India today has more educated women outside the workforce than it did 15 years ago, Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee said in Kolkata on Tuesday, flagging a decline in women's labour force participation despite rising education levels.
"There are more educated women now who are not working than (there were) 15 years (ago),” the 64-year-old economist said at the epilogue session of Exide Kolkata Literary Meet 2026 held at Alipore Museum.
While women are earning degrees, workforce participation has remained “stubbornly low”, resulting in a growing share of educated women who are not getting into paid work setups, Banerjee said.
He cited Indian families’ “obsession with virginity and preserving the purity of women” as one of the reasons behind fewer women at workplaces. As the household becomes better off economically, women are somehow restricted to step out and work, Banerjee added.
“As families have got richer, they are now even less willing to let their girls go out because they can afford it,” Banerjee said.
According to Banerjee, many women are discouraged from working until marriage, and once married, they are expected to prioritise childbearing and caregiving. “This is a very perverse patriarchal obsession,” Banerjee said.
Banerjee, a Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the official data on women’s participation in the work force remains on the lower side. “Education has grown but labour force participation has not,” he said, observing that this gap has widened in the last decade-and-a-half.
Banerjee explained that economic growth alone cannot resolve this imbalance unless accompanied with a shift in social attitudes that can allow every woman “the freedom to work, delay marriage or motherhood, and make independent choices”.
At the session, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee also talked about the revised version of his 2011 book Poor Economics, which is co-authored by French-American economist Esther Duflo.
Banerjee was awarded the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering, experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. He shared the award with his wife Duflo and colleague Michael Kremer.
The session on Tuesday focused on a detailed discussion about how development economics has changed since the book was first written 15 years ago and the challenges that continue to shape poverty, inequality and labour outcomes in India.