As an economy transforms from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, a decline in participation of female labour force is observed. This is attributed to the shift from family-based production to large-scale production in industrial units. The womenfolk being mostly illiterate or with low levels of education face shortage of work in the home turf and have inhibitions in working as manual labour in the non-agricultural sector. But with an increase in family income and improvement in the education level of females, more and more females start entering the labour force, especially into non-manual or serviceoriented jobs. That is why the participation of females in the labour force in comparison with the economic growth is supposed to be U-shaped (Goldin, 1994). This article examines how the experience has been in India especially among rural females who account for the major share of the rural population. For developing countries, average patterns of women’s labour force participation are more mixed, ranging from as low as 21 per cent in the Middle East and North African region to as high as 71 per cent in the East Asian and Pacific region in 2010. The gender gaps in labour force participation are also highest in the Middle East and North African and South Asian regions, where men’s participation rates exceed women’s rates by over 50 percentage points. 1 The labour force participation rate (LFPR) in India is around 40 per cent, but gender-wise, for females it is only 22.5 per cent. 2 The gap in male–female labour force participation is such that the LFPR for rural females of the age group over 15 years is only 35.8 per cent, while for rural males it is more than double at 81.3 per cent. 3 This is quite baffling in a country with a huge demographic dividend of the working population. Studies undertaken to analyse this trend of low and declining female LFPR (FLFPR) has attributed it to education and income effect (Rangarajan, Kaul, & Seema, 2011; Vinoj, 2013). In a culturally diverse country like India, socio-cultural aspects also have a say in the economic participation of the women. India’s policies on liberalization, privatization and globalization initiated in the early nineties and more than two decades of reform-induced economic growth have driven the economy to a double-digit growth. This article examines how the participation of the female labour force has