Title: Trends in occupational gender segregation in India

Authors: Tushar Agrawal; Ankush Agrawal

Addresses: National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), Parisila Bhawan, 11 Indraprastha Estate, New Delhi-110002, India ' Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi-110016, India

Abstract: This paper analyses the trends in occupational segregation by gender in the Indian labour market separately for the rural and urban sectors. The paper is based on four quinquennial rounds of nationally representative household surveys on employment and unemployment conducted by an arm of the Government of India covering the period from 1987-1988 to 2004-2005. The level of segregation is measured using the dissimilarity, Gini and square root indices. Our findings indicate that the occupational segregation in India increased during this period and the level of segregation is higher in the urban sector than that in the rural. Using a decomposition analysis, we find that the increase in the segregation can be attributed to changes in both occupation-mix and sex-composition effects.

Keywords: occupations; occupational segregation; gender segregation; female employment; women employees; workforce composition; India; rural areas; urban areas.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGSDS.2015.067919

International Journal of Gender Studies in Developing Societies, 2015 Vol.1 No.1, pp.4 - 24

Received: 21 Nov 2013
Accepted: 15 Mar 2014
Published online: 31 Mar 2015 *

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