Understanding the Invisible Nature of Women’s Work in India

Every morning, millions of women across India wake up before the rest of the household. They cook, clean, fetch water, care for children, tend to elderly relatives, and often head out to work in fields or informal worksites – only to return home and repeat the cycle. None of this appears in India’s GDP. None of it is counted in formal employment statistics. And yet, without it, the entire economy would grind to a halt. This is the paradox at the heart of women’s work in India: it is everywhere and, officially, it is nowhere.

Why women’s work is often overlooked 🔗

The invisibility of women’s work is not accidental. It is the product of deeply rooted societal norms and economic frameworks that have, for decades, drawn a sharp line between “productive” and “unproductive” activity – a line that almost always runs along gender lines.

The role of patriarchal norms 🔗

In most Indian households, the division of labour is not negotiated – it is inherited. Women are expected to manage the home, raise children, and care for the sick and elderly, not because they are uniquely skilled at it, but because patriarchal norms impose this responsibility on them. These expectations are so normalized that the work itself becomes invisible – it is simply what women “do,” not what they “contribute.”

This cultural framing has real consequences. According to data from the OECD, women in India spend an average of nearly six hours a day on household work – at least 40% more than women in China or South Africa, and nearly six times as much as Indian men. The National Statistical Office (NSO) found that Indian women spend an average of 299 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work, more than three times what men contribute. Yet because this work happens inside the home and carries no wage, it is treated as if it has no economic value at all.

How economic measurement systems fail women 🔗

The problem is also structural. The United Nations System of National Accounts (UN-SNA) – the global framework used to calculate GDP – classifies unpaid household activities as “non-economic labour.” Cooking, childcare, cleaning, and elder care all fall outside the “production boundary” that defines what counts as economic activity. The reasoning given is that these activities do not involve market transactions and are difficult to price. But this logic is circular: the work is excluded because it is unpaid, and it remains unpaid in part because it is excluded from economic recognition.

Beyond the household, a significant portion of women’s paid work is also invisible. Approximately 85% of India’s workforce operates in the informal sector, and women are disproportionately represented in this space – in home-based manufacturing, agricultural labour, small trade, and contract work – all without formal contracts, social security, or legal protections. When data systems only capture formal employment, the majority of women’s economic activity simply disappears from the record.

The double burden women carry 🔗

What makes the situation particularly unequal is that entering the paid workforce does not free women from domestic responsibilities. Research consistently shows that entering the labour market does not mean women abandon their unpaid and care work – the expectation is that they manage both. This “double burden” further limits women’s ability to pursue higher-paying jobs, take on leadership roles, or invest in skills development. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) reports that 44.5% of women cite childcare and household commitments as the primary reason they do not enter the workforce at all.

Impact on economic development 🔗

When half a population’s labour goes unmeasured, uncompensated, and unrecognized, the costs to economic development are enormous – even if those costs don’t show up in official statistics.

The staggering scale of what’s missing 🔗

A 2025 study by IIM Indore estimated that unpaid care and household work performed largely by women in India is worth between ₹30 trillion and ₹90 trillion annually – accounting for 11 to 27% of the country’s GDP. Women account for nearly 87% of the total economic value generated by this unpaid work, yet receive no compensation, no recognition, and no inclusion in national accounts. Globally, Oxfam estimates that unpaid care work by women contributes $10.8 trillion to the global economy annually – a figure that dwarfs many national GDPs.

In India specifically, women and girls perform approximately 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work daily – equivalent to nearly 10% of the GDP. This is not a marginal contribution. It is a foundational subsidy to the formal economy, keeping households functional, workers fed and cared for, and the next generation of human capital alive and growing.

What exclusion costs the formal economy 🔗

The exclusion of women from formal economic participation compounds the loss. India’s female labour force participation rate hovers at roughly 24-25%, compared to a global average of around 47% and nearly 75% in many developed economies. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that women’s contributions to India’s GDP are valued at only 17% – against a global average of 37%. That gap is not a reflection of women’s capabilities; it is a reflection of how completely the system has failed to count, support, or invest in them.

The economic opportunity cost of this exclusion is equally stark. The United Nations estimates that enabling women to participate in the economy on par with men could increase India’s 2025 GDP by 16 to 60%, generating approximately $700 billion in additional output. The IMF and McKinsey Global Institute similarly estimate that gender parity in the workforce could add $770 billion to India’s GDP. These are not aspirational figures – they reflect real, measurable losses that the economy absorbs every year because women’s work is undervalued and women’s workforce participation is suppressed.

How policy is distorted by incomplete data 🔗

When policymakers cannot see women’s work in the data, they also cannot design effective responses to address it. The IIM Indore study noted that policymakers often cite a lack of measurable evidence when delaying investments in childcare, eldercare, and parental support systems. This becomes a self-reinforcing problem: because unpaid work is not counted, there is no data to justify investment in redistributing it; without that investment, women remain trapped in unpaid work; and their continued absence from the formal economy confirms the false narrative that women are not economically active.

Women’s economic position as a development indicator 🔗

One of the most important insights from gender economics is this: how a society treats women’s work is a reliable indicator of how developed that society actually is – not just in terms of income or infrastructure, but in terms of whether its institutions are designed to include everyone or only some.

What the data tells us about India’s development stage 🔗

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 ranks India 131 out of 148 countries, with only 64.4% of its gender gap closed. On economic participation specifically, India scores just 40.7% parity – placing it among the bottom five countries globally, alongside Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt. Women in these economies access less than one-third of the economic resources available to men and are heavily underrepresented in leadership and professional roles.

This is not merely a gender justice issue. The World Bank is unambiguous on this point: no country can achieve its economic potential without the full and equal participation of women. Globally, women’s labour force participation has remained stagnant at 53% since 1990 – compared to 80% for men – with more than 710 million women kept out of the labour market due to family care duties. The same barriers that keep women invisible in India’s statistics are holding back India’s development trajectory.

Women’s economic status reflects institutional design 🔗

The states within India that show stronger women’s empowerment – measured through economic participation, decision-making, and health outcomes – also tend to show stronger correlations with higher per capita income, literacy rates, and lower fertility rates. Research based on NFHS-5 data found significant correlations between Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) scores and per capita net state domestic product across Indian states. In other words, where women do better economically, the whole state tends to do better – and vice versa.

This relationship between women’s economic status and broader development is not coincidental. Research published in PMC found that vulnerable female employment negatively influences a country’s GDP per capita – with a 1% rise in such employment linked to a 5.46% reduction in economic growth. Women’s autonomy in business and law institutions, by contrast, has a measurably positive influence on per capita income. The direction of causality is clear: investing in women’s economic inclusion drives development; excluding women from economic recognition drags it back.

Why women’s work must be included in economic analysis 🔗

Conventional economic metrics like GDP and the Human Development Index (HDI) track what is produced, but not by whom or for whom. As analysts have noted, unpaid domestic labour – overwhelmingly performed by women – remains invisible despite estimates valuing it at nearly 40% of GDP. Without counting this work, economic analysis gives a systematically distorted picture of who is contributing, how much, and at what personal cost.

Incorporating women’s work into economic analysis is not just a question of fairness. It is a question of accuracy. The household functions as a productive sector of the economy – generating services that enable workers to participate in formal employment, raising the next generation of human capital, and providing care that would otherwise need to be purchased from the market. Excluding this sector from national accounts does not make it disappear; it just makes it impossible to plan around it intelligently. Countries that have made deliberate investments in redistributing care work – through subsidised childcare, parental leave for both genders, and elder care infrastructure – have seen measurable gains in women’s workforce participation, economic output, and gender equality scores.

India’s Economic Survey 2019 formally acknowledged the value of unpaid work – a positive step – but implementation has lagged. The challenge ahead is not just recognising women’s work in policy documents, but building the statistical systems, institutional support, and public investment required to make that recognition real.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were included in India’s GDP calculations, how do you think it would change the way governments prioritize policies around childcare, eldercare, and women’s workforce participation? And given that a country’s level of development is often measured by how well it includes all its citizens in economic life, what does India’s current treatment of women’s work tell us about where it actually stands?

References

1. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-news-editorials/unpaid-work
2. https://inbreakthrough.org/ignored-unpaid-work/
3. https://www.businesstoday.in/opinion/columns/story/indias-workforce-crisis-why-women-are-missing-and-what-its-costing-us-460937-2025-01-15
4. https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2241&context=jiws
5. https://yipinstitute.org/capstone/invisible-labor-women-india-home-work
6. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Field%20Office%20ESEAsia/Docs/Publications/2018/07/Invisible%20Work%20and%20Invisible%20Workers.pdf
7. https://www.freepressjournal.in/amp/bhopal/indore-news-indian-womens-unpaid-care-work-worth-up-to-90-trillion-a-year-claims-iim-i-study
8. https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-global-economy/case-studies/india/
9. https://india.un.org/en/172095-gender-equality-and-youth-development
10. https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/gender-gap-female-labour/
11. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2025/in-full/benchmarking-gender-gaps-2025/
12. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/overview
13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11346798/
14. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9922756/
15. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/recognising-the-economic-value-of-unpaid-work-in-india