Aaina Saini

Climate policy in India has focused primarily on agricultural productivity, household consumption, and infrastructure resilience, but the gendered labour market effects of climate variability remain understudied. This article addresses that gap by linking district-level ERA5 reanalysis rainfall data to individual labour outcomes from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, distinguishing between income-driven distress employment and demand-driven opportunity employment as separate channels through which climate variability shapes women’s work. The results reveal a sharp asymmetry: droughts push women into low-wage distress employment, while abundant rainfall pulls them into better-paid work. These findings suggest that climate change is not gender-neutral in its economic effects, and that adaptation policy must account for the distinct channels through which climate variability shapes women’s labour market outcomes.

Women, Work, and Vulnerability

Women in India occupy a uniquely precarious position in the labour market. Female labour force participation remains low at around 33% compared to the 51% world average, and the work women do access is disproportionately informal, low-paid, and insecure. Within households, cultural norms dictate that women’s employment decisions are rarely made independently and are instead shaped by household income, male migration patterns, social norms around who should be the ‘provider,’ and access to childcare and safe worksites.

The existing literature on climate impacts in India has examined how shocks affect agricultural productivity, household consumption, and social outcomes such as migration and violence. Climate shocks have been shown to widen consumption inequality across sectors, with agricultural and industrial households experiencing consumption declines while service-sector households see increases (Aggarwal, 2021). Poor households bear disproportionate costs from heat waves, facing higher mortality, lost labour hours, and reduced productivity (Somanathan et al., 2021). Rainfall deficits have been associated with increases in dowry-related violence; one standard deviation below the local mean correlates with approximately an 8% increase in dowry deaths, driven by the pressure of consumption smoothing during income shocks (Sekhri and Storeygard, 2014). Flood intensity and declining agricultural yields have been shown to increase rural out-migration, as households adapt to deteriorating livelihoods (Viswanathan and Kavi Kumar, 2015).

Yet within this body of work, the specific effects on women’s labour market outcomes remain largely unexamined. We know that climate shocks disrupt incomes, alter household decision-making, and reshape local labour demand – all of which should have gendered consequences. What this literature has not established is whether these disruptions translate into measurable changes in female employment rates, participation decisions, and earnings, and whether the mechanisms differ depending on the type of climate shock.

When agricultural income collapses, do women enter the workforce to compensate? When male members migrate, are women left to provide for themselves? When labour demand expands after a good monsoon, do women benefit?

Floods and Droughts in India

India’s exposure to climate variability is severe and increasing.

Monsoon rainfall, which determines the trajectory of the agricultural year and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, is becoming more erratic due to a global climate crisis. Districts across the country experience droughts and floods with growing frequency, which makes the poor more vulnerable and reduces their disposable incomes further.

Droughts and floods are fundamentally different types of shocks. A drought does not destroy physical assets – it does not wash away homes, schools, or roads. It suppresses crop yields and contracts agricultural income, gradually tightening household budgets. A flood causes immediate physical destruction. However, above-normal rainfall, which may or may not involve flooding, also signals strong monsoon performance that boosts agricultural output in the following season. Post-flood reconstruction may also absorb labour in construction and infrastructure repair, potentially reshaping local employment dynamics in ways that drought does not.

These differences matter for how each type of event affects women.

In drought-prone and arid regions, rain-fed family farming, which absorbs significant female labour, may already be less viable, meaning women in these districts may work outside the home at structurally higher rates regardless of year-to-year rainfall. In flood-prone regions, the dynamics may be different where destruction followed by construction work could alter male labour allocation and, in turn, the opportunities or pressures women face in local labour markets.

Understanding the gendered effects of climate variability, therefore, requires distinguishing between these two types of events rather than treating rainfall shocks as a single phenomenon.

Aim of Research

This research examines whether climate variability, which is measured through district-level rainfall deviations, influences female employment, workforce participation, and earnings in India. The underlying hypothesis is that climate shocks could operate through two distinct channels. The first is an income effect: reduced agricultural earnings push women into the workforce to compensate for lost household income. The second is a labour demand effect: abundant rainfall boosts agricultural output, which generates demand for female labour in farm and non-farm activities.

I use ERA5 reanalysis data to construct district-level annual rainfall and compute standardised deviations from each district’s long-run mean, so that a drought in Rajasthan and a drought in Meghalaya are measured on a comparable scale. These rainfall shocks are then linked to female labour market outcomes from the Periodic Labour Force Survey across Indian districts, with both contemporaneous and one-year lagged specifications to capture the delayed effects of the agricultural production cycle.

The identification strategy treats district-level rainfall variation as quasi-random, conditional on district and time fixed effects. Because monsoon rainfall is determined by large-scale atmospheric dynamics rather than local economic conditions, it is plausibly exogenous to district-level labour market outcomes. The inclusion of district fixed effects absorbs time-invariant differences between districts, such as structural differences in female labour supply between arid and wet regions. This ensures that the estimated effects reflect within-district responses to year-to-year rainfall variation rather than cross-district comparisons.

Findings

The central finding is that droughts and floods both increase female labour force participation, but through entirely different mechanisms and with starkly different welfare implications. These two patterns: distress employment and opportunity employment are the key contributions of this research.

Distress Employment: The Drought Channel

Districts that experienced a drought in the prior year are associated with approximately 6 percentage points higher female participation and a similar increase in employment. However, earnings do not rise. Women appear to be entering low-wage, precarious work not because opportunities have expanded, but because household income has contracted. This is consistent with the income effect channel: contracting agricultural earnings force households to push additional members, particularly women, into the labour market as a coping strategy.

A contemporaneous drought is even starker: it is associated with 8 more women per 100 entering the workforce while their earnings fall by 17%. This combination of rising participation alongside falling earnings is the signature of distress-driven employment. Women are working more and earning less.

Opportunity Employment: The Rainfall Channel

Districts that experienced above-normal rainfall in the prior year tell a different story. Participation and employment rise by around 5 percentage points each, but earnings also increase by approximately 15%. A good monsoon generates demand for female labour at higher wages. This pattern reflects the labour demand channel: improved agricultural output expands employment opportunities and raises the market wage for female workers.

The strongest effects operate with a one-year lag, reflecting the agricultural production cycle: monsoon rainfall determines crop output and agricultural income, whose labour market effects materialise the following year. A one standard deviation improvement in the previous year’s monsoon raises female employment by around 3 percentage points and earnings by 12%. This lagged relationship is consistent with the labour demand channel operating through the agricultural production cycle. This is opportunity-driven employment.

Disentangling Structure from Shock

Importantly, when district fixed effects are introduced to control for time-invariant differences between districts, the flood effect survives while the drought effect weakens. This distinction matters and warrants careful interpretation.

The weakening of the drought effect with fixed effects suggests that the large distress employment pattern observed in simpler specifications may partly reflect structural differences between drought-prone and non-drought-prone districts. In arid regions where rain-fed family farming is already less viable, women may work outside the home at structurally higher rates regardless of year-to-year rainfall variation. This finding warrants caution in interpreting the headline drought results: the distress employment pattern, while striking, may overstate the causal effect of any single drought event if women in drought-prone districts already participate at structurally higher rates.

The flood-driven labour demand channel, by contrast, appears to reflect a genuine within-district causal relationship. When a district experiences above-normal rainfall compared to its own historical mean, female employment and earnings rise. This result holds even after absorbing all permanent differences between districts, strengthening the case that it captures a real response to year-to-year climate variation rather than a cross-district comparison.

Taken together, these results suggest that the opportunity employment channel is the more causally robust finding, while the distress employment channel, though welfare-relevant and policy-important, should be interpreted with appropriate caution about the role of structural factors.

What This Means for Policy

India’s existing climate adaptation frameworks, such as the National Action Plan on Climate Change and State Action Plans, focus primarily on agricultural productivity and household-level welfare. But this gendered analysis suggests that women’s labour market outcomes deserve specific attention within these frameworks.

First, the income effect through which drought forces women into low-wage distress employment points to an immediate policy response where guaranteed employment schemes such as MGNREGA should scale up proactively in drought-affected districts. Evidence suggests women face barriers to accessing these schemes since worksites are far from home, childcare is unavailable, and local officials sometimes prioritise male workers. If drought pushes women into the workforce regardless, policy should aim to convert distress employment into protected employment through women-specific provisions.

Second, the finding that good monsoons create a lagged expansion in female labour demand presents a window of opportunity due to the labour demand effect, wherein good monsoons create lagged expansions in female employment at higher wages. Government skill development programmes could be timed to coincide with post-monsoon recovery periods in agricultural districts, when women are already entering the workforce in greater numbers and demand for their labour is high. Training delivered during this window is more likely to translate into sustained employment and more productive employment.

Third, policy should distinguish between voluntary labour force entry, which may be welfare-enhancing, and distress-driven entry, which likely is not. The fact that drought raises female participation while simultaneously reducing earnings by 17% is not a story of empowerment. Social protection mechanisms like crop insurance, direct benefit transfers triggered by rainfall shortfalls, could reduce the pressure on women to accept exploitative work during droughts.

Finally, and most broadly, adaptation planning should incorporate gender-disaggregated labour market monitoring at the district level. Without tracking how climate variability affects women’s employment separately from household consumption or agricultural output, policy will continue to miss a significant dimension of climate vulnerability.

The evidence presented here,” that droughts force women into low-wage distress work while good monsoons pull them into better-paid employment demonstrates that the labour market costs of climate variability fall differently on women than on men.

The impacts of climate change are not gender-neutral. Neither should the policy response be.