The gender wage gap is notable not just for its persistence and ubiquity but also for its variation across regions and countries. A natural question is how greater workforce participation by women matters to female wages and the gender wage gap. Within India, a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wages are the largest in southern regions of India that are otherwise favorable to women. Ester Boserup hypothesized that this is due to greater labor force participation by women in these regions.

The Three Year Action Agenda, a NITI Aayog document, is based on extensive discussions with and inputs from the central ministries and State governments. The Governing Council of the NITI Aayog, consisting of the Prime Minister as its Chairperson and several Union Ministers and State Chief Ministers as Members, extensively deliberated on the document in its draft form at its meeting on 23rd April 2017. 

The world’s population has doubled between 1960 and 2000 and is expected to rise further by more than two billion people by 2050. Asia will not only continue to be home to the largest share of world population, but it will also have the highest ratio of working to non-working population in the world in 2050. In this chapter we focus on one country—India—poised to be the largest individual contributor to the global working-age population of 15–64-year-olds over the coming three decades.