The paper first describes through trend and cross-sectional tabulations the concentration of gender employment in establishments in Indian manufacturing and services and then investigates the impact of pro-competitive reforms on gender segmentation. An advantage of this approach from the perspective of measuring growth in gender segmentation is that the layers are nested. That is, we can consider broad sectors (manufacturing and services), regions and industries within these sectors, and then cohorts or groups of firms (e.g., plants owned by females versus those led by males). This sheds light on many otherwise hidden mechanisms for changes in gender segmentation. We can understand whether the effects happen through changes in segregation at establishments or reallocation across establishments, through major shifts in activity across regions in India or homogeneous growth in gender based segmentation.

In the next exercise, we evaluate the extent and direction of association between pro-competitive reforms and the gender dimension of economic activity in Indian manufacturing and services. By design, the three drivers of competition—i.e., investment in GQ highways, the trade liberalization episode of 1991 and the dismantling of reservations of products exclusively for SSI since 1999— have been studied before in the Indian context and were shown to have important effects. Thus, we adapt methodologies and insights from these prior studies to enable our efforts. In other words, our project does not need to prove that investments in highways, trade reforms or de-reservation of products are important, but we instead look directly at the gender dimension of economic consequences motivated by these reforms.

We examine the pro-competitive effects of trade and domestic reforms on female activity and segmentation in a regression framework. For instance, trade liberalization reforms remarkably lowered both the input and output tariffs (Topalova, 2007), while an isolated set of reforms targeting SSI repealed the historical product reservations protecting small businesses (Tewari and Wilde, 2015). The staggered removal of these international and domestic protections boosted competition.

We use a long-difference strategy similar to the one applied in Ghani, Goswami and Kerr (2016a) by analyzing differences in the timing of the implementation of reforms across industries. We conduct a panel analysis for a total of 50 industries that allows us to exploit this industry level timing variation and differences in traits across industries. Industries are defined at the three-digit level within the manufacturing sector. Specifically, to measure the direct effect of any industry level reform, we consider the following reduced form estimating equation: where ∆�� is the outcome variable of interest relating to female activity or gender segmentation for industry _i_ . Female activity is measured through two alternative indices: (i) share of female-owned plants and (ii) share of females in total employment. Segmentation, broadly defined, is the extent to which people of the same gender tend to segregate and work together. Thus, segmentation in a workforce could be measured from two perspectives: (i) the gender of the owner and (ii) the gender 17