The role of higher education in closing gender gaps in workforce participation

Here is a number that should make us pause: women now account for nearly 48% of university enrolments in India, and the latest PLFS data places female labour force participation at 41.7%. On paper, that suggests progress. But the real test is not whether more women are studying or entering the workforce; it is whether higher education is helping them build durable, upward careers. 

We have spent decades expanding access. We have been far less successful at ensuring that education translates into sustained economic participation and long-term professional growth.

I say this not as a critic of the system but as someone who operates within it. The drop-off between enrolment and employment is not accidental. It is the product of choices, choices made by curriculum designers, by hiring managers, by campus administrators, and yes, by university leaders. Which also means it is fixable.

The credential is not the destination

For too long, universities have treated the degree as the finish line. Hand over the certificate, wish them luck, and move on to the next batch. That model has always been inadequate. For women, it is particularly damaging.

What actually works, and the evidence is fairly unambiguous on this, is embedding career architecture into the learning itself. Not a placement cell bolted on in the final semester, but industry exposure from year two, structured internships that carry academic credit, mentorship, relationships with working professionals, and curricula that are stress-tested against what employers need.

Women who graduate from these programmes don't just find jobs more easily; they stay in them. The retention numbers, five and ten years out, tell a very different story from those who go through a conventional program. That is the metric we should be optimising for, not enrolment, not graduation, but sustained workforce participation.

STEM is not the problem. Belonging is.

India produces a significant number of women STEM graduates every year. What it does not do well is hold on to them. By mid-career, the numbers thin dramatically, and at the leadership level, women in technical fields are still the exception rather than the rule.

Ask any woman who has built a career in a technical field how she got there, and the answer is almost never a single factor. It is usually a combination: a scholarship that made the degree financially viable, a faculty member who took her seriously early, and an employer who made a deliberate decision to recruit from her institution. 

Remove any one of those, and the outcome changes. That is precisely the problem: the pipeline exists, but it is held together by coincidence rather than design. Targeted scholarships matter. Visible role models in faculty and industry matter. Companies that actively and specifically recruit women from STEM programs matter. But they need to operate as a system, not as isolated gestures. The sectors being built right now — AI, renewables, advanced manufacturing — will define economic growth for the next generation. We cannot afford to staff them at half capacity.

Life interrupts. Education should accommodate that.

A woman takes two years out after having a child. Under the traditional university model, the system offers her very little to build on if she wants to upskill or reskill. That is absurd. It is also entirely unnecessary

Micro-credentials, modular degrees, credit banking, recognition of prior learning, these are not complicated ideas. They exist. The resistance to them is largely institutional inertia.

An evening cohort in data analytics, a six-month certification that stacks toward a full qualification, a hybrid format that does not require someone to choose between their career and their family, these are the design choices that keep women in the economic game across decades, not just in their twenties. Flexibility is not a concession. It is a prerequisite for any institution that is serious about lifelong learning rather than just talking about it.

The hiring pipeline is broken. Fix it upstream.

Most companies I speak to will say that they want to hire more women. Fewer of them have done the structural work to make that happen, and fewer still have thought hard about why they lose women at the three-year and five-year marks, even when the hiring is going well.

The most effective industry-academia partnerships I have seen are not about placement numbers. They are about co-designing what the talent looks like before it walks in the door, Joint curriculum design; assessment frameworks that reward a broader range of competencies; ‘Return-ship’ program built with HR teams, not just announced in a press release and senior leaders who sponsor specific women through critical promotion cycles, not as a charity exercise but because they understand the business case. When universities and companies share data on where women are dropping out and why, we can actually intervene. Right now, most of that data sits in silos on both sides.

Campus culture is not a soft issue

Plainly said: a woman who does not feel safe on campus, or who does not see herself reflected in the faculty, or who receives career counselling that subtly steers her away from ambition, that woman will underperform relative to her potential. Not because of any deficit in her, but because the environment is working against her.

Inclusive campuses are not built through policy documents. They are built through daily decisions – who gets promoted to faculty, whose leadership is encouraged in student organisations, what happens when someone reports harassment, and how career counsellors are trained. Getting such decisions right consistently can produce graduates who walk into the workforce expecting to lead. That expectation, multiplied across thousands of women, is how we begin to shift workplace culture from the outside in.

48% is the floor, not the ceiling

Closing India's gender gap in workforce participation could contribute trillions to GDP over the coming decades. That figure gets cited often. What gets cited less is the corresponding responsibility of institutions like mine to actually do something about it.

The 48% enrolment figure is genuinely something to be proud of. But it is only meaningful if it leads to careers, real ones, sustained ones, leadership ones. That is the work in front of us. And frankly, we have run out of reasons to delay it.

(Dr Sharad Mehra, Regional CEO, Asia and Australia, GUS Global Services)

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)