Motherhood penalty: Two colleagues join the same company in the same year. Both are qualified. Both work hard. He stays. She has a child. She returns after maternity leave, handles paid work and caregiving for a while, and resigns because the workplace offers no third option. Five years later, she tries to return. He is now a senior manager. She is asked to start again.
This is one of India’s least measured labour-market losses. It cuts across sectors, but no official survey tracks how many educated women leave formal jobs because of childcare, eldercare or a husband’s transfer. A loss that is not counted is easy to ignore.
READ | Unpaid care work is the missing link of GDP debate
Women workforce India: Care work keeps women out
The Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24 confirms the basic pattern. Childcare and domestic responsibilities remain the main reason women stay out of the labour force; more than 55% of rural women and 63.5% of urban women outside the labour force cite these reasons.
The ILO’s 2024 care-work estimates are sharper. India has 53% of women outside the labour force because of care responsibilities, against about 1.1% of men. The same ILO report says India needs more investment in the care economy, especially early childhood care and education.
Time-use data show why paid work alone does not solve the problem. The government’s Time Use Survey found that female participants aged 15-59 spent 315 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services in 2019, only slightly lower at 305 minutes in 2024. In caregiving, 41% of women aged 15-59 participated, against 21.4% of men; women who did care work spent 140 minutes a day, against 74 minutes for men.
This burden does not disappear when a woman gets a job. A PIB care-economy paper, using Time Use Survey data, says women in paid employment perform about six times more unpaid care work than employed men. Almost 93% of working women in the 2019 sample performed unpaid domestic services, against 31% of working men.
Motherhood penalty: The cost of return
When a woman leaves work for caregiving, the market rarely treats the break as care work. It treats it as inactivity. Her experience is discounted. Her salary is reset. Her male peers have gained seniority, networks and visible assignments. She returns with skills, but without position.
READ | Women empowerment incomplete without safety, work and agency
Economists call this the motherhood penalty. International research finds that, on average, 24% of women leave the labour market in the first year of motherhood; 17% are still out after five years and 15% after ten. The penalty is not only the months away from work. It is the lost promotion cycle, the weaker bargaining power, and the signal a résumé gap sends to recruiters.
The evidence on employer bias is also clear. A Harvard Kennedy School summary of the Correll-Benard-Paik study found that mothers were rated lower on competence and commitment, faced higher standards, and were less likely to be hired or promoted than otherwise comparable applicants. A meta-analysis of 208 wage effects found an average motherhood wage gap of about 3.6-3.8% for one child.
Childcare leave India: Law stops too early
India’s Maternity Benefit Act, amended in 2017, gives eligible women 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. It also permits work from home after maternity leave where the nature of work allows it and employer and employee agree. That is a strong provision by developing-country standards. It is still too short for the care burden that follows childbirth.
The central government recognises this in its own employment rules. Women government employees can get up to 730 days of childcare leave during service, subject to rules. The private sector has no comparable statutory standard for extended childcare continuity. Once maternity leave ends, many women are left with two choices: return before the household can absorb it, or resign.
The Code on Social Security, 2020 consolidates maternity protections within the wider labour welfare framework and retains women-centric provisions such as maternity leave, work-from-home option and crèche facilities. But the central question remains outside the law: how does an experienced woman keep her place in the workforce when care work becomes intense for more than six months?
READ | Kerala’s midwifery policy reversal undermines its maternal health system
Work from home for mothers: A practical reform
Other countries have built stronger protections. Sweden gives parents 480 days of paid parental leave, with each parent entitled to 240 days where there are two parents. Germany gives employees up to three years of parental leave, with protection from dismissal during that period. Canada funds maternity and parental benefits through Employment Insurance rather than placing the whole cost on employers.
India cannot copy Sweden or Germany. Its labour market is larger, poorer, more informal and heavily dependent on MSMEs. A long paid-leave mandate imposed uniformly on small firms could make employers more reluctant to hire women of childbearing age. That risk is real.
A credible Indian model has to be phased. The first phase should cover larger companies above a defined employee threshold, where HR systems and temporary replacement arrangements already exist. Smaller firms should be covered through a shared social-insurance fund financed by employer contributions, payroll-linked welfare levies and state support. The cost should not fall on one firm hiring one woman at one point in her life.
Three reforms can begin without waiting for a full welfare state. First, extended unpaid childcare leave of up to two years with a right to return to the same or an equivalent role. Second, legally protected work-from-home or hybrid work for any parent, where the role permits, during the early caregiving years. Third, reduced-load remote work with pro-rated pay for employees who cannot afford to stop earning.
The Prime Minister’s May 2026 appeal to revive work from home and virtual meetings was made in the context of fuel conservation and West Asia tensions. But it showed that remote work is now part of India’s policy vocabulary, not a pandemic exception. For mothers of young children, it can be the difference between staying employed and disappearing from the formal workforce.
This should not be left entirely to managerial discretion. Employers will always cite operational needs. Some roles cannot move home. Many can. The law should require employers to record reasons when they refuse childcare-linked flexibility, just as labour law already requires reasons in other areas of worker protection.
Unpaid care work needs measurement
India also needs better data. PLFS and the Time Use Survey capture parts of the problem. They do not tell us how many educated women left formal jobs after childbirth, how many returned below their earlier level, how much income they lost, or how many never came back.
That gap weakens policy. A woman who leaves work to raise a child has not abandoned her ambition. She has moved it, for a time, into unpaid care. The labour market should not erase her because of it.
Hold her place. India has too few skilled women in formal employment to keep treating motherhood as a career exit.
Dr Deepa Palathingal is Assistant Professor in Economics, and Palak Kunwar is a Mathematics Honours student at Christ University, Delhi NCR Campus.