India’s growth story rests, in part, on a quiet assumption: that talent will find its way to opportunity. But for millions of women attempting to return to work after a career break, the pathway is not just narrow; it is structurally obstructed.
The issue is no longer anecdotal; it is empirically established. A field experiment on hiring practices in India finds that women with career breaks receive 49 per cent fewer callbacks than equally qualified candidates with continuous work experience (isid.ac.in). This is not a marginal distortion; it is a systematic penalty embedded in hiring behaviour.
At one level, the implications are straightforward. India already struggles with low female labour force participation. At another, they are more complex and more consequential. The penalty attached to career breaks is not merely reducing participation at the margins; it is reshaping incentives across the lifecycle of women’s employment.
The data points to a large and underutilised pool of labour. An estimated 7 million women in India are actively seeking to re-enter the workforce after a break (isid.ac.in). In an economy that frequently cites skill shortages, this represents a contradiction that policy and industry have yet to adequately confront.
The standard response from employers has been to emphasise “job readiness” and “up-skilling”. Yet, the same study finds that acquiring additional certifications during a career break has no statistically significant effect on callback rates (isid.ac.in). The constraint, therefore, is not human capital in the conventional sense; it is employer perception.
A gap in employment history is interpreted less as a neutral pause and more as a negative signal. It suggests lower commitment, higher attrition risk, and reduced adaptability. These assumptions persist despite the absence of evidence that returnee candidates underperform. In effect, firms are pricing in a risk premium that may not exist while foregoing experienced talent that is immediately deployable.
This bias becomes sharper with age, creating a compounded disadvantage. Women in their 40s and beyond face not only the penalty of a career break but also the implicit preferences of a labour market that skews younger. Hiring patterns across sectors indicate a tilt towards early-career candidates, particularly from Gen Z and younger millennial cohorts, who are perceived as more adaptable and easier to integrate.
This preference sits uneasily with parallel concerns voiced by employers about higher attrition and lower organisational loyalty among younger employees. More experienced candidates, particularly women seeking to return to work, are often filtered out despite being more likely to value stability and long-term roles. The result is a misalignment between stated organisational priorities and actual hiring behaviour.
From a firm-level perspective, this represents an efficiency loss. From a macroeconomic standpoint, it is a misallocation of human capital.
The consequences extend beyond hiring outcomes. Persistent rejection at the re-entry stage has second-order effects on labour supply itself. When the probability of re-entry is perceived to be low, the initial decision to exit becomes more consequential. Over time, this reinforces lower female participation rates and entrenches the expectation of discontinuous careers for women.
The signalling effect is particularly strong in urban, educated segments where early-career participation among women is relatively high but drops sharply during mid-career phases. If re-entry pathways remain constrained, the labour market effectively institutionalises a one-way exit.
There is also a less discussed, but economically relevant, dimension to this dynamic. Employment is not only a source of income but also of professional identity and skill utilisation. When capable workers are unable to re-enter, the depreciation is not just of skills but also of confidence and labour market attachment. Over time, this can translate into lower job search intensity, reduced reservation wages, and eventual withdrawal from the labour force altogether.
For firms, the reliance on continuous career trajectories as a screening heuristic may appear efficient, but it is a blunt instrument. It fails to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary breaks, between skill erosion and skill maintenance, and between perceived and actual risk. In doing so, it systematically excludes a category of workers whose experience could otherwise contribute to productivity.
Policy interventions have, so far, been incremental. Return-ship programmes and diversity mandates exist, but their scale remains limited relative to the size of the affected cohort. More importantly, they do not fully address the underlying bias in hiring processes that the evidence highlights. Correcting this requires a shift at two levels.
First, firms need to recalibrate hiring filters. Employment gaps, particularly those arising from caregiving, must be normalised rather than penalised. This is not a question of accommodation but of accurate talent assessment. Structured evaluation mechanisms that focus on current capability rather than linear career histories would be a starting point.
Second, there is a case for aligning organisational incentives with retention rather than short-term flexibility. If concerns about attrition and workforce stability are genuine, then excluding returnee candidates, who may have stronger incentives for long-term employment, is counterproductive.
The broader economic argument is difficult to ignore. At a time when India is seeking to leverage its demographic dividend, the exclusion of experienced women from the labour market represents a self-imposed constraint. The issue is not supply. It is absorption.
The evidence is clear. Career breaks are being penalised in ways that are neither efficient nor justified by performance data. Age compounds this penalty, further narrowing the window for re-entry.
Up-skilling, while valuable, does little to offset employer bias.
In its current form, the labour market is not neutral. It is calibrated to reward continuity and penalise interruption, irrespective of context. Until that calibration changes, a significant share of India’s skilled workforce will remain underutilised.
The cost of that inefficiency is no longer abstract. It is measurable, persistent, and increasingly difficult to defend.
Kalyani Srinath, a food curator, blogs at https://www.sizzlingtastebuds.com and is a columnist.
