The Changing Economic Role of Women: Challenges and Opportunities

Across boardrooms, laboratories, kitchens, and farms, the story of women’s economic life is being rewritten. More women than ever are earning, leading, and innovating, yet the wage envelope is still thinner for them, and the work done at home remains largely invisible in national accounts. Understanding this shift, with all its progress and pitfalls, is central to understanding the modern economy itself.

Progress in women’s paid work
The education-employment pipeline
The rural surge and what it really means
Pay equity and economic barriers
The glass ceiling
Why the ceiling persists
Other economic barriers
The gendered redefinition of work
Putting a number on unpaid care
From invisibility to policy
The care economy as paid work
Future prospects
Demography and the growth dividend
Policy, law, and corporate change
Technology, both ally and risk
Cultural change at home

Progress in women’s paid work

The last two decades have seen a quiet revolution in women’s participation in paid employment. From medicine and law to space science and software engineering, fields once considered male strongholds have opened up significantly. India’s Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR), which had stagnated for years, rose sharply from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24 according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. Globally too, the trajectory is upward, with women now making up around 28% of the global STEM workforce in 2024, compared with 21% in 2016.

This rise is not just about numbers; it is about visibility. Women now run banks, pilot fighter jets, lead missions to the Moon, and head multinational corporations. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s lunar and solar missions placed women scientists in highly visible leadership roles, signalling a generational shift in what girls can aspire to.

The education-employment pipeline

Much of this momentum has come from education. India has one of the highest proportions of female STEM graduates in the world, with women graduates rising from 38.4% in 2014-15 to 42.6% in 2021-22. Better schooling, lower fertility, urbanisation, and digital connectivity have together expanded the pool of women ready to enter paid work. Skill-based programmes and remote work options that became mainstream after the pandemic have also helped, especially for women in smaller towns and rural areas who could not previously commute long distances.

The rural surge and what it really means

A closer look at the recent jump in FLFPR shows that rural female participation surged from 24.6% to 41.5% between 2017-18 and 2022-23, while urban participation grew much more modestly. Some of this is genuine progress, but a portion reflects distress-driven entry into low-paid, own-account work in agriculture and household enterprises. Counting matters here: when statisticians improve how they measure unpaid family labour, more women appear in the data even if their lives have not changed dramatically. Progress is real, but it must be read with care.

Pay equity and economic barriers

Even where women have entered paid work in large numbers, the rewards are unevenly distributed. The gender pay gap remains stubborn. Globally, the International Labour Organization estimates that women earn about 20% less than men on average. In specific high-skill sectors the gap is far wider; a recent study of India’s tech industry covering over 80,000 employees found a gender pay gap of 30.51%, with the gap widening at higher income levels.

The glass ceiling

The pay gap is closely linked to another structural problem: the glass ceiling. The term describes an invisible but firm barrier that prevents qualified women from rising to the top rungs of organisations. The barrier is not written into any contract; it is built from unconscious bias, narrow networks, lack of mentorship, and the assumption that long hours and constant availability define a “serious” professional.

The Indian numbers are telling. Women may form nearly half of entry-level positions in many sectors, yet in the same tech industry study, out of 28 CEO positions and 51 president or vice president positions, only two each were held by women. In banking and finance, women make up close to half the workforce but only a small fraction of board-level positions. The deeper one climbs, the thinner the air gets for women.

Why the ceiling persists

Several factors lock the ceiling in place. Career breaks for childbirth and caregiving often fall on women, leading to lost promotions and pay increments. Sponsorship – having a senior person actively push your name forward – is rarer for women than mentorship. Workplace cultures that valorise late-night meetings and constant travel penalise anyone with caregiving responsibilities. And subtle biases shape how assertiveness, ambition, or even silence are read differently in men and women.

Other economic barriers

Beyond pay and promotion, women face barriers in accessing credit, owning land, and starting businesses. Safety concerns around commuting, inadequate childcare infrastructure, and restrictive social norms about which work is “appropriate” continue to filter women’s choices. As the Goldman Sachs analysis notes, bringing women’s labour force participation closer to peak levels could add roughly a percentage point to India’s potential growth – a reminder that these barriers are not only unjust, they are economically costly.

The gendered redefinition of work

For most of economic history, “work” meant activity that produced a wage or a market price. Cooking, cleaning, fetching water, raising children, caring for the elderly, and tending to sick relatives – all overwhelmingly done by women – were classified as “non-economic.” They appeared nowhere in the Gross Domestic Product. This invisible labour is now being reassessed, and the conversation around it is changing the meaning of work itself.

Putting a number on unpaid care

The first step has been measurement. India’s Time Use Survey, conducted by the National Statistical Office, has been pivotal. The 2019 round found that 81% of females aged six and above spent over five hours daily on unpaid domestic work, while only 24.5% of men spent over an hour. The 2024 survey showed women aged 15 to 59 spending on average around 305 minutes per day on unpaid household tasks.

When economists value this time at the wage that would have been paid in the formal labour market, the numbers are striking. The Ministry of Women and Child Development has indicated that the economic value of women’s unpaid domestic and care work in India lies between 15% and 17% of GDP. Globally, women perform around three-quarters of all unpaid care work, a contribution that quietly sustains every market economy.

From invisibility to policy

Recognising unpaid work changes how policymakers think. If childcare, eldercare, and household maintenance are real economic activities, then public investment in care infrastructure – creches, eldercare centres, paid family leave, accessible water and sanitation – is not “welfare” but economic policy. The Supreme Court’s recognition of childcare leave as a constitutional right for working mothers reflects this shifting understanding. Equally important is the push to redistribute care work between women and men, rather than merely valuing it more.

The care economy as paid work

A related shift is the recognition of paid care work – performed by ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers, nurses, and domestic workers – as a legitimate and skilled sector. These workers, mostly women, have long been underpaid and informally employed. Bringing them into formal labour protections is part of the same project of taking women’s economic contribution seriously.

Future prospects

The direction of travel is clear, even if the pace is uneven. Several forces are likely to keep pushing women’s economic role forward in the coming years.

Demography and the growth dividend

Falling fertility rates and rising education levels mean more women are available for paid work and stay in it longer. McKinsey Global Institute estimated some years ago that India could add significantly to its GDP by closing gender gaps in the labour market. Demographically, the country has a narrow window to convert this potential into real growth, and women’s participation is central to that conversion.

Policy, law, and corporate change

Maternity benefits, equal remuneration laws, sexual harassment protections at workplaces, and corporate disclosure norms on diversity are all gradually reshaping the terrain. Many companies now publish gender pay-gap data, set targets for women in leadership, and invest in returnship programmes for women rejoining after a break. The push for gender-disaggregated data is itself a quiet revolution; what gets counted gets acted upon.

Technology, both ally and risk

Digital platforms, online learning, and flexible work make it easier for women to combine paid work with other responsibilities. At the same time, automation and artificial intelligence could disproportionately affect sectors where women are concentrated, such as routine clerical work. Skilling programmes that prepare women for higher-value roles will determine whether technology widens or narrows the gap.

Cultural change at home

Perhaps the most decisive frontier is the household. As long as care work is overwhelmingly seen as women’s responsibility, every workplace policy will run into a wall. Men’s participation in domestic and care work – what economists sometimes call the “second shift” – is the underlying variable that determines how far women’s economic role can stretch. This is where social norms, parenting practices, school curricula, and everyday conversation matter as much as any government scheme.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were fully counted in GDP, how might our idea of who contributes to the economy change? And in your own observation, where does the glass ceiling feel thickest – in pay, in promotions, or in the unspoken assumptions about who belongs in leadership?

References

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The Changing Economic Role of Women: Challenges and Opportunities

Table of Contents

Progress in women’s paid work 🔗

The education-employment pipeline 🔗

The rural surge and what it really means 🔗

Pay equity and economic barriers 🔗

The glass ceiling 🔗

Why the ceiling persists 🔗

Other economic barriers 🔗

The gendered redefinition of work 🔗

Putting a number on unpaid care 🔗

From invisibility to policy 🔗

The care economy as paid work 🔗

Future prospects 🔗

Demography and the growth dividend 🔗

Policy, law, and corporate change 🔗

Technology, both ally and risk 🔗

Cultural change at home 🔗