Less Work is More Work: Female Labour Force Participation and Reproduction in India

The puzzling decline in female labour force participation in India in the context of high economic growth has recently generated considerable academic interest. Increasing educational enrolment by women, and higher household incomes are offered as optimistic hypotheses. Women’s increasing participation in domestic activities is regarded as ‘status production’, and as evidence that economic growth has been beneficial. However, these hypotheses do not fully explain labour market withdrawal of women from households in the lower income and asset spectrum. Nor do they account for the shortage of decent work for women workers. Further, an investigation of data on ‘domestic activities’ collected by the NSSO reveals that a significant proportion of women are expending labour in ensuring daily survival of households. Based on this data, the paper suggests that rather than an income effect, the shift of women’s labour from the labour market to domestic activities may be a strategy to cope with the immiserating tendencies of the Indian economy.