Punjab has among the lowest female labour force participation rates in India, which is unusual for a state with its income and literacy levels.
The reasons given are the same everywhere: the association of women's paid work outside the household with low status, the availability of household income from land and remittance, and izzat.
Women do a very large amount of unpaid work: dairy, fodder, kitchen gardens, the household, and in poorer households agricultural labour and brick kiln work.
Female literacy has risen sharply and girls now outperform boys in Punjab's school results, and that has not translated into employment.
The free bus travel scheme introduced in 2021 is one of the few measures whose effect on women's mobility, and therefore on their access to education and work, is directly visible.
A state where girls do better at school than boys and fewer women work than almost anywhere else in India is describing a social constraint rather than an economic one.
The survey asks whether a person worked for pay in a reference week. A woman who milked two buffaloes, cut and carried fodder, made dung cakes, cooked for eight and took a meal out to the field is recorded as not working, and the number that comes out of that is then set beside other states.
Factory employment of women is low as well and what there is sits in Ludhiana hosiery and in food processing. The garment units run their second shift largely on migrant labour from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh rather than on local women, which is a choice that employers and households arrive at together.
The dairy cooperative is where women's agricultural work does produce a recorded income in a woman's name, and that is a large part of why the cooperative mattered.