Medical costs will rise 10.1% in 2027. Salaries will rise 9.1%.
Aon puts India's 2027 medical cost growth at 10.1%, ahead of a 9.1% projected raise. The gap narrows from 2.5 points to 1.0 point.
CapitalVia Research Desk ·
Data story · 9 Nov 2026
Women at work · ICRIER, October 2026
India's female workforce doubled to 201 million. Rural women's pay fell from 53% to 45% of men's.
A new ICRIER study of the government's labour-force surveys finds 97 million more women in work than in 2017-18. Most entered as self-employed or unpaid family helpers, and the pay gap widened everywhere, most sharply in villages.
Women in work, 2025
201million
Up from 104 million in 2017-18. Female worker-population ratio: 22% → 38%.
Rural WPR 23.7% → 44.9%·Urban WPR 18.2% → 25.9%
Scroll
Pay rose for everyone. It rose faster for men.
Average monthly wage, ₹ (PLFS 2017-18 vs 2025, as computed by ICRIER).
2017-182025
Urban men+57%
Urban women+51%
Rural men+65%
Rural women+41%
₹0Bars scaled to ₹25,565 (urban men, 2025)
The punchline
A rural woman earns, per ₹100 a rural man earns
₹45was ₹53 in 2017-18
Gap in rupees nearly doubled: ₹4,200 → ₹8,000 a month
An urban woman earns, per ₹100 an urban man earns
₹61was ₹64 in 2017-18
Gap in rupees: ₹5,900 → ₹9,900 a month
The black tick marks 2017-18. Both bars moved left. More women working did not mean women catching up on pay.
Where the extra 76 million rural women workers went
Change in the number of rural women in each type of work, 2017-18 to 2025 (millions). CapitalVia estimates from ICRIER's share table.
Own-account work (self-employed, no staff)+42 mn
Share of rural working women: 18.6% → 37.2%
Unpaid helpers in a family farm or business+21 mn
Share: 38.6% → 32.8% — but 28.8 mn → 49.3 mn in number
Casual labour, incl. public works+6 mn
Share: 31.8% → 20.0%
Regular salaried job+6 mn
7.9 mn → 13.9 mn. Share slipped: 10.5% → 9.3%
Employers (self-employed with staff)+1 mn
Share: 0.5% → 0.7%
1 in 12
Roughly one in twelve of the additional rural women workers landed a regular salaried job. More than half became own-account workers — micro-businesses of one.
Four more numbers from the report
Rural women working in agriculture
73.3%
Up from 70.7%. Rural men went the other way: 54.1% → 47.2%
Urban women working in agriculture
11.3%
Up from 7.5% — farm absorption is not just a village story
Married women in work (WPR)
37.3%
Up from 20.9% in 2017-18
Extra unpaid work by women vs men
3½–4 hrs/day
Cooking, care and chores on top of paid work
Why this matters to you
Employers
The headline hides your hiring pool. Of 97 million additional women workers, only about 6 million in villages took a regular salaried job. In cities, the salaried share of working women actually slipped, 52.2% → 50.9%. The formal female talent pool is growing far slower than "women's participation doubled" suggests.
Salaried
The urban gap widened too. An urban woman's average monthly wage went from 64% to 61% of a man's — even as it rose 51% in rupee terms. ICRIER finds near-parity only in a handful of sectors, such as computer programming, where few women are employed so far.
Founders
42 million new one-person businesses, mostly rural. Own-account work absorbed more than half of the new rural women workers. That is a very large, very thinly-capitalised customer base for credit, tools, logistics and skilling products.
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