Gender equality and empowerment plays an important role in economic development. In India, despite the fact that female literacy and education enrollment rates have been rising, today it has lower levels of women’s workforce participation than many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. This paper is made an attempt to explore the major objectives like, to review the global trend of women work participation in general, to study the women work participation status in India and Karnataka and suggest steps to increase women work participation rate. This paper is based on the information gathered through available secondary sources and literature reviews. It is found that the percentage of women in South Asia was much lower than the global average of 51.1 per cent, and it was much lower than the percentage of women in East Asia, which was 66.4 per cent. As per Census 2011 workers constituted 39.79 percent of total population whereas the ratio of female workers was 25.51 per cent. In Karnataka as per Census of India 2011, only 23.39 percent of women workers are participated in main work force against 52.80 percent of male work force. Based on this I have come up with some suggestions to improve the women participation rate in India. Government has to launch policies that include sectors which are friendly to women increasing women’s participation in labour markets and policies will be needed to encourage women to overcome social and cultural constraints.
