The minister also welcomed the boost to women’s businesses and mentioned that 300 million Mudra Yojana loans had gone out to women entrepreneurs.
Even as businesses battle to keep women in the workforce, the number of women in college is growing. Companies are making deliberate efforts to boost the proportion of female employees beginning with the recruitment process, although dropout rates among junior-to-middle-level employees are high.
“Female enrollment in higher education has increased by 28% during the last ten years. Girls and women make up 43% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) enrollment, which is among the highest in the world. During the interim budget speech on Thursday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that all of these policies are resulting in an increase in women’s workforce participation.
“83 lakh self-help groups with nine crore women are transforming the rural socioeconomic landscape, and nearly one crore women have already become lakhpati didis,” Sitharaman said while presenting the interim budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1, 2024.
The minister further emphasized the benefits to women entrepreneurs, stating that 300 million Mudra Yojana loans have been made to women entrepreneurs. “The empowerment of women through entrepreneurship, ease of living, and dignity for them has gained momentum in these 10 years,” she went on to say.
The finance minister’s words underline a trend: since the pandemic, there has been a large number of dropouts among women in both formal and informal sectors. Many people have turned to the gig economy as a means of returning to employment.
A study of the 2000-plus companies listed on the National Stock Exchange called the Gender Gap, conducted by the Udaiti Foundation, an NGO, found that the number of permanent women employees in the formal sector increased by 3 percentage points between FY21 and FY23, indicating a slight recovery in female representation post-cpvod.
According to the survey, the number of women in permanent employment in services, healthcare, and real estate has climbed, while those in information technology, consumer goods, and financial services have remained unchanged. The stagnation occurs despite companies across industries revising their retention and hiring strategies in order to hire more women.
Women’s participation in the IT industry, for example, has hovered at 34-35% over the last three fiscal years, whereas it has climbed from 12% in FY21 to 20% in FY23 in the service sector.
