IT IS A PACKED DAY at the Tata Motors factory in Pune. A female voice echoes through speakers, announcing workstation updates. Meanwhile, on the assembly line at the Trim, Chassis and Final-2 plant, a skeletal vehicle frame inches forward. A group of young women tighten bolts, guide robotic arms lifting heavy windshields into place, and wire up electronic components that will eventually power the vehicle’s dashboard and safety systems. By the time the frame reaches the end of the line, it has transformed into a ready-to-roll-out Tata Harrier or Safari. “It makes me proud to see a Tata Harrier and Safari on the road — for I built it,” says Pratiksha Pawar, a 21-year-old operator from Maharashtra who works on the line.

Around 530 km away in Vadodara, an 11-member all-women team at a Larsen & Toubro (L&T) precast facility produced more than 91,125 concrete noise-barrier panels for the Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet train corridor. The task involved pouring around 30,906 cubic metres of concrete. The team wrapped up the work in 62,860 man-days, ensuring timely delivery.

Meanwhile, another team of 10 women is spearheading advancements in research, asset health, decision-support, and supervisory control technologies to develop innovative water solutions at L&T’s Kancheepuram Water Technology Centre in Tamil Nadu.

These efforts reflect a fast-growing, broader movement at India Inc. to engage more women on the shop floor. In fact, some choose to engage only with women on the shop floor. For example, Ola Electric has set up an all-women factory to build scooters and bikes. Apple’s India contractors, including Foxconn, have steadily increased their women-led workforce. Last year, Foxconn hired as many as 30,000 women workers for its iPhone assembly factory in Bengaluru.

Backed by policies

Much of the growing focus on deploying women on shop floors also has to do with corporates making flexible policies. For instance, L&T introduced menstrual leave last year, which it says makes it one of the first Indian conglomerates to do so, with no approval process required. Maternity leave no longer affects performance ratings; employees are protected at their average rating from the previous two years. Renew, a return-to-work programme, has brought in 300–350 women, including those from other companies.

For a company known for building major infrastructure projects, these shifts represent something more than a fad. L&T now employs around 6,000 women — about 10% of its workforce, up from 6% in 2021. Of those, around 2,100 work on construction sites and shop floors, with nearly 80% in operational functions rather than support roles. Women now hold 120 senior roles at Tier III and above, rising from 100 in FY24. They work across planning, engineering design, quality assurance, project management, supply chain, and execution — traditionally male bastions. “Today, hiring women is not difficult,” says C. Jayakumar, CHRO, L&T. “The question is: how do we retain them? How do we give them a career? How do we ensure that they remain with us?”

Retention, over recruitment, drives much of L&T’s diversity strategy. It has worked to build what Jayakumar describes as a lifecycle support system, rather than a hiring initiative. Across remote project locations, including Noamundi, Durgapur, and Khondbond, this has meant constructing dedicated washrooms, changing rooms, crèche facilities, and wellness centres. At the Vizag shipbuilding plant, new mothers returning from maternity leave are provided transport to go home during lunch breaks — a 1.5-hour window — for the first two months. The plant also formally welcomes returning mothers at monthly management council meetings.

The results are telling. Women’s attrition at L&T has dropped from 14% to 8% — a significant improvement. Yet, Jayakumar is candid about where it still falls short. “The attrition of women employees is predominantly because of personal reasons: spouse transfer, family commitments. Very few leave because of career growth.” L&T attempts to address spouse-transfer situations by finding openings within other business units.

Encouraging the female workforce is also about survival. “It is not that they’re doing a social service or ticking a box,” Jayakumar says. “It is for the organisation’s own survival. If you have the mindset that it’s a male-dominated domain and females cannot do it, the organisation will lose out.”

Today, 30% of L&T’s graduate engineering trainee cohorts are women. For specific technical roles, they receive additional targeted training; the women who assembled a 100-tonne Komatsu dump truck used in mining operations, for instance, were trained for that task before taking on end-to-end assembly.

That’s also why, between 2017-18 and 2023-24, women accounted for 74% of the net increase in employment, according to government data. Women from rural areas accounted for 46 percentage points of the growth.

India’s female workforce participation rate has doubled between 2018 and 2024. The female Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), or the percentage of women who are either employed or actively seeking work, rose from 23.3% to 41.7% during the period. The female Worker Population Ratio, or the exact percentage of employed women aged 15 years and above, rose from 22% to 40.3%. In December 2025, the overall LFPR among females aged 15 years and above stood at 35.3%, with the figure in rural areas rising to 40.1%.

Meanwhile, the Centre has set an ambitious target to raise the share of manufacturing in gross domestic product to 25% by 2047, up from 17% currently. Even as it woos foreign manufacturers such as Apple and VinFast, the target might be out of reach without the female workforce.

In 2024, reports emerged that while Foxconn employed women workers, it was reluctant to hire married workers, prompting the government to step in and seek a report from the electronics giant. A year later, new labour codes overhauled and amalgamated 29 older statutes. One of the key objectives is to increase women’s workplace participation by bolstering rights, safety, and equality. The new rules make gender-based discrimination in recruitment, wages, and working conditions unlawful and mandate minimum-wage and overtime payouts that are double the regular wage. Most importantly, they allow women to work night shifts between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. — with adequate safety measures — thus removing a major hurdle that deterred factories from considering female candidates.

Auto on the fast lane

For decades, automotive manufacturing plants were among the most male-dominated workplaces. Today, however, a quiet but significant transformation is unfolding across assembly lines, welding bays, and quality-control stations, as automakers increasingly position women at the centre of manufacturing.

Tata Motors, India’s second-largest carmaker, employs over 7,387 women across plants, including over 4,000 on shop floors assembling vehicles in Pune, Lucknow, Pantnagar, and Jamshedpur. For instance, its high-output assembly floor at the Pune plant produces around 200 vehicles per day, peaking at nearly 300 — a result enabled by nearly 1,500 women working in three shifts, according to Neeraj Agarwal, plant head at Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Ltd. Hired from nearby towns and villages, these women are a crucial force behind Tata Motors’ production volumes and supply chain efficiency.

In FY26, about 19% of technician hires for the commercial vehicle shop floor of Tata Motors were women. The company says it plans to increase that participation to 30% soon. To do that, the company has also implemented a “Learn and Earn” programme that combines shop floor work with formal education. It allows Industrial Training Institute (ITI) graduates and 12th-pass students to work at Tata Motors while pursuing a diploma through partner institutes such as the Nettur Technical Training Foundation (NTTF). Participants receive a stipend while gaining hands-on experience in production, assembly, quality, and maintenance. Pratiksha Pawar’s parents wished to see her in a government job. “But I convinced them that I wanted to do this. It is better than doing a plain BTech. I get work experience, which is more important than just a degree,” says the operator at the Tata Motors plant in Pune.

For Pooja Rajput, another operator, the choice meant turning down a more conventional career path. She had cleared interviews with seven companies for software roles, something her civil engineer father encouraged her to pursue. But she chose this programme to continue studying while gaining industrial experience. “Managing such a workforce is not easy, so we divide the stations into stages,” says Diksha Shrivastava, a production line manager at Tata Motors. Each stage is overseen by a team leader — many of whom are simultaneously pursuing a BTech sponsored by Tata Motors — along with others responsible for safety, quality, productivity, morale, and cost. The structure allows teams to resolve issues on their own and manage the line’s day-to-day operations seamlessly.

The company has also implemented support systems to make the workplace more accessible to women. Employees have access to crèche facilities, pick-and-drop services, and immediate medical assistance. Some of it, though, has now become a necessity under the new labour codes.

For Agarwal, the all-women shop floor is an opportunity to shift industry perspectives. It is about broadening the workforce and challenging assumptions, not excluding men. “A 100% women does not literally mean that no man will enter,” he says. “It’s a mindset we want to drive — that women together can do any job, men together can do any job, and men and women together can do any job.”

Companies such as Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M), Maruti Suzuki, JSW MG Motor India, and Škoda Auto Volkswagen India are also steadily expanding female participation, not to improve diversity metrics but to strengthen manufacturing capabilities. “Over the last two years, Maruti Suzuki has systematically increased the number of women employees in vehicle manufacturing and powertrain transmission roles at its Gurugram and Manesar facilities. Today, they play a crucial role across vehicle assembly and quality control, with a deep sense of pride in the precision and excellence,” says Hisashi Takeuchi, MD and CEO, Maruti Suzuki India. “Our approach is to provide equal opportunities and mainstream women’s participation in manufacturing while inspiring broader societal change.”

Today, nearly 200 women work on the shop floor at Maruti Suzuki, with the overall number of women employees about 1,300. Female hiring has risen from 7–8% in 2005 to around 12–13% in 2025. “Women bring distinct strengths, particularly in colour perception and the ability to detect subtle visual variations, making their presence on production quality control lines a clear competitive advantage,” says a company spokesperson.

The shift is also visible in scale and ambition. M&M employs more than 6,800 women associates across manufacturing functions, while for JSW MG Motor India, women constitute around 41% of its overall workforce. “Women work across our vehicle assembly, aggregate assembly, press shops, paint shops, welding and body shops, machine shops, maintenance and quality functions,” says Nalinikanth Gollagunta, CEO, automotive division, M&M. “Women can contribute across every aspect of shop floor operations, and today that belief is translating into scale.”

Increasing participation has required far more than hiring. Companies acknowledge that manufacturing facilities were traditionally designed for a male workforce. Creating an inclusive workplace has, therefore, involved redesigning workstations, improving ergonomics, strengthening safety infrastructure, and expanding support facilities. “The barriers to women’s participation on the shop floor are often multi-layered, spanning physical, infrastructural, safety-related, and societal dimensions,” says Sitaram Kandi, CHRO, Tata Motors. “Through focussed interventions in skilling, workplace design, safety, and community outreach, we ensure that women are not just hired but are enabled to thrive, stay, and grow.”

Measures such as secure transportation, CCTV surveillance, well-lit work environments, female security personnel, and sensitisation programmes have become increasingly common across automotive plants. Companies are partnering with ITIs and technical institutions to strengthen the talent pipeline and encourage more women to pursue careers in manufacturing.

At JSW MG Motor, women constitute around 41% of the overall workforce — up significantly from when it began operations nearly a decade ago. The participation rate is 81% in critical areas like battery assembly. “We have also introduced blind technical assessments — such as in welding trials — to evaluate performance purely on merit, eliminating evaluator bias,” says Yeshwinder Patial, CHRO, JSW MG Motor India. “We invested in sensitisation programmes to enable a mindset shift: moving from hesitation to acceptance, and ultimately to advocacy.”

The benefits are increasingly visible in operational outcomes. Automakers report stronger process discipline, greater attention to detail, and improved adherence to quality standards in teams with higher female participation. Diverse teams are also contributing to a more collaborative and respectful workplace culture. “Across plants, women-led and gender-diverse teams have demonstrated strong proficiency, process discipline, and attention to detail — qualities that are critical to manufacturing precision, quality, and safety,” adds Kandi of Tata Motors. “These strengths have translated into stable production outputs, improved adherence to standards, and stronger quality performance.”

A start has been made. But the real test is building a pipeline of senior women leaders in manufacturing. “I’m sure that in the next five years, you will find a lot of women leaders at the senior level,” says Jayakumar of L&T. The numbers must prove him right.