NEW DELHI: Delhi has the lowest proportion of working women of any major Indian city, analysis of newly released Census data confirms. Kolkata and Mumbai have nearly double the proportion of working women as the capital city, and southern cities including Coimbatore and Bengaluru are at the highest end of the spectrum.

Data released by the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India two weeks ago confirms a trend that the National Sample Survey Organisation first flagged in 2010 - female participation in India’s workforce is falling. While the fall in the female workforce as measured by the Census is small – just 0.1 percentage points from 25.6% of all women in 2001 to 25.5% in 2011 - this includes even a woman who worked for just one day of the preceding year as a worker. In contrast, the fall in female labour force participation as measured by the NSSO – which looks at how the person spent the majority of the preceding year - was much sharper; nearly 10% between 2005 and 2010.

As with the NSSO data, the new Census data shows that while rural women participate in the workforce at double the rate of urban women, it is rural women who are being hit the hardest. A closer look at farm employment data shows that of the 8.9 million fewer farmers that India had in 2011 as against a decade ago, 5.9 million of those missing farmers were women. While the Census does not give detailed information about sector-specific employment, it shows that over 65% of all working women are in agriculture. NSSO data had shown that in cities, manufacturing hires the most women, while domestic labour is growing fast.

Of the major Indian cities, Delhi has the lowest female workforce participation, the Census says, at just 10.6% as against a male participation rate of 53.1%. Ahmedabad is the next worst off in terms of jobs for women, with a female workforce participation of just 11.7%.

Kolkata and Mumbai are somewhere in the middle, with female workforce participation rates of around 18%. At the high end are Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram at around 20%. Rounding off the top are Coimbatore and Bengaluru, at nearly 25%. To put this in perspective, there is one working woman for every two working men even in Bengaluru, India’s best city in terms of working women.

The rural and urban trends together illustrate what labour economists and female workers’ representatives have been saying is going on with women’s employment. “Women are moving off the land and out of agriculture in large numbers but are not finding the jobs in other sectors of the economy that this transition was supposed to create,” says Indrani Mazumdar, senior fellow and associate professor at the Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Development Studies. “In mega cities, the demands on a woman’s time – from care work, to time spent collecting rations – are even greater, making leaving home for work that much harder,” says Mazumdar, adding that there has been a decline in home-based work, which was a major source of paid work for married women in cities like Delhi.

Moreover in Delhi, there is an intersection of patriarchal mindsets that see the place of the woman as the home, and a genuine scramble for scarce jobs, says Preet Rustagi, economist, professor at the Institute of Human Development , and associate editor of the Indian Journal of Labour Economics. Within manufacturing, many factories are increasingly masculinised spaces, and only by consciously creating an environment in which women can be accommodated – like in apparel factories in Coimbatore where women are given hostel facilities, for example – can women be realistically expected to join the workforce, Rustagi says.

