Trends in Employment and Wages of Female and Male Workers in India: A Task-Content-of-Occupations Approach

Abstract

This paper uses the task-content-of-occupations framework to analyze trends in employment and wages of female and male workers in the Indian labor market from 1994 to 2017. Workers are classified into four main occupational categories: nonroutine cognitive, routine cognitive, nonroutine manual, and routine manual. Decomposing the changes in employment shares into between-industry changes and within-industry changes across occupational categories reveals that within-industry employment changes have increasingly played an important role, suggesting the growing importance of using the task-content framework to analyze labor market trends. The biggest increase in employment shares is for nonroutine cognitive occupations for both female and male workers. The wage analysis reveals that, on average, the gender wage gap has been lowest in routine cognitive occupations for most of the period of analysis. However, the analysis finds no consistent, significant changes in wages based on occupational specialization during the period of analysis.