Ara, Shamim and Shrivastav, Puneet Kumar  <br/><br/>
Decoding rising female labour force participation in India: Evidence from PLFS data 

 - Economic & Political Weekly 
 - 60(26,27), Jun-Jul, 28-05, 2025: p.59-67 
<br/><br/> The female labour force participation rate in India is still half of the LFPR of men and far below the global average of female LFPR of 47.2%. However, recent rounds of the Periodic Labour Force Survey reveal that there has been a significant uptick in the FLFPR, especially in the post COVID-19 pandemic period. This paper tries to analyse whether this surge in the LFPR of women is driven by the improvement in labour market opportunities or by the distress situation induced by the pandemic. The findings suggest that an increase in the FLFPR in India is largely driven by the female work participation in rural areas and in own-account and unpaid work category of self-employment activities in agriculture and the unorganised sector. There has been a significant reduction in the share of women workers in regular salaried jobs, the organised sector and the industry and services sector over the last few years. Besides these, the quality of jobs available to women workers has somewhat improved, but still, more than half of the regular salaried women workers did not have written job contracts and were not entitled to paid leave or eligible for any kind of social security benefits in 2023. - Reproduced<br/><br/>https://www.epw.in/journal/2025/26-27/special-articles/decoding-rising-female-labour-force-participation.html