One Country's Women Work Fewer Hours by Choice. The Other's Can't Get In the Door.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Nearly 60 percent of Dutch women work part-time, roughly three times the OECD average, in a country consistently ranked among the most gender-equal in the world. In India, female labor force participation has climbed from 23 percent in 2017-18 to about 42 percent in 2023-24 — real progress, but still meaning well over half of Indian women are outside the formal workforce entirely, and those who make it into the corporate sector represent barely a fifth of permanent employees. Two very different problems: one country's women have largely opted into a limited version of full participation, the other's are still fighting to get in the room.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

Netherlands

Dutch gender dynamics present a genuine paradox to outsiders: a country that scores extremely well on formal gender equality metrics while running one of the most part-time-skewed labor markets in the OECD. Dutch women average 27 paid hours a week against men's 37, and the imbalance isn't a temporary maternity-era dip — OECD research found many Dutch women begin working part-time in their twenties, well before children become a factor, reflecting the traditional male-breadwinner household model still quietly dominant beneath the country's progressive reputation.

The consequences compound rather than stay contained to weekly hours: fewer hours worked feeds directly into a gender gap in earnings, a gender gap in pensions, and slower progression into management, since part-time employees in nearly every labor market advance more slowly than full-time peers regardless of talent. Interestingly, research suggests many Dutch women in part-time arrangements report high job satisfaction and little desire to change their hours — which complicates any simple reading of the pattern as either straightforwardly chosen or straightforwardly imposed.

India

India's gender workplace story is fundamentally one of access rather than hours. Female labor force participation has nearly doubled in six years, but the corporate sector specifically remains thin on women — just under 21 percent of permanent employees as of 2023 — and the attrition problem once women do get in is severe: nearly half drop off the corporate ladder entirely, compared with 29 percent across Asia broadly, driven overwhelmingly by inadequate maternity support, a lack of crèche facilities, and inflexible hours rather than a change of heart about wanting to work.

The barriers are structural as well as cultural. Over 250 Indian regulations still function to limit women's employment options in various ways, raising the practical cost to employers of hiring women in certain roles or sectors. Catalyst's 2022 research found 60 percent of Indian women feel they must work harder than men simply to prove equivalent competence, and Indian women spend roughly eight times more daily hours than men on domestic and caregiving work — a gap that shapes who can realistically sustain a demanding corporate schedule in the first place, long before any conversation about promotion bias even begins.

The Reckoning

The Netherlands has largely solved the access problem and is left negotiating a subtler one: a labor market where women can work but disproportionately choose, or are steered toward, reduced hours that quietly cap their earnings and advancement over a career. India is still fighting the access problem directly — getting women into the corporate workforce at all, and then keeping them there past the point where domestic responsibility historically pulled them out.

It's tempting to read the Dutch situation as simply "further along," but the comparison is more interesting than that. India's female labor force participation is rising fast off a low base, and its corporate leadership programs are explicitly trying to prevent a mid-career cliff — the specific problem the Netherlands never quite solved either, just packaged differently as reduced hours instead of full departure. Neither country has actually closed its gender gap; they've each just localized it to a different stage of the career.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Internations Amsterdam — An Indian professional who relocated to a Dutch firm described genuine culture shock at how normal it was for senior colleagues, including men, to work four-day weeks, and said it took her months to stop reading her own full-time schedule as a status symbol rather than simply a choice.

Quora — An Indian woman answering a question about workplace discrimination described being told directly by an interviewer that the company preferred not to hire women "who might start a family soon," and noted that raising the issue afterward achieved nothing beyond souring her reputation with the recruiter.

r/expats — A Dutch woman who'd worked briefly in an Indian corporate office said she was struck by how ambitious and vocal her female colleagues were relative to the numbers suggested, concluding that the barrier in India seemed less about individual drive and more about what the system allowed that drive to survive.

r/AskIndia — A commenter describing her return to work after maternity leave noted that her role had been quietly restructured in her absence, with her most visible client work reassigned "temporarily" to a colleague who never gave it back — a pattern she said was common enough among her peers to have a name in her friend group.

Internations Amsterdam — A German expat manager in Amsterdam noted that pushing a talented part-time employee toward full-time hours, something he'd have done reflexively at home, was met with polite but firm resistance — a reminder, he said, that "ambitious" doesn't mean the same thing in every culture.

Conclusion

If you're a woman moving to the Netherlands, know that part-time work is genuinely normalized there, but go in eyes-open about what reduced hours can quietly cost you in pay and promotion over a decade, not just this year. If you're moving to India, vet your specific employer's actual track record on retention and return-to-work support before you assume the encouraging national trendlines apply to your desk. The honest version, for a friend weighing either move: in the Netherlands the door is open but the room narrows the hours you spend in it; in India the room is what's still being built, and getting through the door remains the harder part.