Why Vocational Training Fails Women Without Digital Access
When skilling focuses on certificates rather than market demand, women’s employment gains stall or reverse
Farzana Afridi: Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)
Tanu Gupta: University of Southampton
Rachel Heath: University of Washington
Kanika Mahajan: Ashoka University
SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship | Ministry of Women and Child Development
India has invested heavily in vocational training as a route to women’s economic inclusion. Beauty and wellness programmes, in particular, have expanded rapidly, drawing public funding and corporate partnerships alike. Yet outcomes have consistently fallen short. Employment gains are modest, earnings improvements uneven, and some trained women report frustration rather than empowerment.
When repeated investments in skilling do not translate into work, they risk eroding programme credibility and public trust. The issue is not women’s willingness to work or learn, but a persistent design gap between training and the realities of urban labour markets. At its core, this gap reflects a failure to connect skills to markets.
The Real Bottleneck: Skills Without Market Access
Conventional vocational training in beauty and wellness typically combines several months of classroom instruction with short on-the-job exposure. Participants emerge with certified technical skills, yet many struggle to secure stable or remunerative work. Some accept low-paid salaried positions in salons; others reduce job search efforts or exit the labour market altogether. Dissatisfaction rises as training raises expectations without easing access to work.
This outcome reflects a constraint not of motivation, but of market access. Beauty and wellness is a client-driven service sector. Earnings depend less on certification and more on visibility, networks, and the ability to coordinate flexible work. A newly trained beautician who cannot advertise services, respond to inquiries, or build repeat clientele often faces higher search costs. In such settings, hard-skills-only programmes fail to translate into work and can even backfire by raising expectations without improving market reach – lowering satisfaction and dampening confidence in the value of training itself.
Why Digital Skills Alter Outcomes
What changes this trajectory is not additional technical instruction, but a short, practical layer of digital learning added to vocational training.
The market access constraint was tested by a randomised experiment conducted in Delhi and Bengaluru between June 2023 and April 2024. A compact, project-based digital module of roughly two weeks – involving around 76 hours of training for 2,000 women – focused on everyday digital use: advertising services, communicating with clients, and organising bookings using mobile phones and social media.
The results are telling. The addition of digital training shifted women toward self-employment by nearly 4 percentage points, alongside measurable gains in work intensity and earnings. These effects indicate that easing access constraints alters labour-market outcomes, even when core vocational skills remain unchanged.
Design details are central to interpreting these results. High enrolment and completion rates reflect training delivered close to participants’ homes, ensuring that the digital module tested access to markets rather than access to training itself. Low attrition is not incidental; it is a precondition for learning – digital or otherwise – to translate into labour-market outcomes.
From Digital Access to Self-Employment
When vocational training is combined with digital capability, women are more likely to work for themselves rather than depend on scarce salaried jobs. This shift matters not because self-employment is new, but because it becomes more viable and regular.
Beyond the increase in self-employment already noted, women receiving the digital component worked more days and earned more over the following three months than those who received vocational training alone. These gains reflect greater continuity of work rather than longer hours or intensified effort, indicating that women were able to secure and retain clients more consistently.
The mechanism is practical rather than psychological. Women receiving digital training are significantly more likely to use social media for business purposes – advertising services, responding to messages, and maintaining client relationships. Generic confidence or non-digital soft skills do not explain these effects; improved market reach does.
Importantly, these gains do not simply reshuffle existing jobs. In areas where many women are trained simultaneously, salaried beauty jobs become more competitive and harder to obtain. Self-employment, however, does not depend on a fixed number of local vacancies and is therefore less vulnerable to saturation. Digital skills expand the feasible reach of work by loosening spatial and demand-side constraints rather than intensifying competition for limited salaried roles.
Who Benefits Most, and Why
The benefits of integrating digital skills are concentrated among women from lower-wealth households, particularly in the lower half of the wealth distribution.
Physical connectivity amplifies these effects. Women living within 500 metres of a bus stop experienced substantially larger employment gains – around 3 percentage points under vocational training alone and nearly 6 percentage points under the combined digital programme. This highlights how transport policy and training design jointly shape access to work. Free public transport for women in cities such as Delhi and Bengaluru quietly underpins these livelihood gains by expanding the feasible radius of work.
That outcomes do not differ meaningfully by age, marital status, education, or childcare responsibilities is telling. Digital access does appear to not change preferences or norms, it works by accommodating existing constraints.
Why Skill Missions Underperform For Women
India’s large-scale skilling efforts have scaled vocational certification rapidly, yet employment gains for women have remained modest. The evidence from Delhi and Bengaluru points to a design assumption embedded in many skill missions – that certification alone translates into employability – may be part of the explanation. In service sectors shaped by informality, networks, and fragmented demand, this assumption does not hold. Teaching a skill without enabling access to markets leaves women better trained but no better placed.
The evidence also carries a caution. Training that does not translate into work can reduce satisfaction and confidence, worsening outcomes relative to no training at all.
Rethinking Scale: From Certification To Capability
Integrating a short, project-based digital module raises per-trainee costs, but these are recouped over time through sustained employment and higher earnings, yielding a positive return on investment. Crucially, such modules can be embedded within existing skill missions rather than treated as parallel interventions.
The lesson extends beyond beauty and wellness. Many urban service activities share the same features: low capital requirements, fragmented demand, and heavy reliance on informal client networks. As India’s economy becomes more digitally mediated, the dividing line between skills that remain latent and skills that generate income will increasingly be access, not ability.
The choice is not between welfare and growth, but between training that looks successful on paper and training that works in practice.
Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ working paper on the subject. Views are personal.