Indian women are gradually falling off the job map. A World Bank paper shows that while the female workforce is rising in most parts of the world, it is sliding in India. Just 27% of working age women were employed in 2015-2016. In Nepal, women labour force employment is 79.9% while in Bangladesh it is 57.4% which is miles ahead of us. Only Pakistan, at 24.6%, has a lower rate.What about other countries? Apart from parts of the Arab world, everywhere else more women are working. China, with its powerhouse economy, has 64% of its women working, one of the highest rates in the world. In the US, it is over 56%.The World Bank paper by Luis Andres and colleagues found that whether married or unmarried, whether Dalit, Adivasi or from the upper caste, whether illiterate or college graduates -women from all sections were increasingly not working.While experts struggled to explain the reason for this drop when the economy is growing, economist Jayan Jose Thomas of IIT Delhi felt the key reason for increasing joblessness among Indian women is that there are not enough jobs. “The jobs that are available are marginal, low paying, insecure and backbreaking, like construction in the recent past. Then, there are issues of safety for women or absence of facilities like crèches. Patriarchal values too come into play . All these lead to women not getting paid jobs," Thomas says.