Does “Feminization U Hypothesis” Hold? A Discussion on Women’s Work Participation in Rural India

Abstract

The Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Claudia Goldin in 2023 has renewed attention on issues of women’s work. In this context, this article critically revisits the debate on the declining participation of women in the rural labor market in India, drawing on fieldwork data from two villages in Tamil Nadu. It explores the complexities of women’s labor force participation and argues that women’s work decisions are shaped by a complex interplay of economic necessity, societal prestige, and individual aspirations, all mediated by caste, class, and patriarchal norms. The withdrawal of women from the labor market is often viewed as a marker of social prestige and tends to occur as households experience upward economic mobility. Building on this insight, the article offers a nuanced understanding of how social norms and institutions shape women’s labor market outcomes, by tracing the factors and processes at play on the ground.

Keywords

Women’s work labor force participation caste patriarchy rural labor

Introduction

Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize recognition has reignited discussions on women’s employment and work participation. Her “U-shaped feminization hypothesis,” now widely incorporated into textbooks in development economics, marked a significant shift in a discipline traditionally characterized by a male-centric perspective. Formulated based on historical data from the United States, Goldin (1995) argues that women’s labor market participation follows a U-shaped trajectory over the long run: characterized by high participation in the early stages of economic development, a decline during the onset of growth and capitalist transformation, and a subsequent rise in the later stages. However, like many frameworks rooted in Western contexts, uncritically generalizing and applying this model across different spatial and temporal settings can be problematic.

While debates on whether the “U-shaped feminization hypothesis” holds in non-US contexts are not new, the case of India deserves special attention due to its distinct characteristics. The country has experienced a long-term decline in women’s Labour Force Participation Rates (LFPR), sparking discussions on the various factors shaping women’s labor market outcomes. Much of the existing literature on this topic relies heavily on macro-level secondary data, offering what may be called a “top-down” view. While such studies provide useful national-level insights, they often fail to capture the complex and lived realities of women’s work, which a field-based perspective can offer.

This article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of women’s work participation in India by critically engaging with the dominant literature on declining female workforce participation and questioning universal theories like the “U-shaped feminization hypothesis.” It first collates evidence from village studies on women’s work participation in India and then draws on data from a long-term village study conducted in two villages in Tamil Nadu in 2018. Using interview data and fieldwork observations, this study highlights the complexities of women’s labor force participation within their specific sociocultural settings. These empirical insights challenge generalized assumptions and offer a deeper understanding of the diverse, context-specific factors that influence women’s employment decisions in rural India.

Anchored in Karl Polanyi’s “substantivist” approach to studying real-world economies, this article understands the economy as an instituted process shaped by interactions between humans and their natural and social environments (Polanyi, 2001). According to Polanyi, markets and the actors involved in them are embedded within social norms, cultural practices, and institutional arrangements. However, this does not imply that economic actors (women, in this case) merely follow predetermined scripts based on their social categories. As feminist economists argue, decisions regarding participation or nonparticipation in economic activities can also be acts of agency, each of which may have varying “meaning,” “motivation,” and “purpose” that individuals bring to their activities, all of which are embedded in social norms and identities (Kabeer, 1999).

The rest of this article is structured as follows: The next section delves into the debates surrounding the declining LFPR among Indian women, followed by a review of findings from various village studies across the country. The fourth section presents data and insights from the author’s fieldwork in two villages in Tamil Nadu, followed by a discussion of the findings and concluding observations in the final section.

How Did the Debate Unfold?

Most early studies on the decline in female LFPR relied on macro-level trends from National Sample Survey (NSS) data and linked it to India’s economic growth regime, which generated few jobs (Chowdhury, 2011; Kannan & Raveendran, 2012). Kapsos et al. (2014) estimated that 42% of the decline stemmed from limited employment opportunities for women. Mechanization in agriculture further displaced female workers (Afridi et al., 2020; Mehrotra & Parida, 2017), without a corresponding rise in non-farm jobs (Chatterjee et al., 2015; Menon, 2019).

Other explanations focus on the “income effect,” whereby rising rural incomes reduce the need for women to engage in paid work, and the “education effect,” which suggests that young women remain enrolled in education rather than join the labor force (Neff et al., 2012; Rangarajan et al., 2011). Afridi et al. (2016) extend this argument by suggesting that educated women may prioritize household investments, such as children’s education and health. However, the “education effect” hypothesis is contested, as the decline in work participation is also observed among women beyond school-going age (Ghosh, 2014; Kannan & Raveendran, 2012).

Abraham (2013), through an analysis of LFPR trends since the 1970s, argues that rising incomes within a patriarchal and caste-based society have contributed to the “domestication of women” as a strategy for attaining social status and upward mobility. The stigma associated with women’s presence in public spaces, along with the instrumental use of education for “status production,” further discourages women’s participation in the labor market. Other studies similarly highlight the role of social norms and institutional factors in shaping women’s work outcomes (Jayachandran, 2021; Kapsos et al., 2014; Olsen & Mehta, 2006).

Some studies reject the status production hypothesis as an explanation for women’s withdrawal from the labor market (Naidu, 2016; Naidu & Rao, 2018). Instead, they attribute this trend to the “immiserization” of working-class households in India. In a growth regime characterized by rising job insecurity, a widening gender wage gap, and declining employment opportunities, the opportunity cost of women’s paid work increases. Consequently, women may withdraw from the labor market and engage more in labor-intensive domestic and allied activities.

By and large, the two major competing arguments in macro-level studies explain women’s withdrawal from the labor market in terms of: (a) the income effect and the pursuit of status, shaped by prevailing social norms and (b) the immiserization of the economy, which raises the opportunity cost of working outside the home.

While these studies have been valuable in identifying broad trends and offering plausible macro-level explanations for the decline in women’s workforce participation, they provide limited insight into the diverse, context-specific processes that shape these outcomes. Addressing this gap calls for a move beyond aggregate-level analysis toward more grounded approaches that capture the multiple dimensions of women’s work. One important yet often overlooked source of such insight is the tradition of village studies in India, which offer rich, situated understandings of rural life and labor. The next section turns to this body of work to examine what it reveals about women’s labor force participation in rural India.

Insights from Village Studies

This section draws on village studies, a strand of micro-level research that examines the village as a holistic social unit. The value of such studies—particularly those based on repeated field visits—in addressing questions that lie beyond the reach of mainstream theory and large-scale surveys has been well recognized (Himanshu et al., 2016). Although most were not explicitly designed to study women’s labor market participation, their findings offer important insights that merit closer attention.

Consistent with macro-level findings, several village studies also report a decline in female workforce participation (Elias Khan et al., 2014; Heyer, 2016; Himanshu et al., 2018). For example, the most recent survey in Palanpur highlights household economic status as a key determinant of women’s engagement in paid work outside the home. As household economic conditions improved, women were more likely to withdraw from the workforce; conversely, economic decline often led to increased female labor force participation (Himanshu et al., 2018).

Many village studies highlight the lack of “acceptable” employment as a key reason for women’s limited participation in the labor market. However, what constitutes an “acceptable” job varies across social groups. For educated youth, it often refers to employment that matches their qualifications and is available within or near their villages (Gidwani, 2000; Himanshu et al., 2018). For women agriculture laborers, being treated with dignity in the workplace is a crucial factor. For instance, Srivastava (2016) found that women workers in Eastern Uttar Pradesh were unwilling to take up jobs with employers who failed to treat them with respect.

Grace Carswell’s research in Tamil Nadu highlights that obstacles hindering women’s access to employment are intertwined with socially constructed gender dynamics within the village (Carswell, 2013). Opportunities available to women and their choices regarding employment beyond the village are significantly influenced by local restrictions and societal norms. Similarly, other village-based studies concur that caste plays a pivotal role in shaping the conditions under which women enter and exit the labor market. Findings from Palanpur indicate that Dalit women enjoy greater freedom of movement compared to women from dominant castes (Himanshu & Stern, 2016), suggesting that opportunities and norms of work participation may differ by social location.

Echoing macro-level studies, many village studies observe that women’s withdrawal from the labor market could result from increased household incomes and upward mobility (Carswell, 2013; Heyer, 2015; Himanshu et al., 2018). This trend is observed across all caste groups. Village studies from South India report that Dalit and other lower-caste women are withdrawing from the labor market primarily due to improvements in their household’s economic status. Heyer (2015) and Carswell (2013) show that Dalit women are leaving agricultural labor to become housewives and that they view this shift as beneficial as it frees them from arduous and poorly paid labor while also being symbolic of their upward mobility.

As Gidwani (2000) observes the labor process and the ability to live without engaging in outside work is considered a mark of social distinction in parts of rural India. Clarinda Still, based on her study in Andhra Pradesh, observes how the behavior of women becomes central to the pursuit of social status and upward mobility of Dalit households (Gorringe, 2018). In an attempt to catch up with the upper castes, “Dalits adopt and/or enforce a gender ideology similar to that of higher status groups” (Still, 2011, p. 1128). Mehrotra (2017), in her study based on villages in Uttar Pradesh, reports that Dalit women are made to withdraw from wage work as their migrant husbands did not want them to work in the fields of upper-caste/class households in an attempt to ensure the honor and pride of their households.

Regardless of the motivations behind labor supply decisions in these cases, a common thread emerges: The primacy given to “status production” through regulating women’s labor. In a different sociocultural context, Aswathy and Kalpana (2018, p. 125) observe that women’s withdrawal from work in a Muslim-dominated coastal village in Kerala can be partly explained by “middle-class ideologies of domesticity that promoted seclusion of women within the household.” The study underscores that women’s engagement in paid work outside the home is mediated by a complex interplay of economic necessity and considerations of social status. The type of work available (such as fish vending in this case) and the social stigma it carries are also important considerations.

Nevertheless, it is essential not to overlook the agency of women in determining their participation in the labor market. Nitya Rao (2018), drawing from her research in Tamil Nadu, demonstrates that the “domestication” of Dalit women can also be a willing choice made by them. She finds that women withdraw from the labor market following childbearing, as they view “successful upbringing” of children and their education as a “potential pathway of upward mobility,” which is held in high esteem in the local context (Rao, 2018, p. 5).

The role of state employment generation programs is another influential factor in women’s work outcomes. In an interesting case, Jeyaranjan (2011) finds in his study based on Tamil Nadu that the perception of people about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) as akin to a “government job” prompted both upper-caste women, never part of the workforce, and Dalit women who had recently withdrawn from the labor market, to join the ranks of the MGNREGA workforce. Similarly, Aswathy and Kalpana (2018) show that entrepreneurial employment generation program introduced by the sub-national government in their study villages encouraged women—many of whom might not have otherwise considered working—to enter the labor force.

Village studies also show that, apart from the factors discussed above, the increased difficulty of measuring female work in recent times may contribute to statistics showing declining LFPR. The increasing popularity of labor arrangements like piece-rate work (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2006; Niyati, 2020; Pattenden, 2016) poses problems for measurement. For example, Pattenden (2016) finds that in villages in Karnataka, farm operations such as transplantation, harvesting, and weeding are increasingly performed by women labor gangs on a piece-rate work agreement, which also indicates the increasing possibilities of undercounting.

On the whole, village studies done in different parts of India validate the findings of macro-level research on the decline in female labor force participation and broadly support the explanations offered. They underscore how factors such as limited non-farm employment opportunities and entrenched social norms contribute to women’s withdrawal from the workforce. Even in villages facing a shortage of agricultural labor and rising wages, a decline in women’s workforce participation is evident, suggesting that work was available if they had wanted it. Apart from the “income effect” and the social expectations of being an honorable housewife, women may also choose not to work as an expression of their own agency, as Rao’s study highlights. This insight challenges the explanatory power of macro-level studies and demonstrates the analytical strength of village-level research. The following section presents a contextual and situated analysis of women’s workforce participation in two villages in Tamil Nadu.

Examining Women’s Labor in Vinayagapuram and Veerasambanur

Short Introduction to the Study Villages

This section presents findings from fieldwork conducted by the author in 2018 in two villages, Vinayagapuram and Veerasambanur, located in Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu, a highly urbanized and industrialized state in India, also known for its distinctive sub-national welfare program (Kalaiyarasan & Vijayabaskar, 2021). The choice of these specific villages is due to the wealth of data and insights available from repeat surveys conducted since the 1970s. The previous study conducted in 1994 (Harriss-White & Janakarajan, 2004) provides a valuable basis for analyzing changes and change processes up to 2018, when the author undertook fieldwork in these villages. A major part of the fieldwork involved a census-type house listing of Veerasambanur and Vinayagapuram, where data relating to caste, asset holding, education, and employment of all the households in the villages were collected. As per the house listing survey, there were as many as 123 households in Veerasambanur and 297 households in Vinayagapuram in 2018. The tables presented in this article are based on the house listing survey data involving 420 households in both villages together. This has been supplemented by data from focus group discussions and key informant interviews conducted over intermittent multiple visits to the study villages.

Before we go into the details of what has happened to women’s work participation, it would be worthwhile to give an idea about the general nature of labor and employment transformation that has happened in the study villages over the period. Both study villages experienced a significant process of de-agrarianization between 1994 and 2018, with the share of the workforce engaged in agriculture falling from around 70% to approximately 42%. However, this shift unfolded in a distinctly gendered manner: While agriculture remained the primary source of employment for a majority of women in 2018, most men had moved into non-farm work (Table 1).

Table 1.

Composition of the Workforce by Gender in the Study Villages, 1994 and 2018 (percentages).

Sector	1994			2018
Sector	Men	Women	Total	Men	Women	Total
Panel A: Veerasambanur
Farm	57.9	85.9	71.8	30.3	60.8	41.1
Non-farm	42.1	14.1	28.2	69.7	39.2	58.9
Panel B: Vinayagapuram
Farm	60.2	83.4	71.4	40	54.8	44.9
Non-farm	39.8	16.6	28.6	60	45.2	55.1

Source: Harriss-White and Janakarajan (2004) and House listing survey, 2017–2018.

The share of agriculture in the total income portfolio of the households has also come down. A notable feature of the transition of employment is the emergence of the service sector as the dominant sector providing employment to the village workforce. This is in tandem with the national and state-level trends indicating large-scale tertiarization of employment. Regarding manufacturing, the handloom silk weaving industry that had a strong presence in the study villages in 1994 is almost dormant in 2018. While the weaving industry deteriorated, the construction sector emerged as the major provider of non-farm employment in the study villages in 2018. However, it must be noted that most of the construction jobs reported by the people were outside the villages, mainly in the cities of Chennai and Bangalore.

In the sections below, we discuss the changes that occurred in women’s labor market participation between 1994 and 2018, separately for the agriculture and the non-agriculture sectors.

Agriculture Sector

The majority of the labor force in agriculture is constituted by women in both the study villages (see Table 1). Women’s share in the agricultural workforce was 65% in Veerasambanur and 70% in Vinayagapuram in 2018. While women inundated the class of agricultural laborers, cultivators continued to be predominantly men (Table 2). This imbalance in the agrarian structure underlines women’s continuing lack of access and control of productive assets. This lopsided agrarian structure in the study villages perfectly fits the description of a “gender-based class division” between “a non-propertied/waged workforce composed of women… and self-employed men” (Da Corta & Venkateshwarlu, 1999, p. 104).

Table 2.

Percentage Distribution of the Agrarian Workforce Across Gender in the Study Villages, 2018.

	Veerasambanur			Vinayagapuram
	Men	Women	Total	Men	Women	Total
Cultivator	85.7	14.3	100	86.3	13.7	100
Agricultural labor	36.5	63.5	100	29.6	70.4	100
Animal husbandry	16.84	84	100	41.2	58.8	100

Source: House listing survey, 2017–2018.

Over the period, both the conditions of demand and supply of agricultural laborers have changed. As for the decline in the supply of agricultural laborers, other than the male out-migration in substantial numbers, there are three reasons: first, as people have become more aware of the importance of education, all children attended school and completed at least 12th standard schooling, and nobody below the age of 18 was employed in the study villages. This is a drastic change compared to 1994 when child labor was employed in agriculture. Second, population growth slowed down considerably due to fertility decline.¹ Third, young peoples’ aversion to working in agricultural labor has also taken its toll on labor availability in the sector.

The demand for laborers has come down in agriculture mainly owing to mechanization. The interviews with farmers and agricultural laborers revealed that labor displacement on a significant scale has taken place in the study villages over the period. While the first wave of mechanization (tractor use) displaced male labor, the second wave of mechanization (of harvesting and threshing) displaced women laborers. The mechanization of harvesting and threshing, which were the most labor-intensive activities, drastically reduced the demand for women labor in agriculture.

On the whole, women’s participation in agricultural labor has declined in both study villages, driven by pressures from both the demand and supply sides. While we do not have work participation rate (WPR) estimates from the 1994 survey to offer a quantitative comparison, qualitative interviews provide credible evidence of a downward trend in female labor market participation. One important factor behind this shift is the increased enrollment of women in education and their longer duration of study. Equally significant, however, is a broader sociocultural attitudinal shift among the younger population. Many young people seek to distance themselves from jobs that involve mud, dirt, and strenuous physical labor. In the absence of viable migration opportunities that might allow them to pursue urban employment, many young women now prefer to remain at home. Older women in the villages often remark that the younger generation, especially educated women, is unwilling to take up agricultural work. This reluctance extends even to family labor: young, educated women have stopped working on their own farms. “My daughter would not even turn her gaze toward our farm,” says a member of a cultivator household. Among young, unmarried women from landowning or dominant-caste households, this disinterest in agricultural labor is often accompanied by a reluctance to marry someone engaged in farming.

Dalit women laborers also seem to have witnessed a decline in their participation in the labor market. This trend is in sharp contrast to the situation in 1994 when virtually all able-bodied adult women from Dalit households were employed. Old women from the Dalit colonies in the study villages complained that their daughters and daughters-in-law were “lazy” as they no longer preferred paid work. While most of them cited their aversion to agricultural work and the unavailability of “acceptable” non-farm jobs as reasons for not working, one respondent said she stopped working because her migrant husband insisted she do so in order to focus on the children’s education. Almost all of them spoke about the need to secure a “company job” and “office job” for their children and emphasized the crucial role of education in achieving it.

The fact that women from Dalit households, historically subjected to poverty and social discrimination, are now able to withdraw from the labor market attests to the transformation of living conditions in the study villages. They confirm the findings from other village studies carried out across India: The lowering of women’s participation in the labor market has to do with a considerable rise in earnings of men. In the context of Tamil Nadu, the sub-national social welfare polices also have a role in explaining this. The improved living conditions and growing consciousness of their rights have increased the agency and bargaining power of Dalit women. They are now in a position in which they can comfortably say no to offers of work in the fields of dominant-caste farmers. This is in stark contrast to the situation in 1994. As a 60-year-old agriculture laborer said:

I could not have the option to say “no” when the landowners called me for work [three decades ago]. Whatever they asked, we had to do. Mostly we didn’t speak a word against them. Otherwise, they didn’t call us for work.

During the interview, some Dalit women mentioned that they are now more selective in choosing for whom to work. A 35-year-old Dalit agricultural laborer said that, apart from two dominant-caste households, which are her neighbors and with which she shares friendly relations, she does not work for any others.

All the above factors discussed have created a shortage of labor for agricultural operations. Many farmers complained about the difficulty of finding (female) agricultural laborers, particularly during the peak season. They attributed this shortage to the availability of work under MGNREGA.

This situation led to the spread of piece-rate work through labor gangs. Under this system, a group of five or six workers negotiates a lump sum payment with the landlord in advance and then divides the amount among themselves. According to the women involved, they now earn nearly double what they used to receive under the daily wage system. In Vinayagapuram, most paddy transplantation work is now carried out on a piece-rate basis by groups of women laborers. While this work arrangement may involve long hours of arduous labor compared to daily wage work, which has set time limits, women workers who are willing and physically able to take up agricultural tasks find it advantageous, as it enables them to earn higher incomes. During peak agricultural seasons, when the demand for labor is high, they are able to negotiate higher payments by using their collective bargaining power.

From a measurement perspective, the growing prevalence of piece-rate work complicates the estimation of women’s labor force participation, making it difficult to arrive at firm estimates and potentially contributing to its underreporting. This study also identifies several other forms of women’s work in the study villages that are similarly prone to being undercounted. The increased involvement of women in animal husbandry is one such instance where their work tends to be undercounted. Much of the work which women perform in the livestock sector tends to get statistically undercounted, as recently shown by Swaminathan et al. (2020). This was very much evident during fieldwork in the study villages in Tamil Nadu. Most women viewed livestock rearing as part of their daily household chores and failed to report it as their primary occupation even when they did the majority of the activities. Through interviews with men and women in the study villages, a general schema of the division of work on the upkeep of milch animals is presented in Table 3. Nevertheless, for most of the households where women were reported as “housewives” during the house listing survey, it was found that many of them were actually involved in cow rearing.

Table 3.

Gender Division of Tasks Related to Rearing Cows in the Villages, 2018.

Activities	Only Women	Only Men	Anyone of Them
Cleaning animal shed	✓	✕	✕
Feeding	✕	✕	✓
Watering	✕	✕	✓
Milking	✓	✕	✕
Fodder cutting and collection	✓	✕	✕
Making of feed concentrate	✕	✕	✓
Grazing of animals	✕	✕	✓
Calf rearing	✓	✕	✕
Milk selling	✕	✕	✓
Bathing the cow	✕	✕	✓

Source: Fieldwork, 2018.

To quantitatively illustrate the potential underestimation of women’s work in agriculture, including animal husbandry, this study introduced “unpaid family labor” as a distinct category under the “activity status” part in the house listing questionnaire. Data collected through this method are presented in Table 4. WPR(R), or the “reported” work participation rate, includes only those women who identify themselves as engaged in remunerative work. In contrast, WPR(A), or the “actual” work participation rate, also takes into account unpaid family labor, regardless of whether it is directly remunerated. WPR(A), thus, captures instances where women are engaged in productive activities classified under the System of National Accounts (SNA) but still report themselves as housewives with no involvement in SNA activities.

Table 4.

WPR of Women Aged Between 15 and 59 in the Study Villages, 2018.

	WPR (R)	WPR (A)	Difference
Panel A: Veerasambanur
All women	45.65	60.89	–15.24
All dominant-caste women	35.16	62.63	–27.47
All Dalit women	55.91	60.21	–4.3
Panel B: Vinayagapuram
All women	46.97	70.88	–23.91
All dominant-caste women	41	71.26	–30.26
All Dalit women	65.82	69.62	–3.8

Source: House listing survey, 2018.

In both study villages, there is a significant underreporting of workforce participation of women under the conventional calculation of WPR. In Veerasambanur, the discrepancy between the reported WPR and the actual WPR is 15% while in Vinayagapuram it stands at 23%. Higher employment of family labor in Vinayagapuram may be one factor that explains the higher discrepancy between the reported and actual value of WPR in comparison to Veerasambanur.

It is also notable that the discrepancy between actual and reported WPR varies across caste groups. In both villages, the difference between actual and reported WPR is less than 5% for Dalit women, whereas it exceeds 25 % for dominant-caste women. This pattern is not unexpected, given that dominant-caste households typically possess greater land and livestock assets than Dalit households.

Non-farm Sector

Over the three decades under consideration, opportunities for non-farm employment in Veerasambanur and Vinayagapuram have grown significantly in both scale and diversity. However, this shift was not driven by the development of a vibrant non-farm sector within the villages. On the contrary, the primary non-farm activity in 1994, handloom silk weaving, declined over time. By 2018, urban centers such as Chennai and Bangalore had become the main sources of non-farm employment, with villagers, predominantly men, migrating in search of work. This geographic shift marks the most significant transformation in non-farm employment in the study village.

Table 5 presents the access to non-farm employment by gender, as measured by the “access ratio.” This ratio compares a group’s presence in a particular occupation with its overall share in non-farm employment, as follows:

A c c e s s R a t i o_{j} = \frac{S h a r e o f g r o u p j i n a s p e c i f i c o c c u p a t i o n}{S h a r e o f g r o u p j i n t o t a l n o n f a r m w o r k f o r c e i n t h e v i l l a g e}

Table 5.

Gender-wise Access Ratios in Non-farm Occupations in the Study Villages, 2018.

Occupation	Veerasambanur		Vinayagapuram
Occupation	Male	Female	Male	Female
Self-employed	1.12	0.61	1.30	0.30
Regular wage/salaried	0.88	0.39	1.05	0.89
Casual labor	1.20	0.36	1.30	0.29
MGNREGA	0.25	3.46	0.28	2.69

Source: House listing survey, 2017–2018.

An access ratio greater than one suggests that the group is overrepresented in that occupation, whereas a ratio less than one indicates under-representation relative to their share in the non-farm workforce. It is clear that, in both the study villages, women’s access to non-farm employment is limited compared to men, except for the case of MGNREGA, where they are overrepresented (Table 5).

The subsections below explain the changes that have happened to women’s work participation in Vinayagapuram and Veerasambanur between 1994 and 2018 for different sectors in the non-farm economy.

Silk Weaving

Handloom silk weaving was traditionally undertaken by dominant-caste households in the study villages. Dalits were historically excluded from this sector, as the know-how and control over the value chain were tightly held by caste networks.

As previously mentioned, the handloom silk weaving industry was found to be weak and moribund in 2018, in stark contrast to its promising status in 1995.² Over the period, both villages experienced a significant decrease in the number of weaving workers. Between 1995 and 2018, the number of weavers declined by 77% in Vinayagapuram and 61% in Veerasambanur.

While the weaving industry witnessed a general decline, women emerged as the major casualties, experiencing a substantial reduction in their participation in the sector. Women, who constituted a significant portion of the industry’s workforce in 1995, were notably scarce in 2018 (Table 6). For instance, in Vinayagapuram, which had 47 women working in the sector in 1995, only one woman remained employed in it by 2018. Similarly, in Veerasambanur, women weaving workers had become nonexistent.

Table 6.

Number of Weaving Workers by Gender in the Study Villages, 1995 and 2018.

	Male Workers		Female Workers		Total Workers
	1995	2018	1995	2018	1995	2018
Vinayagapuram	64	24	47	1	111	25
Veerasambanur	13	7	5	0	18	7

Source: Arivukkarasi (2016) and House listing survey, 2017–2018.

The significant decrease in the number of workers, particularly women, engaged in handloom weaving can be attributed to various factors. One crucial factor is the crisis that the sector faced following liberalization. The influx of cheap yarn imports from China and the subsequent boom of the power loom sector spelled trouble for the handloom industry. In an effort to compete with power looms, the handloom industry implemented strict wage controls as a cost-cutting strategy. According to our interviews with weavers, wage levels remained stagnant or rose very slow for almost a decade since the emergence of power looms. This situation severely impacted weaving households, leading women from these households to seek employment in other occupations to compensate for the income squeeze. This is very much similar to the observation by Himanshu et al. (2018) from Palanpur that times of economic crisis may lead to increased work participation of women.

Despite an improvement in weaving fortunes after 2005, women who had exited the workforce during the crisis did not return. In fact, the sector saw no new entrants, irrespective of gender. Weaving demands a long training period, traditionally beginning with childhood apprenticeships. Most weavers we interviewed had started between the ages of 8 and 10, with training lasting up to 8 years. With near-universal school enrollment and minimal dropouts, the use of child labor has ceased—effectively cutting off the supply of new workers to the sector.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)

The MGNREGS was first implemented in the study villages in 2008. The popularity of this scheme increased as time passed by, and people belonging to the laboring class considered it as a reliable livelihood option. From our interviews, this is the only job for which women do not feel like withdrawing, and most likely the narrative of declining work participation does not hold for this sector.

The main feature of the MGNREGS workforce in the study villages in 2018 was that a large majority of them were women. Of the total workers who reported MGNREGS as their primary occupation, not less than 80% were women. Since men consider this as a feminine type of work, they stay away from it. In both the study villages, all the workers who reported MGNREGS as their primary occupation were from landless households. The reasons for MGNREGS being the primary source of employment for women were similar in both the study villages. As MGNREGS was largely seen as ‘light’ work compared to arduous agricultural work, older women found it easy to join the scheme and get a living from it. Especially for women of old age living alone, this was a real boon. The wages from MGNREGS and Old Age Pensions given by the sub-national government gave them enough for day-to-day sustenance. This was also true for relatively young women who faced major health issues.

Among young women who participated in MGNREGS as their primary (and often only) source of employment, many were either “educated” in the local sense, or belonged to upwardly mobile migrant households. In both dominant caste and Dalit households, MGNREGS work was widely perceived as having higher status than agricultural labor. As a result, these women readily engaged in MGNREGS while looking down upon physical labor in agriculture.

Migration

As mentioned earlier, migration to cities was the major source of non-farm employment in the study villages in 2018. People used their kinship networks to find job opportunities in megacities and other urban centers like Chennai and Bangalore. However, the opportunities for migration were highly biased against women.

Table 7 shows that migration in the study villages was a gendered process. In both villages, more than 30% of the male workforce was migrants, while the figure for females was substantially less than this. The sharp inequality in migration opportunities between men and women is brought out by the comparison of access ratios for both groups (Table 7). The access ratio for migration for men is substantially higher than that for women in both villages. It is also notable that, in both villages, the overall access to non-farm employment, as indicated by the access ratios, was nearly the same for both men and women.

Table 7.

Some Statistics on the Gender Distribution of Migration in the Study Villages, 2018.

	Veerasambanur			Vinayagapuram
	Female	Male	Total	Female	Male	Total
Number	17	86	103	29	138	167
Percentage of total migrants in the village	16.50	83.50	100	17.37	82.63	100
Migrants as a percentage of (respective) total workforce in the village	6.18	31.27	37.45	13.81	36.70	28.50
Migrants as a percentage of total (respective) non-farm workforce in the village	10.49	53.09	63.58	17.37	82.63	51.07
Access ratio of respective migrant category wrt. non-farm employment³	0.47	1.28	—	0.48	1.27	—

Source: House listing survey, 2017–2018.

One obvious reason women stayed back was the influence of gender and caste norms. This is most visible in the case of young unmarried women. Traditional divisions of labor assigned women the responsibility of household duties and childcare, which many cited as the main reason they had not migrated like men. However, the decision regarding women’s migration was largely made at the household level. In families that owned and continued to cultivate land, women were often expected to remain behind. By contrast, women from landless households had greater freedom to migrate, leading to a higher rate of migration among Dalit women compared to their dominant-caste counterpart. Two unmarried sisters from a Dalit household in Veerasambanur migrated for work to the Tirupur region. This move, however, was enabled by a crisis within the household—following the death of their father, who had accumulated significant debt, and their mother’s ill health, which left her unable to continue agricultural work.

The presence of young, unmarried Dalit women who had returned to the village after spending time outside elicited disdain from dominant-caste men, who felt that they were trying to alter the village’s “culture”. A male respondent said:

Colony women nowadays wear fashionable dresses. Seeing this, our women are also trying to imitate that. We cannot allow this. We have some culture and traditions here. How can we allow our women to dress like this?

The above statement is also reflective of the stricter social norms imposed on the dominant-caste women. When asked why she did not migrate with her husband to Chennai, this was the answer given by a dominant-caste women respondent:

I have to look after my children. They go to school… I got cows to rear… my husband stays with his friends in a small place (in the city). He cannot afford to keep us with him there.

While this response reflects prevailing social norms that place the burden of household responsibilities entirely on women, it also highlights the economic constraints that limit the possibility of migrating as a family. Except for a few in salaried employment, most men engaged in casual labor in the cities live in overcrowded, shared accommodations. Bringing their wives and children would require renting a separate house, leading to significant expenses and eroding whatever savings they might accumulate.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article examined women’s work participation in rural India through a close reading of macro-level debates and insights drawn from village studies, including this author’s fieldwork conducted in two villages in Tamil Nadu. Juxtaposing the (rural) Indian context with Claudia Goldin’s U-shaped feminization hypothesis, the study highlighted the limitations of universalist and deterministic frameworks in capturing the gendered and socially embedded nature of economic life in rural India.

One general pattern that emerges from both the village studies literature and the author’s fieldwork is that women may withdraw from the workforce during periods of rising household income and upward mobility, while they may be more likely to enter the workforce during times of income decline and downward mobility. However, the internal dynamics of this process can vary across contexts and over time. This article captures only one phase of this dynamic, namely, a context of generalized income increase. Therefore, the argument that women are withdrawing from the workforce due to immiserization made by some of the macro-level studies does not hold, at least in the case of the author’s study villages in particular, and Tamil Nadu more broadly.

These patterns do not operate in isolation; rather, they are shaped by a complex interplay of economic necessity, caste and gender norms, and individual aspirations, which often resist linear theorization. In rural India, the withdrawal of women from the labor market is frequently perceived as a marker of social prestige and tends to accompany upward economic mobility within households. While the decline in women’s workforce participation is often viewed as a negative trend in macro-level studies, it acquires more nuanced meanings when examined from the ground up. In the study villages, women’s withdrawal from paid work is not always a direct outcome of patriarchal or social norms. Instead, it may also reflect acts of agency, shaped by women’s own perceptions, motivations, and choices within specific social contexts.

For Dalit women, who have historically faced multiple forms of oppression in both work and society, the decision to refuse low-paid and degrading labor can signal a growing sense of self-worth. Yet, in a context where choices are often limited—typically between undertaking or refusing agricultural work—and where social norms intersect with individual aspirations, such acts of agency may carry meanings and purposes that are not immediately visible. While this warrants further exploration, what remains clear is that, for many of the Dalit women interviewed, these decisions represent assertions of dignity and self-respect. Government interventions such as the public distribution system and MGNREGS have played a role in expanding the space for such choices, particularly for older women and widows, by offering alternatives to exploitative work and enhancing their bargaining power. These shifts, in turn, contribute to the subtle reconfiguration of caste-labor hierarchies within the village.

The study highlights how class and caste positions critically shape the structure of work: While women from affluent, dominant-caste households are largely absent from paid labor, Dalit women from landless households continue to participate actively in the labor market. This pattern reflects broader social hierarchies, where economic necessity intersects with cultural values. Young educated women, across caste groups, generally avoid agricultural work, and those from dominant-caste backgrounds often show little interest even in cultivating their own land. In contrast, Dalit women who remain engaged in agricultural labor are increasingly doing so on their own terms.

The analysis also highlights how changing labor arrangements, particularly the expansion of piece-rate job contracts in rural India, complicate conventional methods of measuring women’s work participation. This is especially relevant in agriculture and livestock care, where women’s contributions often go unrecorded or are difficult to quantify. In contrast, the insights offered by village studies provide a richer, more situated account of women’s work and its meanings.

In conclusion, this article argues that women’s labor market participation in rural India cannot be adequately understood through top-down, universalizing frameworks. Instead, it calls for context-sensitive approaches, such as a substantivist lens, that view the economy as embedded in social relations, and that take seriously the cultural imaginaries shaping how women view and navigate work. Methodologically, it makes a case for village studies as a critical tool for providing a granular understanding of economic life in rural India.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author expresses his gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The author is also grateful to the Azim Premji University Research Funding Programme 2018 for their financial support, which enabled the fieldwork conducted for this research. All interviews conducted have obtained the agreement of the interviewees, and their names have been concealed.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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