Gap between education and jobs for women in Delhi
Nearly three-quarters of educated, non-working women surveyed had never worked at all. This is not a story of women dropping out and struggling to return. It is about figuring out why educated women are not entering the workforce in the first place.
By Anuradha Das Mathur & Aradhana Sharma
Delhi is among India’s most educated cities for women. And yet, it is also one in which their workforce participation is the least, much lower than the national average of about 35 per cent.
For years, the gap between women’s education and employment has been explained through familiar frames: ambition, social norms, family resistance, personal choice. But when Vedica for Women commissioned a district-level study across 11 districts of Delhi, engaging nearly 3,000 women, those explanations began to feel inadequate.
We asked a different question. Not whether women want to work, but what gets in the way. The reasons were diverse.
Care responsibilities run through women’s lives like a constant thread. Whether or not a woman is employed, she is almost always responsible for children, elders, households, and the invisible labour that keeps families going. Globally, women spend over three times as many hours on unpaid care work as men. In India, that gap is far wider. And yet, care is rarely counted, valued, or planned for. It is treated as a private matter rather than an economic reality. Paid work, meanwhile, is designed as if care does not exist at all.
This mismatch shapes everything. Women told us that work itself is not the hardest part. Making work fit into already full lives is. Long and unsafe commutes, unpredictable schedules, sudden shift changes, late hours each of these turns a viable job into an impossible one. Time poverty, rather than lack of ambition, emerges as a central constraint. Not just the number of hours women work, but their inability to control them.
The study also unsettles another deeply held assumption that societal expectations are always the primary barrier. Nearly half of educated, non-working women reported that their families would support them if they chose to work. And yet, they are still not working. This should give us pause. If families are willing, but women remain outside the workforce, then the barriers lie elsewhere — in rigid workplace design, fragmented transport systems, lack of flexibility, and the absence of buffers for everyday disruptions.
Nearly three-quarters of educated, non-working women surveyed had never worked at all. This is not a story of women dropping out and struggling to return. It is about figuring out why educated women are not entering the workforce in the first place.
Even for women who do work, employment does not automatically translate into agency. Fewer than half of working women reported having independent decision-making power over their own income.
Education has opened doors. But beyond the door lies a narrow corridor, one that requires constant adjustment, explanation, and compromise. Too many women conclude, quietly and rationally, that the cost of entering paid work is simply too high. This is not a story of a single barrier. It is a story of many, stacked on top of one another. Which means there will be no single solution.
But there are places to begin. First, we need far better data on what’s happening with women post education; who is able to enter work and who is not; who is falling out of the workforce, at what stage, and why. Assumption-led policy will not solve a problem this complex.
Second, Delhi should set a clear target for increasing women’s workforce participation.
Third, we need a concerted, mission-mode approach, probably a task force that brings together the government, employers, educational institutions, civil society, and citizens.
Women are not asking to be pushed harder. They are asking for systems that recognise the full lives they already lead.
Mathur is founder, Vedica for Women, and Sharma is Senior Director Editor (Planning & Projects)
Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
