The fact that India is characterized by some of the most glaring stark levels of gender inequality globally implies women’s involvement in wage work was traditionally low.<sup>1</sup> Yet, although sustained growth in GDP, education, and access to key infrastructure (electricity, cooking gas and piped water) vastly improved Indian women’s lives since the early 1990s, women’s labor force participation stagnated in urban areas (Klasen and Pieters 2015) and declined in rural ones, especially after 2005, for the married, and those in the 15 - 24 year age bracket (Andres _et al._ 2017). Changes in returns to home vs. market production may have adversely affected educated women’s labor force participation, especially before 1999 (Afridi _et al._ 2018). Yet, higher wealth and income by other household members also reduce women’s probability of entry to the labor force and increases the likelihood of their exit (Sarkar _et al._ 2019).

Could policies help reverse or at least arrest this trend? Access to job opportunities has been identified as an important factor (Das et al. 2019); in fact agricultural mechanization and increased capital intensity in manufacturing limit opportunities for low-skilled females who mainly worked as casual agricultural labor while increased real wages resulted in a negative income effect that outweighed potential increases in labor supply (Mehrotra and Parida 2017). The fact that provision of low-skilled employment opportunities for women via workfare is associated with reduced female labor force exit (Sarkar et al. 2019) and significantly increased women’s participation in the work force (Desai and Joshi 2019) is often taken as support for the notion that job creation holds the key to increased female labor force participation (Chatterjee et al. 2015). Access to roads or transport is also associated with increased access to nonagricultural employment that affects women more than men, especially in communities with more egalitarian gender norms (Lei et al. 2019). Other measures to empower women can reinforce this (Fletcher _et al._ 2017).

Social norms also have an important role in mitigating female autonomy (Debnath 2015). Evidence on spouses' preferences and community attitudes towards work by married women in central India suggests that women's labor force participation may negatively affect their spouses’ social standing, leading to many husbands being opposed to their wives' taking up of employment (Bernhardt _et al._ 2018). Interventions to change social norms may thus hold promise to increase female labor force participation in the medium term.

Indeed, while short-term interventions involving testimonies by working women or discussions within the household had no effect (Dean and Jayachandran 2019), young rural women who, over a 3-year period, were offered training to acquire skills needed to join the business process outsourcing industry were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period, choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training (Jensen 2012). Similarly, financial literacy

> 1 India ranks 149 of 153 in the Economic Participation and Opportunity sub-index of the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, before only Pakistan, the Republic of Yemen and Iraq. Although levels of gender inequality across Indian regions vary with agricultural endowments that affect demand for and value of female labor (Carranza 2014), such intra-country variation cannot explain low overall levels of female participation.

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