Women & Work – The Pulse of July 2025
News, research and data about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
As monsoon clouds rolled in this July, so did moments of quiet reckoning and powerful momentum. While the rain offered pause, the world of women and work pressed forward — revealing shifts in policy, data, and public discourse. In this edition, we spotlight the insights that rose to the surface: the silences that spoke volumes, the voices that refused to be drowned out, and the ideas that are quietly reshaping the world of work.
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
Delhi is transforming the landscape of work by enabling women to opt into night shifts across shops, factories, and offices—with their safety and consent prioritized. The overhaul of the Delhi Shops and Establishment Act, alongside broader labour reforms, is paving the way for 24x7 operations and faster approvals. This shift goes beyond extended hours; it’s a decisive step toward expanding women’s opportunities, breaking longstanding barriers, and shaping Delhi into a city where women can work safely, confidently, and on their own terms—around the clock. Read more here.
Across Madhya Pradesh, women are leading a quiet revolution in tourism—transforming from homemakers to trailblazing guides, entrepreneurs, and boat captains thanks to the Safe Tourism Destination for Women programme, led by the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board and UN Women. This movement is reshaping how safe women feel while travelling, inspiring young girls to dream bigger, and energising local economies like never before. With thousands trained in hospitality and self-defence, women like Madhu Verma and Leela Gowda are changing the face of Indian tourism. Discover their journey here.
What’s in a name? For Japan’s female scientists, it’s the difference between career recognition and professional invisibility. The country’s unique law forcing married couples to share a surname means 95% of women must give up their maiden names—fracturing academic records, complicating grant applications, and disrupting international collaborations. This creates administrative chaos and psychological stress, as women struggle to maintain continuity in their work and reputation. Despite growing public outcry, political resistance keeps this law firmly in place, leaving countless women’s professional identities—and futures—on shaky ground. Read more here.
Meet India’s first bullet train’s secret engine: an all-women power crew at L&T’s Vadodara factory, producing 90,000 precast noise barriers each month for India’s first 508-km bullet train. With less than 10% female representation in India’s engineering sector, these women —many fresh grads—now run everything from planning to production and dispatch, mastering hi-tech systems and sustainable solutions like gas-fired vapor generators. They’re not just breaking speed records—they’re smashing stereotypes, leading India’s rail revolution, and proving the fastest train runs on bold women power. Know more about the crew here.
💡 Research Spotlight
Do We Judge Female Bosses More Harshly? The Data Says Yes.
Imagine this: You finish a work task. Then your boss—someone you’ve never met—gives you feedback. Now ask yourself: Would your reaction change depending on whether that boss was a man or a woman? Researchers put this exact question to the test. They recruited 2,700 online workers for a controlled experiment. Each person received either praise or criticism—word-for-word identical—but attributed randomly to a male or female manager. Everything else stayed the same: task, feedback, wording, tone. Only the name and profile photo of the “boss” varied.
🚨Findings
1. Criticism from women was judged more harshly than the same criticism from men:
Criticism from a female manager slashed job satisfaction by 21%. From a man? Only 9%. That’s a 12-point drop for delivering the same message.
Male workers rated the same criticism as 30% less accurate when it came from a woman.
Workers were twice as likely to say they wouldn’t want to work with the company again if the criticism came from a female manager (10%) than from a male manager (5%).
2. Praise was treated equally, regardless of the manager’s gender: Workers who received positive feedback reacted similarly, whether it came from a man or a woman.
3. Despite negative reactions, workers’ performance didn’t change: Even when criticism came from a woman and was perceived more negatively, workers did not reduce their effort. The bias was in perception—not productivity.
📌What This Tells Us
This isn’t just about feedback—it’s about how we’re conditioned to see leadership. We’ve been taught, often unconsciously, to associate authority with male traits: assertiveness, confidence, toughness. When men criticize, it fits the mould. When women do the same, it clashes with expectations. We expect women to be supportive, not direct. Warm, not commanding. So when a woman gives fair, necessary criticism, it feels more personal—even if the words are identical. And that feeling carries consequences:
It discourages women from giving honest feedback, fearing backlash or reputational damage.
It undermines their credibility—not because of what they say, but because of who they are.
It pushes women into a constant balancing act: be competent, but not too assertive; strong, but not “abrasive.”
These pressures aren’t just unfair—they’re inefficient. Teams suffer when honest feedback is silenced. Organizations lose when leadership is only trusted in one voice. True equality in leadership isn’t just about getting women into the room—it’s about ensuring they’re heard, respected, and free to lead without penalties. Until we fix how authority is received, we haven’t really fixed who gets to lead.
Delve into the full analysis in the discussion paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics here.
📊 Datapoint
Who Gets Paid — and Who Doesn’t?
Data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21), visualised on CEDA’s Socio-Economic Data Portal (SEDP), offers a revealing insight into how India values women’s labour. While the most frequent form of earnings for women is cash-only wages, what’s deeply alarming is that the second most widespread outcome of women’s work is no pay at all. That’s right—14.45% of working women across India aren’t paid a single rupee for their labour. Whether working on family farms, in home-run businesses, or helping with trade, millions of women continue to contribute their time and labour without any financial compensation. This isn’t just a rural or caste-specific issue—it cuts across sectors and social groups, revealing how deeply women’s work remains undervalued and invisible. When the second most common outcome of women’s work is no pay, it’s not just an oversight—it’s a quiet crisis we’ve normalised.
SEDP provides a powerful tool for exploring and analysing socio-economic data at the state and district-level across a range of sectors including health, education, and employment. Use SEDP to uncover critical socio-economic trends and drive informed decisions in research, policy, and advocacy. Explore here.
⏳ Throwback
In the rugged interiors of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Khabar Lahariya is nothing short of a revolution in motion. Led by Dalit women and including Adivasi and Muslim voices, this all-women newsroom redefines journalism—not as a profession, but as resistance. Born in 2002 with just 6,000 print copies, it now commands a digital audience of over 5 million each month, with raw, unflinching video reports broadcast straight from India’s most overlooked villages. Armed with smartphones, courage, and conviction, these women report from dusty fields, roadside tea stalls, and village panchayats—confronting caste violence, government apathy, and gender injustice head-on. Their stories have forced action: arrests in gang rape cases, corruption exposed, roads built, and schools reopened. They do this not from the safety of city newsrooms, but in the face of daily threats, harassment, and social exclusion.
In a country where newsroom leadership remains overwhelmingly male, upper-caste, and urban, Khabar Lahariya flips the script. For many of its 25 reporters, this is their first job—and their first taste of autonomy. Immortalized in the Oscar-nominated Writing with Fire, their journey is not just about breaking news. It is about breaking barriers. Every byline is a tribute to courage. Every story is a strike against silence. Do make sure to subscribe and witness their powerful reporting on YouTube. Their journalism deserves your eyes, your ears, and your solidarity.
📽️ Lights, Camera, Hustle: Women’s Work Lives in Movies
This fictional CV is a creative work inspired by the character Anjali Meghwal (also known as Anjali Bhaati), as depicted in the series Dahaad (2023). All names and references are respectfully credited to the series' original creators, filmmakers, 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