Share of self-employed goes up after the pandemic, says NSO report

Report shows 39.5 per cent male workers and 39.4 per cent female workers in urban India declared themselves self-employed

Amid massive loss of formal employment during the pandemic, more men and women in urban India declared themselves self-employed in 2021-22, according to a report released by the National Statistical Office (NSO).

The report titled “Women and Men in India 2022” showed 39.5 per cent male workers and 39.4 per cent female workers in urban India declared that they were self-employed, compared with 38.7 per cent and 34.5 per cent, respectively, during the pre-pandemic year of 2018-19. In 2020-21, when the pandemic hit the Indian economy, the share of salaried persons in urban India dipped to 45.3 per cent for men and 50.1 per cent for women. In 2021-22, the recovery was faster for men at 46.2 per cent than for women at 50.3 per cent.

“There was a rise in the number of people categorising themselves as self-employed in the past few years because of the massive job loss, including salaried employment that occurred during the pandemic. However, men have been more successful in gaining back those salaried jobs, but the number of women classifying themselves as self- employed has remained high in the last couple of years due to difficulties being faced by them in recovering the jobs that they lost during the pandemic. This entry barrier is more profound in the regular wage category, though they have been able to recover some of the lost jobs in the informal sector,” a labour economist, said requesting anonymity.

Despite falling from pre-pandemic levels, the services sector continued to provide the bulk of employment opportunities to women in urban areas.

The report shows that “other services” – which include real estate, finance, legal, administration, social work, etc – employs around 40.7 per cent of the female workforce, as compared to 20.7 per cent for men in the period of the survey, which was conducted between July 2021 and June 2022. This is, however, slightly lower than the pre-pandemic share of 44.4 per cent in July 2017-June 2018.

In the latest survey, women’s share in manufacturing in urban areas stood at 24.3 per cent, slightly down from 25.2 per cent in 2017-18. Correspondingly, men’s share was 21.5 per cent in 2021-22, from 22.4 per cent in 2017-18.

The agriculture sector, though small in urban areas, also employs more women (11.1 per cent) than men (5.4 per cent).

The employment of women in the highly skilled manufacturing and services sector in urban areas was probably driven by their higher level of enrolment in graduate and post-graduate courses like nursing, education, library, paramedical sciences, social work, veterinary nursing, physical education etc.

Around 5.4 million women enrolled in arts courses for graduation, as compared to 4.9 million men in 2020-21, followed by 2.5 million women in sciences, around a million in education and close to 894,000 women enrolled in medical sciences.

However, the other non-farm sectors in urban areas like mining, construction, trade, hotels and transportation continue to provide more employment opportunities to men than women. For men, trade, hotel & restaurant (25.2 per cent) were the largest employment providers, followed by manufacturing (21.5 per cent) and “other services” (20.7 per cent).