Women’s Struggles in Moving Beyond Subsistence: The Path to Progress

Across the world, millions of women wake up before dawn to cook, clean, fetch water, care for children, tend small plots of land, and then head out to sell goods at a market or take on piece-rate work – all before most policy discussions even begin. They occupy three worlds simultaneously: the home, the workforce, and the community. Yet their labor is routinely undercounted, undervalued, and unsupported. Understanding why women struggle to move beyond subsistence-level activities requires looking honestly at the layered constraints they face every single day – as caregivers, workers, and citizens.

Women’s multiple roles: the invisible workload 🔗

Women do not occupy a single role. They are caregivers, income earners, community members, and often the primary managers of household survival – all at once. This is not just a social observation; it is backed by hard data. According to UN Women, women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men. Globally, women perform 76.2% of all unpaid care work, dedicating an average of four hours and 25 minutes per day compared to men’s one hour and 23 minutes, as estimated by the UNDP.

This unpaid labor – cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, subsistence farming, and collecting water or firewood – is the backbone of household economies. If it were assigned a monetary value, it would exceed 40% of GDP in some countries, according to UN Women’s analysis of care work. Yet it remains almost entirely absent from national statistics, labor policies, and economic planning. The work exists – the recognition does not.

This invisibility has real consequences. UN DESA data shows that 45% of working-age women are outside the formal labor market because of unpaid care responsibilities, compared to just 5% of men. When a woman is expected to handle everything at home, her capacity to pursue education, formal employment, or entrepreneurship is structurally constrained – not by personal choice, but by a system that assigns her these roles and offers her little in return.

The “double burden” and its cost 🔗

For women who do enter the paid workforce, the unpaid work does not disappear. They carry what researchers call a “double burden” – paid employment stacked on top of full domestic responsibilities. Working mothers, for instance, spend significantly more time than working fathers on childcare and household tasks combined. Research from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that among parents working full-time, mothers do 1.6 times as much childcare and household work as fathers. For part-time working mothers, that ratio rises to 2.4 times.

The health consequences are significant. A peer-reviewed study published in BMJ found that middle-aged full-time homemakers had five times the risk of cognitive impairments compared to women in other occupations, while providing intensive care for sick or elderly relatives is consistently associated with elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and reduced quality of life in women. The burden is not just economic – it takes a measurable toll on physical and mental wellbeing.

The informal sector: where most poor women work 🔗

When women do enter the paid economy, most end up in the informal sector – a space characterized by minimal regulation, no job security, no social protection, and low wages. The scale of this is striking. UN Women reports that in South Asia, over 80% of women in non-agricultural employment are in informal work. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 74%, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 54%.

Street vending, domestic work, piece-rate garment stitching, subsistence farming, seasonal agriculture – these are the occupations that dominate women’s working lives in the developing world. In the Pacific Islands, for example, between 75% and 90% of all market vendors are women, working long hours for low and unpredictable earnings, largely excluded from market governance or decision-making.

What informal work actually means for women 🔗

Working informally is not just about lacking a formal contract. It means working without labor law protections, without pension contributions, without paid sick leave or maternity benefits, and often without any recourse when things go wrong. A peer-reviewed study on barriers to women’s empowerment in India’s informal sector found that women in informal employment face significant income insecurity, a lack of legal protection, and severely limited access to social benefits – all of which deepen existing gender inequalities rather than alleviate them.

The long-term consequences extend into old age. Because informal workers rarely contribute to pension schemes, fewer women receive pensions globally. In countries like France, Germany, Greece, and Italy, women’s average pension is more than 30% lower than men’s – a direct downstream effect of careers spent in informal, unprotected work.

Women’s enterprises in the informal sector also remain structurally smaller and less viable than men’s. As the UK Government’s guidance on promoting economic empowerment for women in the informal economy notes, women’s enterprises are on average smaller, less profitable, and less likely to be formally registered than men’s – limiting their access to credit, legal protections, and business development support. Without formal registration, women entrepreneurs cannot build credit histories, access business loans, or scale their operations in any meaningful way.

Why women end up in the informal economy 🔗

Women’s concentration in the informal sector is not random. It is shaped by a combination of structural barriers: fewer years of education, limited access to capital and land, discriminatory hiring practices in formal employment, and the sheer weight of unpaid care responsibilities that make rigid formal work schedules unmanageable. The informal sector’s lower entry barriers and flexible hours make it the only realistic option for many women – particularly those with children or elderly dependents. World Bank researchers note that while the flexibility of informal work can be appealing for those combining paid work with caregiving, it also reinforces occupational segregation and keeps women in lower-productivity, lower-earning activities.

Gender norms compound all of this. As the Urban Institute’s systematic review found across 18 low-income countries, gender norms directly restrict women’s access to jobs, assets, information, and networks – and are often used to justify occupational segregation that assigns women to roles deemed less skilled and therefore less worthy of adequate pay.

Why economic empowerment matters beyond income 🔗

Moving women out of subsistence-level work is not simply about raising their earnings – though that matters enormously. Economic empowerment means ensuring women can participate in and benefit from decent work, access markets, control resources, and have a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their lives. According to UN Women’s framework, it is about ownership over one’s time, body, and future – not just a paycheck.

The evidence for why this matters is compelling. When women gain economic agency, the benefits extend far beyond the individual. The IMF’s research on gender equality and economic growth has shown that empowering women as economic, political, and social actors changes policy choices and makes institutions more responsive. In India, giving women power at the local level led to greater provision of public goods like water and sanitation – things that directly benefit communities.

Economic empowerment also disrupts gender norms over time. When women take on new economic roles, they actively challenge the assumptions that confined them – creating a feedback loop where greater participation enables further norm change. This is why narrowly focused programs that only train women in skills often fall short: unless the underlying gender norms and structural barriers are addressed simultaneously, gains remain fragile and limited.

The policy gap that leaves women behind 🔗

One of the central problems is that many labor and job-creation policies are gender-blind – designed around male-dominated sectors and the assumption of a male-breadwinner household. As the UK government’s guidance on women in the informal economy notes, job creation programs are frequently biased toward sectors dominated by male enterprise owners, leaving women in the most vulnerable categories of informal work – own-account workers and unpaid contributing family workers – without targeted support.

The UNDP’s Gender Equality Strategy 2022-2025 identifies financial inclusion, digitization, and innovation as key tools for closing the gap. Mobile banking and fintech solutions, for instance, can give women in remote or rural areas access to savings, credit, and insurance for the first time – without requiring them to navigate discriminatory financial institutions in person. But access to tools is not enough on its own. Comprehensive policy must simultaneously address discriminatory laws, the redistribution of unpaid care work, and the social norms that define what roles women are permitted to occupy.

Expanding care infrastructure is also critical. UN Women estimates that closing existing care policy gaps and expanding care services with decent care work could create almost 300 million jobs by 2035 – the majority of which would benefit women. This is not a niche feminist concern; it is a mainstream economic strategy with measurable returns.

The path from subsistence to progress 🔗

Women’s struggles in moving beyond subsistence are not the result of individual failure or lack of ambition. They are the result of overlapping, mutually reinforcing systems: a care economy that extracts enormous unpaid labor from women without recognition; an informal sector that offers access but no protection or upward mobility; and gender norms that define which work is acceptable, which resources women can access, and whose time is considered expendable. Addressing any one of these in isolation produces limited results. Progress requires tackling all three together – through legal reform, care investment, financial inclusion, and a genuine redistribution of domestic responsibility.

The starting point is recognition. When the work women do – all of it – is made visible and counted, the case for structural change becomes impossible to ignore.

What do you think? If women’s unpaid care work were formally counted in national economic statistics, how do you think it would change government policy priorities? And what would it take for informal sector work to actually provide women with a path to economic security rather than just survival?

References

1. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work
2. https://www.undp.org/latin-america/blog/missing-piece-valuing-womens-unrecognized-contribution-economy
3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/faqs-what-is-unpaid-care-work-and-how-does-it-power-the-economy
4. https://social.desa.un.org/world-summit-2025/blog/invisible-yet-indispensable-why-the-world-runs-on-womens-unpaid-care-work
5. https://thegepi.org/the-free-time-gender-gap/
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8406085/
7. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/women-in-informal-economy
8. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2018/11/womens-economic-empowerment
9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-025-01398-0
10. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dc0284340f0b6379cde83fe/Promoting-Economic-Empowerment-Women-Informal-Economy-Oct19.pdf
11. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/understanding-gender-gaps-informal-sector
12. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/gender-norms-and-womens-economic-empowerment-low-income-countries-what-we-learned-reviewing-evidence
13. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures
14. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/03/revenga.htm
15. https://www.undp.org/africa/blog/womens-economic-empowerment-critical-catalyst-sdg-achievement