation of females in the workforce is pro-active to economic growth.  Female labour force participation (FLFP) is a multidimensional agglomeration of structural and socioeconomic factors. However, it is historically low in India, and in the era of liberalisation and globalisation, particularly during 1993-’94 to 2011-’12, India’s FLFP rates remain low, even decline along with increases in gender discrepancy in labour force participation rates despite prevalence of congenial factors including rapid economic growth, educational gains, fertility decline, and Government’s pro-female labour market policies for raising this participation rates. Thus, the paper attempts to understand and explain the puzzle of mismatching between economic growth and FLFP through better understanding the issue by extending the analysis across rural-urban regional and political states dimensions along with associating male-female Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR)s and Work Participation Rate/Work Population Ratio (WPR)s and gender disparity in such participations with socio-economic and structural  factors including caste population, human development indices, literacy gains and levels of educations of Indian populations based on National Sample Survey (NSS) data with the ultimate aim at designing appropriate measures for the policy makers to raising FLFP rates. The principal objective of this paper is to evaluate and scrutinise the extent of male-female labour force participation rates along with gender gap in rural-urban regions in India and its states along with associated challenges to understand the relative comfort of rural vis-à-vis urban females. The paper reveals that reducing work opportunities for rural females, lower labour force participations of the higher educated urban females because of their economic comfort and limited flexible, better paid urban work opportunities, persisting social norms for delivering home caring service and for entry in the labour market for the non-tribal women, and balancing family commitments and livelihood opportunities are some of the factors through which the puzzle can be explained.