Women's participation in the workforce rises, but the gender gap is far from closing

It continues to be a lonely struggle for women at the workplace. Two new reports have highlighted the rising participation of women in the workforce, both globally and in India, but have also shown that there is still a long way to go to in ensuring gender equality, diversity and higher productivity.

Women’s representation at the top of enterprises has improved over the past decade, a new report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) on Tuesday said but added that they remain under-represented in management overall.

The share of enterprises with a woman board chair rose to 30.9% in 2025 from 13.1% in 2013, while the share with a woman CEO increased to 28.2% from 23.4% over the same period, said the ILO’s report ‘Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success’. However, women hold less than a third of managerial positions globally.

Don't Miss: FM Nirmala Sitharaman, Nita Ambani, Priti Adani & Other Women leaders building their own legacy

“Progress across the management pipeline is also uneven: between 2013 and 2025, gender balance improved at senior and top management levels but declined at junior and middle management levels,” it said.

The report found that more enterprises report positive outcomes from gender equality initiatives, and the scale of these benefits is significant. “Profit gains are both widespread and, in many cases, substantial, while improvements in innovation, workforce engagement and reputation further reinforce the strategic value of diversity,” it said.

In 2025, 68.5% of enterprises reported positive results from gender equality and diversity initiatives, an increase of 11.1 percentage points compared to 2018. Enterprises led by a female CEO are 6.4% more likely to report better business outcomes than enterprises led by a male CEO, while enterprises with a female board chair are 17.5% more likely to report better business outcomes than those with a male board chair, it found.

But while there have been significant gains by women in education and attaining skills, outpacing even men, this has not translated into labour market outcomes. This points to enduring structural constraints, including occupational segregation, unequal care responsibilities and persistent social norms that shape labour market participation and career progression

Just 48.6% of women are economically active, the report found, adding that while the number of women employers has nearly doubled over the past 30 years, women still account for only 22.8% of business owners.

It also highlighted a growing disconnect between education and labour market outcomes. “Women now outpace men in higher education globally—in 2023 nearly half of all women (46.4%) attended university compared to 40.3% of men—yet remain under-represented in key sectors, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, comprising around 35% of tertiary STEM graduates worldwide,” the report said.

The Indian context

Meanwhile, a report by ICRIER found that while female workforce participation has risen sharply in India, the quality, productivity and intensity of women’s work have not improved commensurately, and on several dimensions have even deteriorated.

“The female workforce in India has doubled between 2017-18 and 2025, from 104 to 201 million, with the worker population ratio rising from 22% to 38%. This headline expansion, however, was overwhelmingly rural and was absorbed almost entirely by the agriculture sector,” said the report titled ‘The Participation Paradox: Women’s Work and Time Use in India 2017-18 to 2025’.

It also noted that the growth came through own-account and unpaid family work rather than regular salaried jobs, whose share actually edged down. Data reveals that where women did enter manufacturing and services, they clustered in low-productivity, informal segments such as garments, textiles and domestic work, it further said.

“The participation surge is concentrated among rural women in prime and mid-age brackets, while urban women moved only modestly, so that the rural-urban divide among women has widened even as the rural gender gap has narrowed,” it said.

Marriage continues to be a reason for women to exit the workforce, it further found. This was evident in the fact that nearly 87.6% of married men participated in the workforce in 2025 as against just 37.3% of women. However, the married-women figure has risen sharply from 20.9% in 2017-18, indicating some loosening of the ‘marriage penalty’.

It also found that average weekly hours fell for every group, but the decline was steepest for rural women. Rising participation alongside falling hours per worker implies an expansion of the workforce into increasingly marginal, low-intensity activity, the clearest sign that the quantity of female employment and its quality have moved in opposite directions, it said.

Data from the Time Use Survey revealed that women perform roughly three-and-a-half to four hours more unpaid work per day than men. The ICRIER report noted that this is a gap that did not narrow and, in the care dimension, actually widened between 2019 and 2024, which is the period of the participation surge.