Only one out of four employees in tech, service sectors are women, they also earn less than men: Delhi govt report

These findings are part of the ‘Status Report of Delhi State Indicator Framework 2024’, released by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, the Delhi government’s nodal agency for statistical data.

It marks the national capital’s progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The UN General Assembly in 2015 adopted the document titled “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” comprising 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The SDGs provide a framework for promoting a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable future for people, Bipul Pathak, Additional Chief Secretary, Finance and Planning, states in the report.

The lower wages women are earning compared to men and the higher social costs associated with going to work are responsible for a low female labour force participation, according to Farzana Afridi, Professor of Economics at Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Delhi. “The growth in jobs is coming mostly from platform and gig work, and women are not able to take advantage of it due to larger infrastructural issues, such as lack of public toilets and safe public transport,” Afridi underlines.

According to Afridi, the national capital is faring much worse than the entire country and the female labour force participation rates are terrible.

In urban areas across the country, the percentage of women willing to work during August 2025 was 26.1%, data from the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation shows.

The report also looks at the participation of women in the legislature.

The percentage of seats won by women in the Delhi Assembly Elections fell to 7.14% this year, the lowest percentage in this regard that the national capital has seen in a decade, even as the percentage of women contesting the elections has risen from 9.8% in 2015 to 13.73%. In 2015, 6 of the Capital’s 70 MLAs were women. This number reduced to 5 in 2025.

The report, meanwhile, shows that the city has been making steady progress on social indicators such as the multidimensional poverty index, an decrease in underweight children and maternal mortality ratio, among others. (see box)

Under the affordable and clean energy goal, the Capital has made considerable progress with the share of power being generated from renewable sources — solar, wind, waste-to-energy, small, hydro and hybrid sources — increasing from from 0.71% in 2015-16 to more than one-fourth (27.24%) in 2022-23.

The number of Medium and Small Enterprises (MSMEs) registered in the Capital has also shot up from 1.78 lakh in 2022-23 to 4.19 lakhs in 2023-24. In 2022, the report notes that there were just more than 3,500 startups registered in the city. In June 2024, 14,734 startups were recognized under Startup India in the city.

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