What effect do India’s labour laws have on women?

Laws designed to protect women in the workplace can end up reducing their access to it. Understanding why requires looking at both what the laws demand and who ends up bearing the cost.

The Prosperiti State of Discrimination Report, a 2022 audit across 23 Indian states, found that laws restricting women cluster around four categories: working at night, in hazardous jobs, in arduous jobs, and in jobs deemed morally inappropriate. Fourteen of twenty-four states prevent women from working nights in factories. Twenty-two industrial processes restrict women’s participation. These are not dormant provisions. They are in active use.

The compliance costs are concrete. A 2025 analysis modelled a textile factory in Coimbatore through Tamil Nadu’s requirements for hiring women on night shifts. The requirement to provide separate safe transport alone adds costs equivalent to 86% of a female worker’s monthly minimum wage. Under the full set of conditions, the factory’s profit margin could fall by 42%. A rational employer avoids hiring women at night not out of bias, but because the law makes it economically irrational. The protection, in effect, becomes the barrier.

But the hiring cost is only part of the problem. The deeper issue is who is responsible for women’s safety in public spaces and transport in the first place. That is a core state obligation. What labour law has done is transfer that obligation to private employers, who respond the only way they rationally can: by not hiring women. The state’s failure to provide safe public infrastructure becomes, through the mechanism of labour law, a restriction on women’s employment. The cost of that failure is borne not by the state but by the women it was meant to protect.

Two distinct problems, then: laws that make hiring women expensive, and a state that has outsourced its own obligations onto employers. Both reduce women’s access to work. And both deserve to be named clearly when evaluating whether a protective law is actually doing what it claims.