Twenty-three-year-old Ayesha* fought hard to study a master’s degree in social sciences and finally land a corporate job in Delhi in 2024. But within a year, she was struggling to stay afloat with her starting salary of Rs 40,000.She was paying Rs 18,000 a month for a gated, paying guest accommodation, a metro-adjacent location and a neighbourhood she could come home to at night without planning ahead. After food, travel, groceries and sending money home, she was saving Rs 1,000 at best.The latest annual Periodic Labour Force Survey data says that women’s workforce participation stood at 40% from January to December 2025. It means the number of Indian women working has nearly doubled from 23.3% in 2017-’18.However, the rise in women’s workforce is largely among rural workers, and a significant part of it appears to be driven by a change in the definition that reclassified women performing subsistence and domestic tasks as “self-employed”.These numbers also conceal the high costs paid by first-generation Dalit or Muslim women to attain a private sector job and remain employed in an Indian city. These are the women who are most likely to have broken through family resistance and constrained networks to land a job that offers upward mobility.This “intersectional tax”, as I call it, falls hardest on the women who have the least capacity to absorb it, becoming a drain on income and savings.The price of safetyThe first might be called the safety premium.A woman migrating alone to Bengaluru, Mumbai, or Delhi for her first salaried job is likely to pay more for safe accommodation unlike male colleagues. For first-generation working women, this can be a high added cost on trainee-level salaries.Entry-level salaries range between Rs 30,000-Rs 40,000 a month, according to two estimates.A 2023 Foundit report on the white-collar jobs market puts entry-level salaries at Rs 3.45- Rs 6.75 lakh per annum in IT and Rs 3.28-Rs 5.40 lakh in Banking, Finance Services and Insurance. Similarly, GetWork’s fresher salary data for the financial year 2025 shows an average of Rs 4.29 lakh per annum in Mumbai and Rs 4.05 lakh in Delhi.A gated paying guest facility with a security guard, a building within walking distance of a metro station, a neighbourhood where coming home at 10 pm does not require a prior risk assessment, all command a premium. Zaira (name changed), a 25-year-old Muslim woman in Delhi, paid Rs 16,000 a month for safe accommodation, leaving her with savings of Rs 2,000 at best, she told me.These costs add up. For instance, an app-based cab during late hours instead of a shared auto became another expense. My conversations during 2023-’25 with 10 women employed in entry-level roles in Delhi suggested these differential costs can account for 10%-15% per cent of a fresher’s take-home pay.Housing discriminationReligious and casteist discrimination can compound these costs.In a 2012 research paper, scholars including SK Thorat documented discrimination against Dalits and Muslims in the housing markets of Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Noida. Another study found that the probability of a landlord responding to an upper-caste applicant is 0.35, but it is only 0.22 for a Muslim applicant, and Muslim applicants are especially disadvantaged when applying for one-bedroom houses.Brokers have been documented advising Muslim clients to conceal their religious identity and to remove visible markers of faith. Dalits and people of other marginalised identities face a similar version of discrimination: scrutiny of surnames, steering them towards particular neighbourhoods, terms and conditions that would not be offered to others.A young Muslim woman arriving in Mumbai is unlikely to choose her neighbourhood so much as being assigned one by a housing market. The cost of housing bias is longer commutes, higher transport costs and more brokerage payments as she cycles through unwilling landlords. Alongside these is psychological fatigue: of the cumulative weight of concealment, rejection and second-class treatment could affect her performance at work.Among the 12 Muslim women I met at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 2023-25, several chose not to pursue jobs in Mumbai because of the city’s hostile rental market.Almost none of them work in Mumbai or Delhi now, except one woman who is a member of a political organisation and has a support system. They repeatedly talked about how difficult it is to navigate the housing market as a visibly Muslim woman. Finding accommodation was described as one of the biggest barriers to living and working independently in these cities. Then there is the cost of menstruation.India currently has no national menstrual leave policy. One study from 2015 of about 1,000 women found that at least 70% of the participants suffered from dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation cramps. Most Indian companies offer between 18 and 21 days of combined earned, sick and casual leave annually.A 23-year-old, first-generation Muslim woman employed at a five-day, work-from-office company told me that she needs a sick leave every month. Her organisation offers 18 days of combined leave annually and has a no-sandwich-leave policy, which means if she takes a Friday and Monday off, four days are deducted. She told me that managing her menstruation through the year left her with barely any days off to travel home.How it adds upConsider two women graduates entering Delhi’s formal economy at starting salaries of Rs 40,000 a month. The woman from a socially-privileged background is much better placed to afford these added costs.For the first-generation Dalit or Muslim woman, the higher rent for safe housing, additional transport costs and the cost of living in a city adds up.The cumulative savings divergence between two workers on identical incomes will compound. The financial cushion that makes risk-taking in careers possible, investing in further education, surviving a period of unemployment or leaving a bad job gets built at a slower rate, or not at all.This is the mechanism through which caste and religious disadvantage reproduces itself in the formal labour market.The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation should consider publishing labour force participation data disaggregated by social group and urban-rural residence.As long as policymakers cannot see urban Dalit women and urban Muslim women as distinct analytical categories, they will continue designing interventions for an average that corresponds to nobody’s actual experience.India’s efforts to improve women’s economic participation has focused on what keeps women out of the labour market: skill deficits, household norms, patriarchal gatekeeping. Apart from job creation, equity in India’s urban labour markets will require a reckoning with costs paid by some women to stay in the workforce.Fathima Althaf is a development sector professional with experience in public policy and government advisory. Her research interests are in gender, labour and urban employment.