Driven by distress or built to stay? How pre-COVID male employment vulnerability shaped regional rural female labour force participation: Evidence from India from 2017 to 2024

Driven by distress or built to stay? How pre-COVID male employment vulnerability shaped regional rural female labour force participation: Evidence from India from 2017 to 2024

Gender and Labour Economics

Valliammai Subramanian, Suchismita Roy, Sarah Sajan

This paper investigates whether the post-COVID rise in rural female labour force par- ticipation (RFLFP) in India reflects distress-driven labour supply. Using a state-level pseudo-panel constructed from the Periodic Labour Force Survey between 2017-18 and 2023-24, we measure states’ exposure to the COVID-19 shock using the pre-pandemic share of rural male non-farm employment in lockdown-vulnerable industries. We esti- mate an event-study difference-in-differences model with state and year fixed effects to test whether more exposed states experienced larger increases in RFLFP. Rural female participation rose from 24.6% to 47.6% over the period, with unpaid family helpers ac- counting for approximately 55% of this increase; participation excluding unpaid helpers also rose from 15.0% to 25.3%. The rise began before the pandemic and shows no sign of unwinding afterwards, so its timing is inconsistent with a purely COVID-specific distress response. Our test finds no statistically significant evidence that states with higher pre- pandemic male employment vulnerability experienced larger post-pandemic increases in RFLFP, but the estimates are imprecise and sensitive to weighting and to individual states. They therefore neither confirm nor reject distress as a driver of the rise.

Gender Economics, Labour Economics, Development Economics