In India, caste and gender have historically been the two axes of stratification responsible for the major inequalities in access – in as diverse areas as education, health, technology, and jobs. Both axes of stratification are supported by a ritual ideology and a complex set of social norms. The aim of this chapter is to understand to what extent these axes have a bearing on employment. It is divided into two parts – Part I addresses why women’s labor force participation rates have been falling in an era of rapid economic and educational growth. Part II addresses the issue of exclusion in the labor market based on traditional caste and tribal status and assesses the changes that have taken place over almost two decades. The two papers draw on the sociological literature on caste and the demographic, economic and feminist literature on women’s employment. Data for the empirical analysis comes from four thick rounds of the employment modules of the National Sample Surveys from 1983 to 1999-2000. Using varied sociometric methods, the papers attempt to build a conceptual and analytical framework which adds to the existing body of labor market analysis on gender and caste in India. Results from the analysis in Part I indicate that for women, low opportunity structures are responsible for low labor force participations rates – consistently under 40 percent. In a pattern peculiar to India and Pakistan, education lowers the likelihood of participating in the labor force for women, and entry into the labor market is the critical marker of Indian women’s employment trajectories. Not surprisingly, for wage workers, higher education is associated with higher wages. Marriage is near-universal and depresses labor force participation, with husband’s income having a significant negative effect on married women’s labor force participation. When this income effect is not offset by the possibility of high status jobs and wage equality for educated women, they remain out of the labor force. Casual female workers earn about half the wages that men do, and only a little over one-fourth of this gap is explained by differences in endowments, indicating that wage discrimination is probably an important factor discouraging entry into the casual labor market. Women that do enter this market thus have very low bargaining power. Analysis in Part II suggests that the effects of caste alone, controlling for a number of household, individual and regional characteristics, really plays out in the form of an increased likelihood of SC/STs being in casual labor and their reduced chances of being in off-farm self-employment. In regular salaried work – which is still predominantly in the public sector and where reservation policy operates – there is an advantage to SC/ST status in urban areas. However, interaction terms denoting the multiplied effects of caste and education, indicate that SC men suffer a disadvantage in regular salaried jobs if they have postprimary education. This is a corollary of an increasing supply of educated SC men over time, and an otherwise efficient reservation policy, creating a system of rationing of jobs for SCs, who cannot compete in the non-reserved salaried job market. This has implications for the structure of the reservation policy, which may in fact be penalizing educated SC men and fostering an elite within them as the anecdotal evidence on “creamy layer” suggests