Every year, International Women’s Day arrives with familiar imagery - panels, pledges, profiles of trailblazers. These moments matter. They signal progress and recognition. But if this day is to have real economic meaning, it must also force a reckoning with something far less visible: the vast amount of work women do that never enters balance sheets, budget speeches, or GDP calculations.
India’s growth story is increasingly ambitious. Yet it continues to rely on an old and unspoken bargain, that care work will be performed within households, largely by women, without pay, without pension, and without policy acknowledgement. As long as this bargain remains intact, efforts to expand women’s participation in paid employment will remain incomplete.
The Invisible Constraint on Women’s Work
According to the Economic Survey 2025–26, over 40 per cent of women of working age are engaged in caregiving activities at home, compared to just over 21 per cent of men. Women spend nearly 140 minutes a day on caregiving, and over six hours daily on unpaid work overall, almost three times as much as men. This includes caring for children, elderly family members, and persons with disabilities, in addition to routine household management. The economic system treats this labour as if it were infinitely elastic and costless.
It is neither.
In our recent paper for NCAER, and published in the Economic and Political Weekly, we examined how redistributing unpaid care work and introducing legally protected part-time employment could reshape labour market outcomes. The findings were not rhetorical; they were quantifiable. A more equal sharing of care responsibilities, combined with formal flexibility in employment, could raise India’s female labour force participation rate by around six percentage points.
Six percentage points may sound technical, but in India’s context it represents millions of additional women entering paid work. The macroeconomic effects, higher output, stronger household incomes, expanded tax bases would be substantial. The message from the modelling is clear, unpaid care is not merely a social issue; it is a macroeconomic variable.
The Platform Economy: Promise and Friction
The debate around women’s work must also grapple with the rapid expansion of digital and platform-based employment. At a recent roundtable convened by NCAER and the International Labour Organization on gender, financial inclusion, and the platform workforce, a wide spectrum of policymakers and industry representatives converged on a shared conclusion: technology does not dissolve structural inequality.
Women remain underrepresented in location-based platform services such as delivery and ride-hailing. Where they do participate, they are often concentrated in lower-paying segments or home-based digital tasks. The barriers are not abstract. They include access to smartphones, digital literacy, two-wheeler ownership, upfront onboarding costs, and safe mobility. For many women, even entering the platform economy requires credit, which is often harder for them to obtain.
Discussions at the roundtable also surfaced a subtler constraint. Platform algorithms frequently penalise workers for declining assignments. For women managing caregiving responsibilities or navigating safety concerns, the ability to refuse certain gigs is not optional, it is necessary. When flexibility is accompanied by earnings volatility and limited social protection, it becomes precarious rather than empowering.
The lesson is that labour market innovation must be matched by institutional innovation. Without gender-responsive design, new forms of work can reproduce old inequities.
Financial Inclusion: Access Is Not Enough
India has made undeniable progress in expanding formal banking access. Gender gaps in basic account ownership have narrowed significantly. Yet ownership does not automatically translate into economic agency.
Credit access remains uneven, particularly for women entrepreneurs and self-employed workers. Fintech tools have expanded possibilities, but many financial products are built on assumptions about income regularity, asset ownership, and credit history that do not align with women’s economic realities. Women’s earnings are often fragmented, seasonal, or embedded in informal networks, patterns that traditional underwriting systems struggle to capture.
Evidence presented at the NCAER - ILO dialogue reinforced a broader insight from international research: narrowing gender gaps in financial inclusion is associated with stronger growth and lower inequality. But meaningful inclusion requires more than accounts. It requires product design that recognises women’s constraints, safeguards against over-indebtedness, and systematic collection of gender-disaggregated data.
Care as Infrastructure
If there is one idea that deserves to anchor this International Women’s Day, it is this - care is infrastructure.
When policymakers discuss infrastructure, they typically mean highways, ports, and power grids. Yet childcare centres, eldercare services, and community-based support systems perform an equally foundational role. They free time, expand choices, and stabilise labour supply. If the economic value of this labour were visible, investments in care services would appear not as discretionary welfare spending but as productivity-enhancing outlays.
From Celebration to Structural Change
International Women’s Day should certainly celebrate progress. Female enrolment in education has risen. Financial access has broadened. Digital connectivity has expanded opportunity. But the structural imbalance in unpaid care persists, and it continues to shape labour market outcomes. India’s next phase of growth will depend less on headline announcements and more on whether it confronts this foundational question: who provides the care that makes all other work possible?
On this International Women’s Day, the answer cannot remain invisible. Recognising women’s achievements is important. Redistributing the burdens they carry is transformative.
