Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
Independence is a word we inherit, freedom is something we build. For women, that freedom is built in workplaces, homes, streets, classrooms and markets, through choices made and work done, often without recognition. Sometimes it looks like a first paycheque. Sometimes it is a woman leaving home for work, starting something of her own, or simply being able to say- this is my choice! Freedom is rarely a single, sweeping moment. It is stitched together in ordinary lives, through work, courage, opportunity and choice. At Women & Work, we look beyond the idea of independence to the everyday freedoms women are still fighting to claim.
Before we get started, a request: We are curating ‘Women & Work’ with the hope that it can provoke, stimulate and amplify conversations about women’s participation in paid work in India. If you like this edition, please do share it on your social media, and with your friends, family and colleagues. Thank you.
In case you would like to read any of our past editions, they are available here.
🗞️ In The News
Dr. Ashwini Deshpande, Academic Director of CEDA, joined Argumentative Indians to examine whether India’s rapid economic growth is translating into enough ‘good’ jobs. The conversation looks at the changing structure of employment, the slowdown in manufacturing and the return to agriculture, while considering what these trends mean for young people, women and the future of work in India. Watch the conversation here.
The question should be why the assault happened, not what the survivor was wearing, drinking or doing. Yet Uber’s defence in sexual-assault lawsuits has reportedly scrutinised survivors’ clothing, alcohol use, sexual history and relationships. For women, safe transport is essential to accessing work and opportunities, making safety during the journey part of economic participation itself. The cases raise difficult questions about victim-blaming, corporate accountability and whether seeking justice can expose survivors to further trauma. Read more here.
In Kochi’s low-lying coastal villages, women, particularly Dalit and economically marginalised women, are bearing the brunt of increasingly frequent tidal floods that damage homes, contaminate water and disrupt livelihoods. Through Kudumbashree and local networks, they are mapping flood levels and documenting losses, turning lived experience into evidence for better disaster response. Their efforts are helping communities demand compensation and recognition, even as inadequate State support continues to threaten the homes, work and economic security of those most vulnerable. Read more here.
As protests in India have increasingly drawn attention to dissent and political accountability, women at the centre of these movements are facing a different battle online. The New York Times reports that women protesters have been subjected to sexualised abuse, threats, doxxing and attempts to discredit them personally. The attacks shift the focus from what women are protesting to who they are, raising a larger question about who gets to speak, dissent and participate in public life without being punished for it. Read more here.
💡 Research Spotlight
India is producing research at scale. In 2017, it was the fifth-largest research producer globally. Yet behind that impressive output was a striking gender imbalance: India also had the highest UN Gender Inequality Index among the 30 largest research-producing countries. So, who was actually producing India’s research? Were women missing mainly from traditionally male-dominated subjects such as engineering and computer science, or did the imbalance extend much further across academia?
A study by Mike Thelwall, Carol Bailey, Meiko Makita, Pardeep Sud and Devika P. Madalli set out to answer these questions. Published in the Journal of Informetrics in 2019, it examined 161,541 Scopus-indexed journal articles published in 2017 by researchers affiliated with India. The study went beyond asking how many women were publishing. It asked two more revealing questions: In which fields are women publishing, and what are they publishing about? The researchers compared women’s and men’s representation across research fields and examined the topics that appeared more often in their papers.
First, how did they identify the gender gap?
Scopus does not record authors’ gender. So the researchers inferred the gender of first authors from their names, using lists containing 3,590 female and 4,180 male names, supplemented with US Census data. They focused on first authors, who generally make the largest individual contribution to a study, while recognising that in some fields this position may instead be held by a senior researcher. This method could confidently identify gender for 39.7% of articles. But the researchers did not simply take those classifications at face value. They manually checked 1,000 randomly selected articles to test the method. They then used a statistical correction to account for authors whose gender could not be identified from their names. With that in place, they could ask the bigger question: how far does the gender gap actually extend?
The answer: almost everywhere.
The gender gap wasn’t sitting in one corner of research; it was everywhere! The study grouped research into 26 large subject areas, such as medicine, engineering, mathematics and social sciences. Within these were 186 more specialised areas, such as obstetrics & gynaecology, orthopaedics & sports medicine and computational mechanics.
Where do women come closest to parity?
The distribution reveals a clear hierarchy in women’s presence across research fields, rather than a uniform gender gap. Women are closer to parity in several health and life-science disciplines, while their representation falls sharply in fields associated with engineering, technology, quantitative methods and resource-intensive research. The contrast across disciplines suggests that what counts as a ‘women’s field’ in research is shaped by the structure and culture of individual disciplines, not simply by whether a field is STEM or non-STEM.
It’s not just who publishes. It’s what they study.
The researchers then looked at the words appearing in article titles, abstracts and keywords. This revealed another layer of the gender divide: different topics were more strongly associated with female- and male-authored research.
The gender divide extended beyond who was publishing to what was being researched. Female-authored papers were more strongly associated with health, biological and social themes, while male-authored papers were more strongly associated with engineering, industrial and physical-science topics, revealing distinct patterns in the subjects that receive attention across genders.
But can the gap be explained by “people vs. things”?
One possible explanation is that women and men simply gravitate towards different kinds of research: women towards people-oriented fields, and men towards things-oriented fields. The study found some evidence for this pattern. Nursing, psychology, dentistry and health professions, for instance, were among the fields with relatively high female representation. But the pattern does not hold consistently enough to explain the wider gender gap:
Medicine ranked only 11th out of 26 fields for female representation, despite being strongly people-oriented.
Business, management & accounting ranked 16th, even though it includes people-focused areas such as personnel management.
Meanwhile, immunology & microbiology and biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology had relatively high female representation despite being less directly people-oriented.
Surgery offers an even sharper counterexample: although it is people-centric, the term was 2.76× more likely to appear in male-authored research.
The people-versus-things distinction, then, captures part of the pattern, but not enough to explain it. Women’s representation varies substantially even among fields with similar orientations, suggesting that the gender divide in research is shaped by factors beyond the subjects themselves.
What does this mean for women in research?
The scale of the imbalance points to a challenge that goes well beyond a few traditionally male-dominated disciplines. Women were underrepresented in all 26 broad subject areas and 183 of 186 specialised areas examined, with even the fields where women were relatively better represented remaining below parity. This suggests that the issue is not simply which disciplines women choose, but the conditions under which research careers are built: who gets to enter and progress, who gets to publish, and whose work receives recognition and visibility. The differences in research topics add another dimension. When women and men are unevenly represented not only across fields, but also in the subjects they study, gender representation can shape which questions receive attention and which perspectives become part of the research record.
Closing the gap, therefore, is about more than getting women into research. It is about ensuring they have an equal opportunity to contribute to, influence and shape the knowledge that research produces.
📊 Datapoint
India’s biggest cities are often imagined as the places where jobs, ambition and opportunity converge. But when it comes to women’s participation in the labour market, the story is less straightforward. The 2025 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows that the labour force participation rate (LFPR), the share of people who are working or actively seeking work, is lowest among women in the top five cities, Greater Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru, at 31 percent. In other million-plus cities, defined as urban agglomerations with at least one million people, it is slightly higher at 31.4 percent, while in the remaining urban areas it rises to 33.4 percent. India’s biggest cities may offer more jobs, but they are not necessarily drawing more women into the labour force.
So, what does this mean for women’s work across urban India? Read the full analysis by Dr. Kanika Mahajan and Sneha Thomas for a closer look at how women’s participation, employment, earnings and unemployment vary across India’s urban landscape.
⏳ Throwback
🪡 The woman who stitched a nation
Picture this: July 1947, and India is weeks away from independence without a flag it can call its own. The flag that had carried the freedom movement through decades of marches and arrests bore a charkha, Gandhi’s spinning wheel, at its centre. Its designer, Pingali Venkayya, is remembered by name. But the charkha had also become closely associated with the Congress, and the new nation needed a symbol that could belong to everyone. Someone had to rethink the flag, and fast.
That someone was Surayya Tyabji.
A young artist from Hyderabad, she brought an eye for fabric, colour and design to the task. She proposed the Ashoka Chakra, the wheel depicted on the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath, and painted the draft herself. When Gandhi objected to her first version, a black wheel, she redrew it in navy blue. Then, with independence days away, she picked up a needle and stitched the flag herself, the very flag that would fly from Nehru’s car as India became free.
It is a fittingly familiar story: a woman’s labour, skilled, essential, and physically embedded in the outcome, folded quietly into a narrative that remembers the men around her instead. Design credit, like so much of women’s work, has a way of travelling upward and sideways, landing on husbands, mentors, and movements, rarely on the woman holding the needle.
Seventy-nine years later, as we count India’s working women, we might also start counting the ones history simply forgot to name.
📽️ Lights, Camera, Hustle: Women’s Work Lives in Movies
This fictional CV is a creative work inspired by the character Mandira Rathod Khan from My Name Is Khan (2010), with all names and references respectfully credited to the film’s original creators and rights holders.
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Curated by: Sneha Mariam Thomas for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian
The drop from 33.4% in smaller urban areas to 31% in India’s five biggest cities complicates the idea that more jobs automatically mean more access for women. Commute safety and the kind of work available belong in the participation measure.