By and large women’s work is spread over self employment in agriculture and household enterprise for profit, self employment outside the household for profit, self employment in agriculture and allied sectors for subsistence, resource generation activities for the welfare of the household and home management activities including cooking, cleaning, care of children and care of aged and disabled. While few women in the Indian situation would be exempt from the last two areas of work, a very large proportion of women are occupied as unpaid family helpers in agriculture or household production rather than as workers who have a tangible income commensurate with their labour.

Several distinctive features of women work participation emerge from secondary data sources. One can list them as follows.

1. There is much smaller component of female labour participating in gainful economic activity as compared to males throughout the five decades after independence. The gender disparity in work participation is part of a global phenomenon.
2. The WPRs are systematically higher in the rural sector for both men and women but the rural urban gap is more conspicuous in the case of women. This is partly due to limited employment opportunities available to women living in urban areas and their relative invisibility, as they become part of the informal sector.
3. The rise in FMR for main workers 1981-91 is a good augury, for this implies longer periods of regular employment for women even though women are still a small component of the working population.
4. A disquieting finding is the high and steadily rising FMR for marginal workers—those who work for less than 183 days in a year. The implication is that even after several decades of planning and development, women’s economic vulnerability continues as a major handicap.
5. A connected issue is the extent of unemployment of men and women. Rural women as a group seem to be seriously affected by chronic unemployment, and the worst affected are those rural women who ar3e educated upto secondary or higher levels.

The 1990s have witnessed a reshaping of India’s economic policies. An integral part of the new approach to the management of the economy is the Structural Adjustment Programme, based on the general philosophy of reducing the role of the state and strengthening the role of the market forces. Evidence collected from the countries that have experienced the Programme shows that it is the women who most often bear the brunt of the crises. As the state reduces support for education, health, housing etc. and livelihoods become insecure due to privatisation and deregulation, women are increasingly compelled to stretch their paid and unpaid labour time as a form for compensation. This additional effort combined with the known gender based biases in access to nutrition and other resources of household, has serious repercussions on women and young girls.

It must now be recognised that women’s ability to reach our far more rewarding pursuits is almost always constrained by their involvement in the elemental task of household management—so easily taken for granted by the society. Therefore the concern for employment generation for women must be matched by an equal concern for planning and delivery of ‘ back up services’ that could make a dramatic difference in the life of a working women—for example community kitchens and recreation centers, child care facilities, labour saving devices at home and basic amenities at the workplaces.