Women’s Labour Force Participation in Haryana: A Disaggregated Analysis

The paper seeks to present an overall picture of women’s work in Haryana and compare the rural-urban scenario with respect to women’s employment. The paper analyses the trends and patterns of female employment in urban and rural areas in Haryana. The paper seeks to capture the gender gap in employment in both at the State level and district level. It also examines the kind and quality of work taken up by females in Haryana and makes a comparative study of the urban-rural female employment scenario with respect to wages, education level and nature of employment. The paper found that women’s participation in Haryana is significantly lower than national average. Average daily employment of women in factories in 2010 was 4.78 percent in Haryana which is significantly lower than 15.76 percent for All-India level. The gender gap in wages/salaries for directly employed female worker for the period 1999-2000 to 2009-10 was Rs. 231.90 which is 31.7 percent lower than their male counterpart (Rs. 287.96). The share of rural women in the workforce is much higher than those in urban. However, women in rural Haryana are clearly in an inferior position in the labour market vis-à-vis urban Haryana. This is evident from the fact the most of the rural women are casually employed and are engaged in low-paying agricultural work. The level of female workforce participation rate and gender gap in WPR has shown significant variation across the districts of Haryana