The recent announcement of the Nobel Prize in Economics has reignited attention around women’s work participation, especially the ‘feminization U hypotheses.’ However, this narrative, which stems from the experiences of Western countries, seems to have limited validity in the case of a country like India. Unlike Western countries, where women’s workforce participation rises during the course of economic development, national-level studies unambiguously show a decline in women’s workforce participation rates in India over the last two decades, despite high economic growth (Abraham, 2013; Lahoti and Swaminathan, 2015; World Bank, 2022). Similarly, a considerable number of village studies have also reported a decline in female workforce participation rates in the country (Elias Khan et al., 2014; Heyer, 2016; Himanshu and Stern, 2018). This article attempts to examine the factors and processes that lead to this peculiar outcome from a micro-level perspective and reflect it on the feminization U hypothesis.

My fieldwork, conducted in two villages in Tamil Nadu in 2018, confirms the national-level trend of declining work participation among women. Interestingly, it was found that the decline in work participation is witnessed even in the case of women from the Dalit communities, who are historically marginalized and resource-poor. An investigation into the reasons behind this revealed the dichotomy faced by these households regarding ‘economic value’ and ‘social value.’ Even though women’s work contributes to the household’s income, households may behave in the opposite way by restricting women’s entry into the labor market. Withdrawing women from the labor force gives households a symbolic social value and social prestige in the study villages. Upward economic mobility was found to be associated with women’s withdrawal from the workforce, and the economic value thus forgone is found to be inferior compared to the social prestige the family will gain from this move. Though the role of social institutions in determining women’s labor market outcomes is not a new finding, this article extends our understanding of the same by tracing the factors and processes at play at the ground level. This reveals the cultural moorings of capitalist development in specific regions and cautions against the uncritical use of deterministic economic theories of women’s work participation

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