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Abstract.
India's female employment and labour force participation have been declining since the mid-2000s. Kerala, traditionally its best-performing state on these indicators, has done worse than the country as a whole. This article examines the shifts that occurred in Kerala's female employment and participation between 2004 and 2012, by household income level, age group, level of education and occupational category. Those dropping out of the labour market are typically young, educated women qualified for professional occupations, suggesting a discouragement effect exacerbated by widening gender pay differentials in top occupations. These shifts have obliterated some of the hitherto defining features of Kerala's labour market.
A disquieting feature of the labour market in India - and in South Asia more generally - has been the relatively low labour force participation of women, and its further decline in recent years. Studies on the region point to an array of complex, often interconnected forces driving female labour force participation down, including not only socio-cultural norms, but also economic, human capital and demographic determinants. Against this background, this article examines the changing labour market dynamics of female employment in urban Kerala.
Kerala makes an interesting case study indeed. On the strength of its historically impressive accomplishments in social and human development, this state in south-western India gained a place of prominence in the development discourse as the "Kerala model of development" (UN-DESA, 1975). Its performance on indicators of human well-being was not only far ahead of the national averages despite its slower economic growth, but also comparable with that of many middle-income countries.1 While Kerala's development trajectory thus deviated from the conventional path of economic growth leading to human development, it had in fact been conditioned by a wide range of unique socio-political, cultural and historical processes.2 Their development outcomes are still reflected in the state's low levels of infant mortality, long life expectancy, high levels of literacy, a sex ratio favourable to females, and low population growth (currently below the replacement rate). These accomplishments were hailed as a classic case of "welfare by public intervention" (Sato. 2004), whereby public action and state provisioning of public goods and basic needs offered an alternative path towards social development, despite low economic growth (Drùze and Sen, 1997).
These socio-demographic advances created...