To achieve $5 trillion economy goal along with all-encompassing sustainable growth and development, population’s participation in work force is inevitable. In the last few decades, rising trend in economic growth and population growth has been registered with decline in work force participation. Work force participation rate of India was 47.96% in 2018 with slight increase to 49.48% in 2022 as compared to USA (61.89%), China (66.9%), Germany (61.5%) and Japan (62.33%) in the year 2022 ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS ). This entails that nearly fifty percent of the employed populace of India is non participating in economic domain to contribute to fiscal growth whereas more than 60% of working population participate directly in economic activities in USA, China, Germany and Japan. Further, the data of female participation in work force of India raises a serious concern being just 23% in 2022. Thus, the present study aims to analyses the trends in work force participation rates (total, male, female and ratio of female to male participation in work force) over the period of 1990–2022 and establish the relationship between participation rates especially women involvement in work force and growth of economy. The dataset is collected from World Bank database and Cointegration test is used to establish the relationship between variables. The trend analysis presents a concerning and alarming situation in terms of women participation in work force. However, the test findings verify the presence of long run stable relationship between all the participation rates and economic growth.