Women & Work - what caught our attention in March 2025
News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
March, as often happens, ends up being a busy month for so many of us. We hope it went well for you all. We had a great time at the Godrej DEI Lab’s Women at Work event in Mumbai earlier this month. It was wonderful to meet many of you. The event saw a focus on conversations on designing returnship programs for women who want to get back after a career break, where we also launched our report on the theme (more details later).
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
At its 69th meeting earlier this month, the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), several experts reiterated the importance of prioritising women’s economic participation, emphasising that improving women’s access to jobs is the smartest and fastest way to enabling economic growth. The full note from the meeting is available here.
An increasing number of women are signing up on various ed-tech platforms to learn new skills, Times Ascent reported. Several online learning platforms said that they are seeing a notable increase in enrolment by women, and that most of the women were signing up on their own volition.
Smaller companies perform better than their larger counterparts when it comes to representation of women among executive directors, a Mint analysis revealed earlier this month. Using data of listed firms on the National Stock Exchange sourced from primeinfobase.com, the analysis found that women comprised nearly 15 percent of executive directors of companies in the bottom quartile, while among companies in the top quartile, this share was only eight percent.
Several manufacturing companies are introducing special incentives in a bid to improve women’s representation among their ranks, a report in The Economic Times notes. The benefits span a wide range – from creche/on-site daycare facilities, creche allowances, menstrual leave, hybrid work models, mentorship and leadership development initiatives, returnship programmes, and gender pay audits.
✍️ From Our Desk
For a recent CEDA analysis, Ashwini Deshpande, our Academic Director, looked at data from various rounds of the Periodic Labour Force Survey and triangulated it with other datasets to make sense of the recent increase in India’s female labour force participation rates (FLFPR). While the recent rise in FLFPR is real, it would be premature to view it as a transformative shift, she argues. The analysis is available on CEDA’s website.
Returning to work after a career break can be challenging, but it's also filled with opportunity, for both the returning employee and their employer. In The Returnship Road, our report produced in collaboration with The Godrej DEI Lab, we combine reportage with existing evidence to understand how organisations can enable women’s re-entry into the workforce and a successful return. The report is available here.
💡Research Spotlight
If you asked someone if they valued greater gender diversity at the workplace, it is highly likely that they will say yes. It is a nice thing to say, after all. But do people really care? And if yes, would this impact their willingness to work at a pay at certain wages?
Researchers Celina Högn, Lea Mayer, Johannes Rincke and Erwin Winkler present analyses based on two different datasets from Germany to find some answers. Their research was published as a discussion paper by the IZA Institute of Labour Economics earlier this month.
The first is a descriptive analysis of earnings of executives serving on the boards of high-profile companies in the country. The second is based on a hypothetical choice experiment administered to students through a survey.
What do they find? Let’s dive in.
They surveyed 5,401 PhD, Masters- and Bachelors-level students and conducted an interesting hypothetical choice experiment. Each participant was given ten pairs of hypothetical job offers (A and B). They were shown various wage and non-wage characteristics of both offers side-by-side, and they had to pick their preference (A or B) for all these ten pairs. One of the non-wage characteristics was the share of women among co-workers in that particular job. Additionally, the students were surveyed on questions related to their demographics as well as personality traits.
Their findings indicate that in general, people show a preference to work for companies with greater representation of women, and they are willing to pay (WTP) a price (i.e. accept a lower pay offer) to accommodate this preference. Specifically, on average, the respondents in their dataset were willing to forgo almost 2.5 percent of earnings to switch from a job where only 10 percent of co-workers were women to one where the female share was 25 percent. For an increase of this share to 40 percent, the WTP was a little more than four percent. However, there were some variations among this WTP:
Not surprisingly, there was a gender gap. While both men and women had a preference for gender diversity, on average, women had a much higher WTP for gender diversity among potential colleagues than men
The gender gap was true for all fields of study and not specific to students of certain disciplines
PhD students had a slightly higher WTP for such diversity than undergraduate and post-graduate students.
When it comes to personality traits, this WTP for gender diversity was lower for individuals who were more competitive or ambitious. But again, with a gender gap. Among women, the WTP was higher even when the respondents scored high on competitiveness and ambition.
In their second analysis, they found that top women executives serving on male-dominated boards were paid better in comparison to women who served on less male-dominated boards. This finding is based on their analysis of publicly available (not hypothetical!) data on executive pay in some of the biggest publicly traded German companies in the business years 2022 and 2023. The dataset is small – only 247 top executives, 52 of whom are women. (They exclude male-only boards from the data).
Very specifically, they find that on average, female board members earned almost 11 percent more if the share of women among their co-managers decreased by 10 percentage points. In comparison, men’s pay does not vary systematically based on the gender-composition of the board.
So, what does all this tell us?
One, people in general do prefer to work in organisations that have higher shares of women, and this preference is greater among women. So much so, that they might be willing to forgo some earnings to work in a place with a better representation of women. Therefore, to attract female talent, especially at the top (or where their numbers are smaller) companies might need to additionally compensate women.
Or as the authors note, “we thus hope that our findings carry broadly applicable insights into why organizations with a high share of men in top positions may find it difficult to attract and retain top-talent women”. (Companies, we hope you are paying attention!).
Read the full discussion paper here.
📊Datapoint
This is how labour force participation rates vary by age for Indian men and women – as the chart shows, for men, labour force participation is near universal after 25 years of age, while for women, the likelihood of being in the labour force increases with age, and is the highest when they are in their forties. Dive in further here and here.
👍 CEDA Recommends
This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Maya Mirchandani, Head and Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Media Studies, Ashoka University
What’s an essential academic work that you would recommend to someone who is just getting started with working on the subject of female labour force participation?
Maya Mirchandani: A Gender Atlas of India by Radha Kumar, Marcel Korff and Karthika Sudhir (Sage Publications, 2018). While this is not only about women in the workforce, it is an overall study of India's performance on gender indicators from sex ratios across Indian states, literacy, political participation, employment amongst others. The data on employment is enlightening, and shows a decline in female labour force participation and analyses state-wise data to score them. The atlas is a useful tool for both academic and non-academic researchers who are exploring the question of gender equality across fields.
Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?
Women's employment in India up, yet 89 mn urban women remain out of work – this report by Zenaira Bakhsh published in ThePrint highlights an interesting paradox brought out by Chennai-based Great Lakes Institute of Management on what hinders urban women from working, including factors like domestic violence, transport and safety.
Is there a film that you can recommend which, in your opinion, does a good job of portraying the world of work from a gender lens?
Bread and Roses is a 2023 documentary about Afghan women losing the chance to work and fight for their rights in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after 2021. I’d also recommend Nine to Five (1980, USA), a landmark for its time and Bombshell (2019, USA) which is based on a true story.
And a book that did the same?
This is a tough one! There are so many, but with strong and complex female protagonists rather than depicting women at work. Let me suggest the most recent one I read: Yellowface by R.F Kuang (2023). It is quite interesting – the lead character is an author.
⏳Throwback
The Guerrilla Girls is a collective of anonymous artists who, since 1985, have been using art and creative posters to “expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture”. The above is one such poster from their early work (between 1985-89). Explore more of their work on their website.
Thank you for reading! If you have feedback, questions, tips, or just want to say hello, feel free to do so by replying to this email, or drop in a word at editorial.ceda@ashoka.edu.in
Curated by: Akshi Chawla for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian