Trends in occupational gender segregation in India

This paper analyses the trends in occupational segregation by gender in the Indian labour market separately for the rural and urban sectors. The paper is based on four quinquennial rounds of nationally representative household surveys on employment and unemployment conducted by an arm of the Government of India covering the period from 1987–1988 to 2004–2005. The level of segregation is measured using the dissimilarity, Gini and square root indices. Our findings indicate that the occupational segregation in India increased during this period and the level of segregation is higher in the urban sector than that in the rural. Using a decomposition analysis, we find that the increase in the segregation can be attributed to changes in both occupation-mix and sex-composition effects.