Biggest cities offer better salaries, more regular jobs for women, but stark gender disparity in income favours men

📌 Summary:

• NSO's report 'Labour Market Dynamics in Million-plus Cities' — part of PLFS 2025 — for the first time gives labour-market estimates for India's 46 million-plus cities (per Census 2011), based on ~3.95 lakh urban respondents including ~60,000 in these cities

• Women in million-plus cities are far more likely to hold regular/salaried jobs: 65.1% of employed women (vs 50.9% in urban India overall), and they surpass men (56.4%) on this measure

• But women's Worker Population Ratio languishes at 25.5% vs 72.6% for men in million-plus cities — nearly identical to urban India (25.9% vs 73%)

• Gender pay gap persists or widens in big cities: men in regular jobs earn Rs 30,707/month vs Rs 23,707 for women (gap Rs 7,000) in million-plus cities, vs a Rs 6,320 gap in urban India; women's salaries are 77.2% of men's in both

• Near/above pay parity cities: Prayagraj (women earn 131.2% of men's salaries), Srinagar (124%), Lucknow (117.1%), Patna (111.1%), Meerut (105.9%), Varanasi (102.4%); Greater Mumbai 98.2%; Kolkata worst among metros (women earn 36% less)

• Regular/salaried jobs overall are higher in million-plus cities (58.5%) than urban India (47.6%); self-employment earnings gap is stark — men Rs 33,888 vs women Rs 16,167 per month

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS1 Society — women and employment, urbanisation; GS3 Economy — inclusive growth, female labour force participation; strong data bank for Mains answers on gender gap in urban labour markets.

📝 Prelims Facts:

• PLFS is conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO), MoSPI
• WPR = percentage of employed persons in the population
• 46 Indian cities have million-plus population as per Census 2011
• Employment categories: regular/salaried, self-employed, casual

🔑 Key Term: Worker Population Ratio (WPR) — percentage of persons employed among the total population; key PLFS indicator of employment intensity.