What is the status of Women workforce in rural India?

• In contrast to the urban women workers, who are offered with technological and infrastructural advancement, rural working women constitute 81.29 percent of female working force in India.
• Quantitatively, rural women workers (121 million) outnumber their male counterparts (105.5 million) in the urban areas.
• Empirical studies indicate the emerging scenario of gender equality in rural labour comprising with female labour force (48.6%) and male labour force (51.4%) respectively.
• The emerging phenomena of feminization of rural labour is discernible through a gender analysis of rural people seeking work in which, 25.8% of rural women labourers are seeing work in contrast to 16.2% rural male labourers.
• Rural women (228 million) outnumber rural men (153 million) among the marginal work seekers.

What are the challenges of rural women at work?

• Contradictory to feminization of global farming, women cultivators lack access to  fertilizers, seeds, credit, membership in cooperatives and unions and technical assistance that are bestowed upon the men holding title to the agricultural land of the household.
• Lack of access to credits, capital , decent of work in addition to dependent children succumb rural women to the vicious cycle of poverty, which is deeper than that of men due to gender equality in the control and use their own income, household resources etc., to the same degree as men.
• Triple role of women labourers saps their energy and time that renders them weak and malnourished.
• Rural women lack immunity and become vulnerable to ill health and diseases that adversely affect their work participation temporarily or permanently.
• Both the option of and being in physical labour precludes the possibility of women to engage in further education.
• By the nature of tasks assigned and the extent of time augmented from women labourers by masculine hegemony, women labourers are succumbed to over work.
• Routinized tasks and absence of training renders rural women labourers unskilled for their life time.
• In addition to physical hardships, rural women are subjected to ill treatment, verbal abuse and sometimes even physical violence and abuse which go largely unreported.
• Under rural patriarchy operating at home and workplace, the women's work is pervasively undervalued, underrepresented and exploitatively extracted due to women's lack of knowledge about safeguards, inadequate voice in public forum and coercion beneath symbolic violence.