The story behind the rise and rise of women managers

This article is authored by Bhavya Razshree, Aditya Ashok and Satyam Mishra.

The government released the 27th edition of Women and Men in India on April 29, and the headline number is striking: Women in managerial positions in India increased by 102.54% between 2017 and 2025, compared to 73.80% for men. Rural female labour force participation rose from 37.5% to 45.9% in just three years. Gender parity has been achieved at every level of school education from primary to higher secondary. The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education is now higher for women (30.2) than for men (28.9).

Women economy (Voices of Youth)

These numbers are real. They represent genuine progress. And they hide a story that the report itself does not tell.

The 102% rise in women managers is concentrated in a handful of sectors: Information technology, financial services, telecommunications, and professional consulting. These are urban, formal, English-speaking industries where corporate diversity mandates, SEBI board composition requirements, and global ESG pressures have created institutional incentives to hire and promote women. The rise is significant. It is also narrow.

Step outside these sectors, and the picture inverts.

Nine out of ten women in manufacturing work in informal enterprises, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. These are unregistered, household-level operations with no contracts, no social security, and no labour protections. Within apparel manufacturing, where the largest concentration of female factory workers exists, the share of self-employed women has risen from 46% in 2000 to 63% in 2024. Nine out of ten women working as tailors are self-employed and operate from home. The formal private sector in manufacturing employs significantly more men than women.

The PLFS 2025 data confirms the structural divide. Agriculture still accounts for 43% of total employment, down only marginally from 44.8% in 2024. The share of women in regular wage or salaried employment rose from 16.6% to 18.2%. But 64.2% of women remain self-employed, a category that in the Indian context overwhelmingly means unpaid family work or subsistence-level own-account work. The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 noted that nearly two-thirds of incremental employment since 2019 comprised self-employed workers, among whom unpaid women family workers predominate.

This is the gap the 102% headline does not capture. India is producing women managers at twice the rate of men. It is also producing women tailors, women agricultural labourers, and women domestic workers at rates that have barely changed in two decades. The boardroom is transforming. The shop floor is not.

The rural LFPR number deserves particular scrutiny. A rise from 37.5% to 45.9% sounds like empowerment. But researchers at the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University have pointed out that this increase has not been accompanied by higher earnings for rural women, a rise in women as employers, or an increase in regular salaried jobs. The increase is driven primarily by more women entering farming and own-account work, categories that are often low-productivity, low-earning, and survivalist in nature. When a woman who was previously counted as “not in the labour force” begins helping on the family farm because household income has fallen, she enters the LFPR statistics. But she has not been empowered. She has been compelled.

The Economic Survey 2024 acknowledged that women’s unpaid care work contributes 3.1% to GDP. This invisible labour rarely contributes to income or asset ownership, offering no pathway to the kind of economic agency that the 102% managerial number implies.

The sectoral distribution tells the sharpest story. In construction, which has among the highest employment elasticity in the Indian economy, jobs are overwhelmingly male, informal, and low-wage. Manufacturing employment grew by only 1.7% even as gross value added grew at 7.5%, a classic case of jobless industrial growth. The services sector, where women have made visible gains, employs a fraction of the total workforce compared to agriculture and construction.

India is, in effect, running two parallel women’s economies. One is urban, formal, educated, and growing rapidly. Its women are in boardrooms, in tech companies, in consulting firms. The MoSPI report captures their progress accurately. The other economy is rural, informal, agricultural, and barely moving. Its women are in fields, in home-based garment work, in construction sites where they carry bricks for wages that frequently fall below the prescribed minimum. The same report captures their numbers too, but not their reality.

The policy challenge is not that progress is absent. It is that progress is unevenly distributed to the point of being two different countries.

Three interventions would begin to close the gap. First, the formal manufacturing sector needs targeted incentives for hiring women, similar to what the Production-Linked Incentive scheme has done for output. Employment-linked incentives that reward female workforce participation in factories would address the structural gender skew in organised manufacturing. Second, the definition of “employment” in official surveys needs to account for the quality of work, not just its existence. A woman doing unpaid work on a family farm and a woman managing a team at an IT company are both “employed” in PLFS data. They are not living the same life. Third, the social infrastructure that enables women to work, affordable childcare, safe public transport, workplace creches, needs public investment at the same scale as the physical infrastructure that enables men to work.

The 102% rise in women managers is worth celebrating. But celebration without context is misleading. Until the factory floor moves as fast as the corner office, India’s women’s employment story will remain a tale of two economies, one visible and one invisible, one measured and one merely counted.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Bhavya Razshree, advocate, Delhi Courts and co-founder, LawSarathi.in, Aditya Ashok, public policy consultant, Government Advisory and Satyam Mishra, advocate, Delhi Courts.