Economic progress in India is said to have demographic winds at its back. Half of Indians are under 29, and the working-age population will keep growing until about 2040. But a demographic dividend depends on how many working-age adults have jobs. By the weekly measure in the government’s own labour survey, only a third of Indian women are in the labour force. That is among the lowest rates in the world, below even Saudi Arabia’s. None of the East Asian economies that reached upper-middle income had female labour force participation much below 45%. In China, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, young women staffed the factory floors that turned surplus labour into export earnings. The Indian government has set a target of 70% female participation by 2047, but there is no clear pathway to reach it.

Lack of education is not what holds women back. Young women now enroll in college at higher rates than young men. For two decades, women’s education rose while their employment fell. University of Maryland academics Esha Chatterjee, Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman explain this as the result of a shortage of jobs that womenand their families find acceptable, meaning jobs close to home and seen as respectable. Those conditions rule out much of the retail, hospitality, and transport work that employs women in other countries.

Ironically, as poor families become better off, women often leave the workforce, a pattern that is not unique to India. They return when education opens up white-collar jobs. Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin documented this U-shaped pattern........

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