An astonishing 133 million Indians were lifted out of poverty between 1994 and 2012. This success could have been even more dramatic if the number of women in the formal workforce hadn’t dropped sharply from 2005. Despite evidence that empowered women workers are an untapped source of economic growth, across the world the gap between numbers of men and women in formal work has hardly budged since the mid-1990s. In India, in fact, the gap is particularly large, and widening.
In 2004-05, 37 per cent of India’s women worked in paying jobs. In 2011-12, only 27 per cent of Indian
