Women in Construction and Manufacturing: Breaking Barriers | N Srinivas | CHRO | BirlaNu

India’s female labor force participation rate has climbed from 23.3% to 41.7% over the past six years. That is a significant shift, and one that has attracted considerable attention in policy and corporate circles. But the number conceals an uneven reality. The gains have not distributed equally across sectors, and two of the country’s largest employers, construction and manufacturing, remain stubbornly difficult for women to enter, stay in, and grow within.

Construction employs roughly 71 million people in India and contributes 9% of GDP. Yet only 12% of this workforce is female, according to a 2025 ILO report. Manufacturing tells a slightly more complex story. Women head 58.4% of manufacturing establishments in the country, a statistic that sounds encouraging until one examines what lies beneath it. The vast majority of these are small, home-based, informal operations. In organized factories, only 10% of directly employed workers are women. Nine out of ten women in manufacturing work in informal enterprises, without contracts, social security, or any of the protections that formal employment is supposed to guarantee.

The sectors where women do show up in large numbers are heavily concentrated. In apparel manufacturing, 65% of workers are women. In tobacco, the figure is 93%. In textiles, it is close to half. But in every other manufacturing subsector, from metals to chemicals to machinery, women make up less than a third of the workforce. The question is not whether women are present in Indian industry. They are. The question is where they are present, under what conditions, and why those conditions have remained largely unchanged.

The gap between hiring intent and retention

Many organizations now express a genuine intent to hire more women on the shop floor. Diversity targets are set, recruitment drives are designed, and initial numbers sometimes look promising. The problem surfaces six to twelve months in.

Retention is where the effort collapses, and it collapses for reasons that are rarely mysterious. Women leave because the physical infrastructure was not designed for them. Washrooms are inadequate or absent. Changing rooms do not exist. Transportation to and from the site is unavailable, unsafe, or both. A World Bank study found that 31% of women identified commuting as a barrier to work. In construction specifically, where sites are temporary and remote, this barrier intensifies. A woman who can get to a factory in an industrial area may not be able to get to a construction site 40 kilometers outside the city, and even if she can, there may be nothing at that site that accounts for her presence.

The other retention failure is cultural. Shop floors in construction and manufacturing have operated as male spaces for decades. The language, the informal hierarchies, the assumptions about who does what, and the social dynamics after hours are all calibrated around a male workforce. Introducing women into this environment without addressing the environment itself is not inclusion. It is placement. And placement without support has a predictable self-life.

What needs to change

The infrastructure piece is straightforward, even if it requires investment. Separate and functional washrooms, safe transportation, adequate lighting, and childcare access are not progressive ideas. They are minimum operating conditions. Countries like Vietnam and Thailand, where women make up nearly half the manufacturing workforce, did not achieve that ratio through intention alone. They built the infrastructure that made sustained participation possible.

What is harder to solve is the mindset layer. Supervisors on a shop floor may have never reported to a woman, worked alongside one, or considered that a role they have always associated with male physical capacity could be performed differently. This is not a training-module problem. It requires consistent, visible leadership behavior that signals a changed expectation. When a plant head treats the presence of women on the line as normal rather than notable, the floor follows. When leadership treats it as a corporate initiative to be reported on, the floor reads that signal too and responds with compliance rather than change.

Skilling pathways also need rethinking. Women graduating with STEM degrees in India have increased in number, but the pipeline from campus to shop floor is broken at multiple points. Apprenticeship programmers in construction and manufacturing remain overwhelmingly male in design and culture. Internship structures assume a mobility and availability that many women, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, cannot offer in the formats currently available. Flexible apprenticeship models, mentorship from women already in these roles, and clearly communicated career progression paths are not soft additions. They are structural requirements for the pipeline to function.

The workforce argument

India needs to nearly double its female labor force participation to reach a 400-million-strong women workforce by 2047, according to Bain and Company. That target will not be met through services and technology employment alone. Construction and manufacturing, which together employ over 80 million people, must be part of the answer. But they will only become part of the answer when organizations stop treating women’s participation as a diversity initiative and start treating it as a workforce planning imperative.

The business case is not abstract. Labor shortages in construction are well documented. Attrition in manufacturing roles is a well-known cost center. Women who are hired with adequate infrastructure, trained with relevant pathways, and retained through a culture that does not require them to constantly prove they belong tend to stay longer, reduce turnover costs, and bring perspectives that improve safety and process adherence on the floor.

None of this is new thinking. But the distance between understanding these facts and acting on them remains wide. The organizations that close this distance in the next five years will simply not be more inclusive. They will be better staffed, more stable, and more competitive in a labor market where talent scarcity is only going to deepen.

The barriers are real, but they are not permanent. They are built, and what is built can be rebuilt.