Why Opportunity, Not Pay, Drives India’s Gender Gap
Fixing pay gaps requires fixing the pathways that limit women’s access to high-return careers
Kaibalyapati Mishra: Centre for Economic Studies and Policy (CESP), Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC)
Krishna Raj: Centre for Economic Studies and Policy (CESP), Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC)
SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth
Ministry of Labour & Employment | Ministry of Women & Child Development
India’s debate on gender inequality often fixates on the wage gap, as if pay were the point at which inequality begins. In reality, pay merely records disparities that the labour market has already produced. Long before women and men receive a salary, the structure of work assigns them to different roles, responsibilities and trajectories – shaping who gains visibility, influence and room to advance.
A common assumption in labour-market debates is that pay differences reflect differences in productivity. Markets reward the opportunities people are allowed to access in the first place. The stakes extend beyond fairness: a labour market that sorts talent so early and so asymmetrically cannot allocate ability efficiently, and therefore cannot grow to its full potential.
The Degree-Gender Paradox
According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023–24, India’s female labour-force participation stands at 41.7 percent, even though women now match or surpass men in higher education enrolment. For years, policymakers assumed that rising educational attainment would narrow gender disparities by equalising access to opportunity. Instead, a persistent paradox has taken shape: as women accumulate credentials, they remain underrepresented in the roles where education yields meaningful economic returns.
This imbalance does not reflect a lack of capability. It stems from occupational sorting – the systematic channelling of women and men into different kinds of work – that blocks skills from translating into mobility, earnings and leadership.
How Sorting Shapes Inequality
Sorting in the labour market operates through three distinct, but sequential, channels.
The first is entry, where employers determine the career tracks that women and men may access. Even when they join with comparable qualifications, women are disproportionately channelled into support-track or peripheral technical roles, while men are placed on core operational or revenue-linked tracks that offer clearer routes to advancement. In the technology sector, for example, firms routinely assign women with engineering degrees to quality assurance, maintenance or coordination functions, while positioning men in development, architecture and systems design – tracks that feed directly into leadership pipelines. Pay gaps that emerge later reflect these initial structural divergences rather than market forces alone.
The second channel is task allocation, which governs who receives opportunities to build visibility, judgement and leadership credibility within those tracks. Managers tend to assign high-stakes, client-facing or problem-critical tasks to men, while women remain concentrated in routine or operational responsibilities. The pharmaceutical industry illustrates this clearly. Although women earn more than 70 percent of life-science degrees, men dominate the assignments that shape strategic decision-making – regulatory negotiations, commercial planning, external-facing research – and thus move into leadership roles. Women cluster in quality control and laboratory support, essential to operations but peripheral to the strategic arena where advancement is determined.
The third channel is promotion, where earlier patterns in role assignment and task exposure translate into unequal advancement. Individuals who begin on core tracks and receive high-visibility assignments accumulate the experience that promotion systems reward; those confined to peripheral roles rarely meet these implicit criteria. Nursing offers a clear illustration. Although women constitute the overwhelming majority of the workforce, men progress more rapidly into ICU specialist posts, theatre charge roles and superintendent positions. Their accelerated rise reflects earlier access to critical rotations and supervisory responsibilities that shape assessments of readiness for senior roles. Promotion, in this sense, does not correct inequality – it formalises it.
Gender-Focused Jobs
India’s labour market also reveals a distinctive asymmetry: several women-dominated occupations have no male comparator role at all. More than three million Anganwadi and ASHA workers deliver nutrition, immunisation and household health monitoring across the country. The state created these roles on the basis of gendered expectations about care, domestic access and community engagement, without establishing parallel pathways for men.
Male-dominated fields operate differently. In occupations such as welding or site engineering, firms may hire only a small number of women, but the roles themselves remain open in principle. The contrast underscores a different form of structural imbalance: women often work in roles designed specifically for them, while men move across roles that, in theory, anyone with the requisite skills could perform.
The Cost of Excluding Women
Occupational segregation carries tangible economic costs. When firms channel educated women into low-return roles, they forfeit productivity gains that a more efficient allocation of talent would deliver. Public spending on higher education yields weaker economic returns when a significant share of graduates cannot access roles that match their skills. And leadership pipelines remain narrow, that stabilise, rather than correct, these disparities.
The OECD estimates that India could raise its long-term GDP by up to 27 percent if it closed gender gaps – a projection that underscores not only the scale of under-utilised talent but also the growth India forgoes by maintaining segregated occupational pathways.
Redesigning Pathways to Opportunity
Reform must begin by widening women’s access to high-return occupations. In infrastructure and construction – sectors that account for more than 15 percent of non-farm employment – women constitute less than 12 percent of the workforce and remain largely absent from site engineering and machinery operations. Industry–government partnerships that reserve apprenticeship slots for women, coupled with enforceable standards for safe and inclusive worksites, would open the entry routes that current labour-market dynamics restrict.
A second priority is to scrutinise how organisations allocate meaningful tasks, developmental rotations and leadership-facing work. . Firms routinely track salaries, yet they seldom track who receives opportunity – even though opportunity, not pay, shapes long-term trajectories.
Third, India should measure occupational segregation with the same rigour it applies to wage data. Publishing information on the extent to which women and men cluster in different job categories would enable policymakers and employers to direct reforms where structural gaps are most acute.
Finally, higher education and industrial training must align more closely with actual mobility. Gender-inclusive apprenticeship targets in engineering, manufacturing and automotive fields would create the pipelines that current labour-market patterns alone have not generated.
One Economy, Two Labour Markets
India increasingly operates as two labour markets in parallel: one that confines women to support and low-visibility roles, and another that positions men in strategic, revenue-linked work. Until the country confronts the sorting dynamics that shape work long before wages appear, equal-pay measures will remain a limited remedy. A labour market cannot claim meritocracy when the pathways to merit diverge at the starting line.
If India intends to sustain its growth ambitions, it must redesign the architecture of opportunity itself – ensuring that talent, not gender, determines who advances and who leads.
Authors:
Views are personal.