Paper short abstract:

While Tamil Nadu state in India has a higher female labour force participation than the national average, this has been declining over the past two decades. Through a longitudinal qualitative study, this paper explores why this might be the case.

Paper long abstract:

The south Indian state of Tamil Nadu shows a higher labour force participation rate for women than the national average consistently over the last twenty years, attributed to factors such as higher wages for women in south India, or the cultivation of female labour-intensive crops such as paddy. However, as in other parts of the country, women here too have been ‘dropping out’ of the labour force since 2004. In 2017-18, the gender gap in male and female work participation was 39.5 percentage points, compared to 28.3 percentage points in 1999-2000 (Iyer et al., 2022). This paper investigates this declining trend through an intergenerational, gendered analysis of work patterns, and divisions of labour within the home and outside. Has a shift to a male provider-female housewife model from dual member working households (Rao, 2014) been further consolidated, and if so, what are its implications for women’s agency in households and communities?

Work-life course interviews were carried out in 2021 with 12 married couples from five villages in the Thiruppur-Coimbatore cluster in Tamil Nadu as part of a revisit village study, interviewed earlier by Rao in 2009. Interviews were also carried out with at least two adult offspring of the couples. Using the data collected in the two rounds of study, we analyse changes in gendered participation in paid and unpaid work across generations and its implications for gender relations over the life course to add to the literature on longitudinal change in rural India.