IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/glodps/1791.html

Cinderella No More: Night Shift Bans and Women's Employment in India

Author

Listed:
  • Kaur, Sarvnipun
  • Arora, Anshika
  • Singh, Prakarsh

Abstract

Night-shift bans prevent women from working nights on equal terms with men. Though most countries repealed such bans, India retains gender-based restrictions. After 2017, several states permitted women in service-establishments to work nightshifts under administrative requirements. Exploiting this staggered rollout, we find reforms reshaped female employment composition without affecting its level. Women in treated-states were 10.1% more likely to be employed in services and 5.3% less likely in non-services. This effect is stronger in safer districts, robust to placebos and contemporaneous manufacturing reforms. Lifting this constraint may expand employment, but administrative-costs can offset these gains. We find the former dominates.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaur, Sarvnipun & Arora, Anshika & Singh, Prakarsh, 2026. "Cinderella No More: Night Shift Bans and Women's Employment in India," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1791, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:glodps:1791
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/342331/1/GLO-DP-1791.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mehrotra, Santosh & Parida, Jajati K., 2017. "Why is the Labour Force Participation of Women Declining in India?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 98(C), pages 360-380.
    2. Sean Dougherty & Verónica C. Frisancho Robles & Kala Krishna, 2011. "Employment Protection Legislation and Plant-Level Productivity in India," NBER Working Papers 17693, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Ahsan, Ahmad & Pagés, Carmen, 2009. "Are all labor regulations equal? Evidence from Indian manufacturing," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 62-75, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ayyagari, Meghana & Demirguc-Kunt, Asli & Maksimovic, Vojislav, 2014. "Does local financial development matter for firm lifecycle in India ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 7008, The World Bank.
    2. Betcherman, Gordon, 2014. "Labor market regulations : what do we know about their impacts in developing countries ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6819, The World Bank.
    3. Swapan Chakraborty, 2021. "Labour Market Regulation and Manufacturing Employment: A Study of Organized Manufacturing Sector Across Indian States," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 64(1), pages 1-22, March.
    4. Ayyagari, Meghana & Demirguc-Kunt, Asli & Maksimovic, Vojislav, 2013. "Size and age of establishments: evidence from developing countries," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6718, The World Bank.
    5. Veeramani, Choorikkad & Banerjee, Purna, 2022. "Exchange rate fluctuations, labour laws, and gender differences in job flows: Analysis of manufacturing industries across Indian states," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    6. Chaurey, Ritam, 2015. "Labor regulations and contract labor use: Evidence from Indian firms," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 224-232.
    7. Diti Goswami & Sourabh Bikas Paul, 2020. "Labor Reforms in Rajasthan: A boon or a bane?," Papers 2012.01016, arXiv.org.
    8. Kaplan, David S., 2009. "Job creation and labor reform in Latin America," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 91-105, March.
    9. Nihar Shembavnekar, 2015. "Tariff Liberalisation, Labour Market Flexibility and Employment: Evidence from India," Working Paper Series 8115, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    10. Yue Wang & Dengjiao Liao & Bin Yan & Xinhai Lu, 2023. "Employment of Land-Expropriated Farmers: The Effects of Land Expropriation and Gender Difference," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(10), pages 1-19, October.
    11. Daniel Schwab, 2020. "Labor protection laws and the drain on productivity: Evidence from India," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(2), pages 383-401, May.
    12. Bhukta, Rikhia & Pakrashi, Debayan & Saha, Sarani & Sedai, Ashish, 2024. "Community electrification and women’s autonomy," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    13. Sonalde Desai & Omkar Joshi, 2019. "The Paradox of Declining Female Work Participation in an Era of Economic Growth," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 62(1), pages 55-71, March.
    14. Saibal Ghosh, 2022. "Firm Performance and Productivity: Is Labour an Obstacle?," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 65(3), pages 709-728, September.
    15. Anirban Mukherjee & Sukanya Sarkhel, 2025. "Motherhood and Labour Market Penalty: A Study on Indian Labour Market," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 20(1), pages 7-30, April.
    16. Singh, Abhijeet & Romero, Mauricio & Muralidharan, Karthik, 2024. "COVID-19 Learning loss and recovery," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt3jj1b8hb, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    17. S. Irudaya Rajan & P. Sivakumar & Aditya Srinivasan, 2020. "The COVID-19 Pandemic and Internal Labour Migration in India: A ‘Crisis of Mobility’," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 63(4), pages 1021-1039, December.
    18. Sonja Fagernäs, 2010. "Labor Law, Judicial Efficiency, and Informal Employment in India," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 7(2), pages 282-321, June.
    19. Djankov, Simeon & Ramalho, Rita, 2009. "Employment laws in developing countries," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 3-13, March.
    20. Achyuta Adhvaryu & A. V. Chari & Siddharth Sharma, 2013. "Firing Costs and Flexibility: Evidence from Firms' Employment Responses to Shocks in India," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(3), pages 725-740, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
    • J78 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Public Policy (including comparable worth)
    • K31 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Labor Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:glodps:1791. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/glabode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.