These tariff changes are measured from 1987 to 2000, the sample period available to us from Topalova and Khandelwal (2011). Trade reforms are established to be exogenous to the Indian formal manufacturing sector, particularly in the period prior to 1997 (Topalova, 2007; Topalova and Khandelwal, 2011). Since we measure the change in trade reforms up to the year 2000, we are not overly concerned about the endogeneity of these reforms. When estimating the impact of tariff changes, we measure the change in the female activity from 1994-2010, thereby taking advantage of the full sample period available to us.

For industry de-reservations, our explanatory variable of interest is simply the increase in the share of de-reserved products for SSI. These changes are measured from 1999-2009, as made available from Tewari and Wilde (2015). As in the case of trade reforms, we measure change in female activity and segmentation in these regressions from 1994-2010, including industry level information from both the formal as well as the informal manufacturing sectors. Although these reforms are mostly considered exogenous, particularly to formal manufacturing activity (Martin, Nataraj and Harrison, 2014; Tewari and Wilde, 2015), we are not aware of any study that considers the impact of de-reservation on the informal manufacturing sector in India or establishes its exogeneity in this particular context. Looking ahead in our work, we do expect de-reservations to impact the informal manufacturing sector as most plants in this sector are, by definition, small. Therefore, any policy that lifts protection off the relevant industries in this sector is likely going to have a large impact on competition. Future work that hopes to study the impact of these reforms on the informal sector should also aim to establish the exogeneity of these reforms to the informal sector.

�� in equation (1) is the set of other controls in our estimating equation, such as the initial value of the dependent variable, the share of female employment in total employment in the given industry _i_ or the change in this share over the considered period. �� is the i.i.d. error term.

� is the coefficient of interest to us. A change in reform is defined in such a way that it represents an increase in competition. For example, for trade liberalization reforms, we define our explanatory variable as a decline in tariffs or ERP, while in the case of de-reservation reforms, we measure the increase in the share of de-reserved products. Theory predicts � to be negative with respect to segmentation because an increase in competitive forces is likely to reduce the extent of segmentation. We next move to describing female activity and segmentation patterns in India and examining whether enhanced competition by way of domestic and international reforms has played a role in changing these trends.

# **V. Results**

# **_Descriptive Tabulations_**

Table 1a broadly describes the manufacturing and services sector data. Panel A presents the raw count of observations available for the years 2001, 2006 and 2010 in both the manufacturing and the services sectors. The services sector is officially unorganized, including its largest 19