ABSTRACT
Gender inequality in human capital and labour force participation has been shown to significantly inhibit growth through a number of direct and indirect pathways. This chapter considers what liberalization has meant in practice in India, with a focus on agricultural reforms, and then discusses some of the methodological complexities of seeking connections between liberalization and particular gendered outcomes. It explores how gendered rural livelihoods are changing and what is happening to forms of social reproduction. The utilization of women’s labour in domestic production as a part of livelihood strategies is affected by a range of factors: shifts in cropping patterns, technical change, availability of alternative opportunities and broader changes in the social organization of agricultural production such as contract farming. Employment for women is increasingly spatially dispersed as migration to seasonal work opportunities in other rural areas or to towns increases.
