Labour Force Participation Rate of Women in Urban India: An Age-Cohort-Wise Analysis

The persistent problem of low and stagnant labour force participation rate of women in urban India over the past two and a half decades has been well recognised by scholars. The rates stagnated within the low range of 22–23%, during the period extending between 1999–2000 and 2011–2012. The paper attempts to contribute to the current understanding of this puzzling phenomenon through a sequential analysis of long-term trends in female labour force participation rate by disaggregating urban women in terms of their age, marital status, and education levels. The cross-sectional analysis is supplemented by the nonparametric technique of classification and regression tree (CART). Focussing on the sample of non-student urban women, the paper finds that the problem relates primarily to the relatively better educated married women in the age-cohorts of 30–59 years. Moreover, 2011–2012 was marked by a further weakening in the labour market outcomes of these women, both with respect to the lesser educated married women and married men in general.