The Economic Survey 2025-26 celebrates a surge in female labour force participation, from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, with unemployment among women falling from 5.6% to 3.2%. The emphasis on expanding women’s workforce participation is well-placed, as it is seen to be at the centre of India’s growth strategy and its vision for Viksit Bharat by 2047. However, the Survey’s findings point to a more complex reality.
The share of women in regular wage employment remains stuck at just around 10.8% in rural India. Over 60% of working women remain concentrated as own-account workers or employers and as unpaid family helpers in household enterprises.
The Survey interprets this as a ‘tendency towards independent work and entrepreneurship, which offers more flexibility.’ But this raises a fundamental question: does flexibility reflect choice or the constraints under which women’s work is organised?
India’s employment data classifies home-based workers under three categories: own-account workers (OAWs), self-employed employers, and unpaid family helpers. OAWs, who operate household enterprises without hired labour, constitute more than two-thirds of the self-employed workforce in India. Widely recognised as one of the most precarious segments of India’s labour market, own account is marked by stark gender and caste divides: Nearly three in ten working women are own account workers, with representation from OBC (48.2%), followed by SC (18.6%) and ST women (9.2%).
Unpaid family helpers form an equally vulnerable group. These workers contribute to household enterprises without receiving any remuneration. Women are disproportionately represented here: 28.8% of working women work as family helpers, compared to just 7.8% of men. Research shows that the expansion of such forms of self-employment in India is closely linked to the contraction of formal employment, with workers increasingly pushed out of factory-based jobs into informal, home-based activities that often yield lower earnings than even casual wage work. The absence of social security, employment stability, and workplace protections deepens this vulnerability.
In this context, the Survey’s characterisation of women’s concentration in these activities as ‘independent work and entrepreneurship’ is deeply concerning. It risks obscuring the economic distress that underlies these employment patterns.
Moreover, since labour protections in India continue to be tied to jobs with an identifiable employer–employee relationship, most self-employed women remain outside the scope of the labour codes now being celebrated.
To its credit, the Economic Survey acknowledges the disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work that women shoulder in India, drawing on findings from the Time Use Survey. However, it then interprets women’s concentration in own-account work and household enterprises as reflecting a preference for flexible work that allows them to balance employment with unpaid labour.
This reading mistakes adaptation for choice.
Home-based and informal work allows women to remain economically active precisely because it can be interrupted, combined with domestic responsibilities, or carried out within the home. But this argument assumes the presence of a meaningful trade-off between income and flexibility. For unpaid family helpers, whose earnings are zero, and for many own-account workers with low and irregular incomes, no such trade-off exists.
In these cases, flexibility does not offset the costs of unpaid care; women simply absorb both the caregiving burden and the economic cost of inadequate or absent earnings.
The Survey’s interpretation of these employment patterns as women’s preference for flexible work, therefore, obscures the economic vulnerability embedded in these forms of labour. Flexibility here is not empowerment; it is accommodation to constrained circumstances.
The central challenge that emerges from the Economic Survey is the misalignment in policy attention.
Recent gains in female labour force participation have been driven largely by distress-led shifts into own-account work and unpaid family labour, yet the Survey’s recommendations largely presume a workforce that is already positioned to access formal employment. Measures such as STEM skilling, mobility support, and workplace protections are essential for women’s long-term economic mobility, but they deliver results only once basic constraints are addressed.
Evidence from comparable contexts shows that interventions such as income and asset support for own-account workers, legal recognition of informal work, sector-specific regulations and investments in childcare and local infrastructure are critical transitional steps. Without these conditions, formal sector-related policies risk bypassing the majority of working women who remain trapped in low-earning, insecure and often unpaid forms of work in India.
This mismatch is further evident in the sectoral distribution of employment. Close to three-fifths of employed women are clustered in agriculture.
Men, by contrast, are spread far more evenly across the economy, with roughly a third employed in each of the agricultural, secondary, and tertiary sectors. This concentration is not incidental. Agriculture is where unpaid family labour, own-account work, and low-productivity employment are most prevalent, particularly in rural India.
For India’s vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, this distinction is critical. Women-led growth cannot rest on women’s capacity to adjust to shrinking wage employment, unpaid care burdens, and increasing informalisation. While the Economic Survey offers a range of measures to raise female labour force participation, the analysis would have benefited from a more direct engagement with the conditions under which women are currently being absorbed into the labour market, especially the expansion of unpaid family work, low-earning self-employment, and sectoral concentration in agriculture, and what these patterns imply for job quality, income security, and economic autonomy.
Without such engagement, rising participation risks reflecting women’s resilience in absorbing economic distress rather than progress towards empowerment.
When a majority of working women are concentrated in precarious forms of labour, this outcome signals the absence of decent alternatives rather than entrepreneurial choice. Women-led growth demands not just more women at work, but better work for women.
Gargi Sridharan is a doctoral researcher in Economics at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS).
Basit Abdullah is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad.
Views expressed here are the authors’ own.