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........

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