Ninety-three percent of Indian men between 25 and 60 participate in the labour force while, Twenty-seven percent of women do.
And that’s not a small gap.
This indicates most of the adult female population of the country sitting outside the labour market.
We talk endlessly about getting women back to work. We talk much less about why roughly a third of them left the formal workforce in the first place, often into informal work or unpaid domestic roles and what was actually happening at home while that decision got made.
The math nobody puts on a slide
Indian women spend, on average, 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work. Men spend 97. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a second, unpaid, full-time-adjacent job stacked on top of whatever paid work she’s trying to excel at, and competing with her male counterparts for the next promotion. And unlike many Western economies, India’s childcare infrastructure is still overwhelmingly home-based, run by family or by domestic help, rather than regulated daycare. Which means the whole arrangement depends on one person being available and reliable. When that person isn’t, and eventually, someone usually isn’t, it’s the mother who steps back, not because she wants less, but because the system has exactly one shock absorber, and it’s her.
The resignation is rarely the actual decision point
Here’s what tends to get missed when we only look at the resignation letter.
By the time someone formally quits, she has usually already quietly renegotiated her own role for months, sometimes years before that. She stopped raising her hand for the stretch project. She let the international trip go to someone else. She started leaving at six instead of eight, and nobody in leadership noticed because her output on paper didn’t visibly change yet.
The resignation is the end of a long invisible negotiation, not the start of one, and organisations that only start paying attention at the exit interview have missed every earlier point where a different conversation might have changed the outcome.
Why “returnship” already frames this wrong
Here’s what bothers me about how we frame the whole conversation. “Return to work” quietly implies she went somewhere else, on her own terms, and now needs help finding her way back. What actually happened, for a huge number of these women, is that an unequal division of unpaid labour made continuing to work practically unworkable, and she was the one who absorbed the cost. That’s not a career choice in any meaningful sense. That’s a structural failure showing up as an individual decision.
What this means for organisations, specifically
If the exit is structural, the return can’t be purely individual either.
A returnship programme that only addresses her, skills, confidence, network, while leaving the underlying arithmetic of unpaid work completely untouched, is solving half the problem and calling it done.
What would the other half actually look like?
Real, flexible childcare support, not a token creche most companies never staff properly. Manager training on recognising when someone’s quietly absorbing a caregiving crisis long before she resigns, so the conversation happens at month one, not at the exit interview. And a genuine look at whether your organisation’s “flexibility” policies exist on paper or actually get used without penalty, because a policy nobody dares use isn’t a policy, it’s a decoration.
The question we should be asking before the interview
Before we ask whether she’s ready to return, maybe we ask something earlier: did we do anything, while she was still here, to make leaving less likely to have been the only option available to her? Most organisations have never actually asked that question about their own attrition data. It’s uncomfortable, because the honest answer, more often than we’d like, is no.