O Occupational Gender Segregation and Female Labor Force Participation in India Garima Sahai Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Definition Labor force participation rate (LFPR) is the pro- portion of the employed and those looking for employment, among the working-age group (those between 15 and 64 years), of the total working-age population of a country. It provides a measure of the labor supply of a country, avail- able for the production of goods and services for a wage. It only includes labor that is being, or seek- ing to be, exchanged for a wage and excludes any labor that might have use value but is not remu- nerated in pecuniary terms (ILO n.d.). Female labor force participation or women’ s labor mar- ket participation, following from the definition of labor force participation, is typically measured as women that are employed or seeking work as a share of the working-age female population. Since labor not done for a wage (such as domestic work or care-work within the household) is not counted as labor force participation, and since such work is predominantly done by women, many argue (see, for e.g., Mondal et al. 2018) that female labor force participation underestimates women’ s labor. Occupational gender segregation or gen- der-based employment segregation can affect female labor force participation as well as reveal its nature. Occupational gender segregation refers to the disproportionate presence of men and women workers across and within jobs (Das and Kotikula 2019). Occupational gender segregation can be of two types – horizontal and vertical. Horizontal segregation describes the situation where men and women are distributed across occupations unequally. Vertical segregation refers to the situation where within an occupation there are disparities between the positions that men and women occupy, generally with men holding supe- rior positions. Both kinds of segregation are often associated with disparities in wages and job qual- ity of female and male workers (Anker 1997). Introduction Female labor force participation (FLFP) has been highlighted both for its intrinsic importance and for its instrumental role in economic growth (Duflo 2012, World Bank 2012, IMF 2013). The ILO (2013) ranks India’ s female labor force par- ticipation rate as 121 out of 131 countries, one of the lowest in the world. Recent National Sample Surveys (NSS) in India reveal that its female labor force participation is not only lower than the world average; it is also the second lowest among all South Asian countries after Pakistan. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. Leal Filho et al. (eds.), Gender Equality , Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95687-9