Enhancing Social Protection for Women in the Workforce

For most women workers in India, a job is rarely a stable contract with predictable wages, paid leave, and a pension waiting at the end. It is a fragile, day-to-day arrangement built on hawking vegetables, stitching at home, sweeping floors in someone else’s house, or picking through waste. As economies have shifted away from secure factory and government jobs toward flexible, contract-based, and informal arrangements, women have ended up bearing the heaviest costs of this transformation. Strengthening social protection for women in the workforce, therefore, is not a welfare add-on. It is the missing scaffolding that determines whether women can work safely, save anything, recover from illness, and grow old with dignity.

The deepening insecurity of women’s work 🔗

The single most important fact about women’s employment in India is that the overwhelming majority of it lies outside the protective net of formal labour law. According to a widely cited International Labour Organization estimate, around 82 percent of working women in India are concentrated in the informal sector, doing domestic work, home-based piecework, waste picking, construction, street vending, and similar jobs. The eShram national database has formally registered more than 151 million women as unorganised workers, making women the majority of that vast population.

Two structural shifts have made this picture worse rather than better. First, even formerly secure jobs in manufacturing, retail, and services are increasingly being broken up into short-term contracts, sub-contracted piece work, and platform-based gigs. Second, women, who already faced barriers to entering the formal workforce, are being pulled disproportionately into these precarious arrangements. The result is a workforce where insecurity is the default, not the exception.

What insecurity actually looks like 🔗

The features of informal work are remarkably consistent across trades. There are no written contracts. Wages are irregular and often below the legal minimum. Social security benefits are absent. Legal recourse, when something goes wrong, is practically out of reach. A recent analysis of women in India’s informal sector describes how a street vendor can lose her selling spot during a municipal raid without warning, a domestic worker can be dismissed instantly without notice or severance, and a home-based garment worker can have her orders cancelled overnight with no income to fall back on.

Because most labour laws were drafted with formal employment in mind, women working as domestic help, for instance, have no clear legal framework protecting them from wage theft, arbitrary dismissal, or workplace harassment. Maternity benefit laws apply only to establishments with more than 10 employees, which means childbearing typically translates directly into lost income for informal workers.

Why social protection matters so much 🔗

Social protection is the set of guarantees that prevents a job loss, an illness, a pregnancy, or old age from pushing a household into destitution. For workers in informal arrangements, it has to be designed differently from the classic employer-funded model. India’s Code on Social Security, 2020 defines it broadly as the protections that ensure access to healthcare and income security in situations of old age, unemployment, sickness, invalidity, work injury, maternity, or loss of a breadwinner.

Yet the gap between the legal definition and lived reality is enormous. National Sample Survey data has long suggested that only a small minority of women in informal work have access to any meaningful social security. The consequences play out across three crucial dimensions.

Healthcare 🔗

An informal worker who falls ill faces a double blow: she loses her wages for the day and she pays out of pocket for treatment. Without health insurance or paid sick leave, even a moderate illness can wipe out months of savings. Schemes like Ayushman Bharat are being slowly extended to informal and gig workers through the eShram platform, but coverage remains patchy, and awareness among the poorest women workers is limited.

Pensions and old-age security 🔗

The Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-dhan pension scheme, launched in 2019 for unorganised workers, is one of the first serious attempts to address old-age income insecurity. It offers a guaranteed monthly pension of Rs 3,000 after the age of 60 in exchange for small monthly contributions during working years. Coverage, however, is still tiny compared to the scale of the informal workforce, and women, who tend to have lower and more irregular earnings, often find even modest contributions difficult to sustain.

Job security and dispute resolution 🔗

Job security in any meaningful sense remains the missing piece. The Code on Social Security, 2020 has introduced National and State Unorganised Workers’ Welfare Boards and a national database of unorganised workers. The Code also extends maternity benefits, life and disability cover, and health benefits to gig and platform workers for the first time. However, as a field analysis from Ahmedabad documents, informal workers themselves point out that registering on a portal is very different from actually receiving timely benefits, and the institutional structures meant to enforce minimum wages and workplace safety have often failed in practice.

The role of unions and NGOs 🔗

If the state has been slow, civil society has not. The most influential example anywhere in the world of women in the informal economy organising themselves is the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), founded in 1972 in Ahmedabad by labour lawyer Ela Bhatt. SEWA is today the single largest central trade union in India for women workers in the informal economy, with a membership of around 3.78 million women across 20 states.

What makes SEWA important is not just its size but its model. It treats poor women simultaneously as workers and as women, and it combines the logic of a union with the logic of cooperatives. SEWA has set up its own bank, dozens of trade cooperatives, health and childcare collectives, and insurance programmes. Its decades of advocacy contributed to the passage of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill in 2013, which gives vendors licences, protects them from arbitrary eviction, and regulates fines.

New frontiers: climate, gig work, and digital platforms 🔗

The work of advocacy is constantly being expanded. SEWA has more recently piloted what is reported to be among the world’s first heatwave insurance schemes for informal women workers, compensating members for days when extreme heat makes outdoor work impossible. Other organisations such as Aajeevika Bureau, Working People’s Charter, and Bandhkam Mazdoor Sangathan focus on migrant workers, construction workers, and platform-based gig workers, pressing for portable benefits and worker registration.

NGOs and unions also play a less visible but equally important role: they translate complex legal entitlements into practical access. They run helplines, fill out forms, accompany workers to government offices, and document violations. Without this layer of intermediation, the gap between rights on paper and rights in practice is essentially unbridgeable for most women workers.

The gendered division of labour 🔗

Any honest discussion of women’s work in the economy must also reckon with the work that is not paid for at all. The reason so many women work in flexible, home-based, and part-time arrangements is not simply choice. It is because they are doing two jobs: one in the market and one in the household.

India’s Time Use Survey 2024, conducted by the National Statistics Office, shows that women aged 15 to 59 spend about 19.7 percent of their day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with 2.6 percent for men. On average, women spend roughly 305 minutes a day on unpaid activities, nearly six times the 56 minutes spent by men. The 2019 round of the survey, analysed in a paper by the Observer Research Foundation, found that globally women spend about three times as many hours as men on unpaid care work; in India the gap is eight times.

How unpaid work shapes paid work 🔗

This skewed division has direct economic consequences. Research using the 2019 Time Use Survey found that an additional hour of unpaid care work each day reduced a woman’s odds of being employed by 38 percent, of being self-employed by 27 percent, and of pursuing higher education by 34 percent. In other words, the hours women spend cooking, cleaning, fetching water, and caring for children and the elderly come at the direct cost of their participation in paid work and learning.

The same dynamic helps explain why India’s female labour force participation rate has remained low. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that if women were represented in the formal economy at the same rate as men, the Indian economy could grow by an additional 60 percent by 2025, adding around $2.9 trillion. The economic case for redistributing care work is, in pure GDP terms, staggering.

Recognise, reduce, redistribute 🔗

A widely used framework for tackling this imbalance is the “three Rs”: recognise unpaid care work in statistics and policy, reduce its drudgery through public services such as piped water, clean cooking fuel, childcare, and elder care, and redistribute it more equally between women and men, and between households and the state. Each of these levers is also a social protection lever. A public crèche reduces women’s care burden, allowing them to take up paid work; maternity benefits compensate for biological care work; pensions support older women who spent decades in unpaid labour and have no retirement savings of their own.

Bringing it together 🔗

Enhancing social protection for women in the workforce is, in the end, a single integrated agenda. It requires recognising that the bulk of women’s paid work happens in informal settings, and redesigning healthcare, maternity benefits, pensions, and dispute resolution to fit that reality. It requires strong worker organisations and NGOs, because rights without organised pressure remain words on paper. And it requires confronting the unpaid work that quietly subsidises every household and every economy in the country.

The Code on Social Security, 2020 and the eShram database are meaningful first steps, but they will only matter if benefits actually flow, if women workers know about them, and if the underlying gendered division of labour is taken seriously rather than treated as natural.

What do you think? Should social protection in India be tied to a worker’s job, or treated as a universal right of citizenship that follows the worker from one informal gig to the next? And how would your own household look if the unpaid care work in it were counted, costed, and shared equally?

References

1. https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/india-must-protect-the-150-million-women-in-the-informal-sector/
2. https://gender.study/gender-and-governance/women-india-informal-sector-indispensable/
3. https://vvgnli.gov.in/en/code-social-security-2020
4. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2076951
5. https://idronline.org/article/rights/do-indias-labour-codes-address-informal-workers-needs/
6. https://www.sewa.org/about-us/
7. https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/ela-bhatt-self-employed-womens-association/
8. https://m.thewire.in/article/gender/what-the-time-use-survey-says-about-womens-work
9. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data
10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387000150_Unpaid_Care_Work_Time_and_Women's_Employment_Status_Evidence_from_India
11. https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-global-economy/case-studies/india/