Twenty-three-year-old Ayesha* fought hard to study a master’s degree in social sciences and finally land a corporate job in Delhi in 2024. But within a year, she was struggling to stay afloat with her starting salary of Rs 40,000.
She was paying Rs 18,000 a month for a gated, paying guest accommodation, a metro-adjacent location and a neighbourhood she could come home to at night without planning ahead. After food, travel, groceries and sending money home, she was saving Rs 1,000 at best.
The latest annual Periodic Labour Force Survey data says that women’s workforce participation stood at 40% from January to December 2025. It means the number of Indian women working has nearly doubled from 23.3% in 2017-’18.
However, the rise in women’s workforce is largely among rural workers, and a significant part of it appears to be driven by a change in the definition that reclassified women performing subsistence and domestic tasks as “self-employed”.
These numbers also conceal the high costs paid by first-generation Dalit or Muslim women to attain a private sector job and remain employed in an Indian city. These are the women who are most likely to have broken through family resistance and constrained networks to land a job that offers upward mobility.
This “intersectional...
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