Female Work Participation-A Reply

August 9, 1975 Female Work Participation A Reply Leela Gulati IN his comment1 on my paper,2 J N Sinha has made a number of critical observations. Before summing up his criticism I shall briefly summarise what I attempted to do in my paper. It was largely an attempt to explore to what extent, if any, some of the major economic and demographic factors explained inter-state disparities in work participation by Indian women. The major conclusion of my paper was that inter-state differences in female participation rates, as revealed by the 1971 Census, are not possible to explain in terms of (i) disparities in per capita income; (ii) the cropping pattern; (iii) disparate levels of literacy; (iv) dissimilarities in rates of male participation (again for 1971); (v) varying proportion of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population, or (vi) differing sex ratio. I must emphasise that this conclusion related to inter-state disparities in female work participation; the only disaggregation I had allowed myself to make was that between rural and urban rates, I shall now attempt first to sum up Sinha's criticisms and then to answer them one by one.