 "Share of self-employed women increased to 67% in 2023-24: PLFS data")
Helping their families run household enterprises or operating small businesses is driving the surge of women in the labour force in the country.
More than two out of every three working women have been categorised “self-employed” in the latest July-June 2023-24 Periodic labour Force Survey (PLFS).
A Business Standard analysis of the recently released PLFS data shows the share of self-employed women in employed women has sharply risen to 67.4 per cent in 2023-24 from 51.9 per cent in the equivalent period of 2017-18, which was when the National Statistical Office (NSO) started releasing the annual PLFS.
In rural areas, the share of self-employed women rose to 73.5 per cent from 57.7 per cent during this period, while in urban areas it rose to 42.3 per cent from 34.7 per cent.
At the same time, the labour force participation rate (LFPR) for women, which represents the share of females either working or seeking work in the population, increased to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24 from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18.
P C Mohanan, former acting chairman of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), said the continual rise seen in the female LFPR, particularly in rural areas (from 24.6 per cent in 2017-18 to 47.6 per cent in 2023-24) in these years, was perhaps women being able to get more time in hand due to a substantial expansion in access to basic amenities such as piped drinking water and clean cooking fuel.
“[These] activities are not counted as employment in the survey. Now, due to the women being free from these duties, they are able to contribute in some form or the other to the household establishment or agriculture, which is basically being captured here by the surveyors. This does not reflect creating additional employment and only highlights the addition of surplus labour to the already overburdened agriculture sector,” he added.
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Expressing similar views, a report authored by a group of economists in the finance ministry earlier this year, led by Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran, pointed out the female LFPR had been rising due to the culmination of many factors, including continuous high growth in agriculture output and women getting more spare time for other work.
“The feminisation of agriculture points to a much-needed structural shift within agriculture, where excess (male) labour moves out and the remaining (female) is utilised efficiently,” the report had noted.
However, Santosh Mehrotra, visiting professor at the University of Bath, said the engagement of female labour in agriculture or working as unpaid household help was a reflection of the distress induced in the household by the pandemic and a slowing economy. Women are being forced to work to augment household income rather than fetching jobs based on their skills, he said.
The survey using the “usual status” measure of employment classifies a person in accordance with the type of work she or he would have done during a one-year reference period, such as self-employed, regular wage/salaried employee, and casual labour.
The self-employed worker category includes a worker who works as a helper in a household enterprise, either paid or unpaid, or is an own-account worker.
In contrast, “regular wage” or “salaried work”, where workers receive regular and fixed wages, is generally considered a better form of employment than working as a casual worker or being self-employed.
The data shows the share of women having a regular salaried job is at a seven-year low at 15.9 per cent in 2023-24 from 21 per cent in 2017-18, with the share of women wage workers in rural areas declining to as low as 7.8 per cent from 10.5 per cent in this period.