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IWWAGE-Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality

Women’s Entrepreneurship in India: Harnessing the Gender Dividend

India’s economic growth has largely bypassed its smallest enterprises-particularly those led by women. Despite an increase in the number of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), only 21.5% were owned by women as of 2018-19. Even more concerning is the stagnation in growth: between 2010 and 2015, the share of women-led enterprises and their gross value added (GVA) remained static, while the share of workers in these enterprises declined.

Women entrepreneurs face layered barriers-from deep-rooted social norms and gender biases to unequal access to education, credit, and networks. For many women, entrepreneurship is not a path to scale but a survivalist response to limited employment opportunities, wage inequality, and inflexible work conditions.

India ranked 49th out of 57 countries in the 2020 Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs-a stark reflection of the odds stacked against women in the entrepreneurial landscape.

To enable women to thrive as entrepreneurs, we must address structural and cultural challenges. Key recommendations include:
– Challenging restrictive gender norms and stereotypes;
– Ensuring better access to education and digital literacy;
– Expanding affordable and inclusive financing mechanisms;
– Creating women-friendly business networks and incubators;
– Leveraging technology to connect women to markets, mentorship, and information.

Enabling women to realise their entrepreneurial ambitions is not only a matter of equity-it is essential for India’s inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

Women in the Indian Informal Economy

Globally, the informal economy employs over two billion people aged 15 and above-accounting for 61.2 per cent of total employment. In India, a slightly higher proportion of women than men are engaged in informal employment, despite the absolute numbers being lower. Informality often reflects a lack of socio-economic development and education, with workers possessing limited or no formal qualifications being more vulnerable to informal work.

In India, women are extensively engaged in productive and reproductive activities, yet much of this labour remains invisible. They are concentrated in low-skilled, low-paid informal jobs with minimal or no social protection-working as domestic workers, self-employed home-based workers, or in other precarious roles. These challenges are further compounded by caste- and religion-based discrimination, revealing the layered nature of women’s marginalisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing gender inequalities within the informal sector. With the collapse of livelihoods during the lockdown, women bore a disproportionate burden of job losses and increased household responsibilities. The economic shock reinforced pre-existing gaps in employment, wages, and access to social security.

To address these inequities, the following policy recommendations are key:
– Expand employment opportunities through direct public investment and job generation, including reservation for women in these initiatives.
– Improve working conditions in the informal sector by recognising all types of work (including home-based), enforcing minimum wages, and reducing gender wage gaps.
– Strengthen access to social protection, especially old-age pensions and healthcare, including occupational health services for women in often-overlooked sectors.
– Invest in gender-sensitive infrastructure, such as safe public transport, crèche facilities, and accessible toilets.
– Support collective organising among informal women workers to strengthen their bargaining power and representation.

Addressing informality through a gendered lens is crucial for building an inclusive and equitable economy.

Women and Unpaid Work

Women’s workforce participation in India has been consistently low-and steadily declining over the last 15 years, as recorded by official surveys like those conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). However, these numbers fail to capture the full extent of women’s economic contributions, largely because they exclude unpaid work-domestic chores, caregiving, and community roles-that women perform on a daily basis.

Feminist scholars have long advocated for the recognition, reduction, and redistribution of unpaid work as essential steps toward achieving gender equality. If the definition of work is expanded to include these invisible activities, it becomes evident that many more women are contributing to the economy than current statistics suggest.

The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these inequalities. As homes transformed into sites of both work and survival, women’s unpaid workload increased significantly. A Rapid Assessment Survey conducted by the Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) in Delhi found that women in urban informal sectors-such as domestic work, waste picking, street vending, and construction-reported a significant rise in unpaid responsibilities, including childcare, eldercare, and food provisioning. Despite other family members being at home, women continued to shoulder the majority of domestic work, often with little or no help.

To build a more inclusive and equitable economy, it is critical to recognise and value unpaid labour and ensure that data and policy frameworks reflect the full spectrum of women’s work.

Digital Solutions to Unlock the Potential of SHGs and their Federations

Digital tools hold the promise of accelerating women’s empowerment, enhancing the effectiveness and efficacy of existing initiatives, providing new tools to improve knowledge, and creating new opportunities for women to connect and share information.  Most of these initiatives revolve around Self Help Groups (SHGs) and federations, which are social support groups known for empowering women through social mobilisation and financial inclusion. To understand the varied digitization initiatives within the SHG ecosystem in India, IWWAGE undertook a detailed landscape assessment of such initiatives. The study, undertaken in 2018, covered various state chapters of NRLM and SHPAs across states like Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, to understand the level of digitisation undertaken in each. This brief discusses the observations and findings from the study for Chhattisgarh, and identifies challenges and potential opportunities to implement digital solutions to support SHGs.

 

Accelerating Women’s Access to Entitlements through Digital Solutions

Digital innovation presents exciting opportunities for women who are part of collectives or Self Help Groups (SHGs). Technology can be used to link women within SHGs to each other and other existing l networks, and layer other services and use cases to promote their social and economic empowerment.  More specifically, SHGs can use digital platforms to request and receive information and services, so as to enable their members access these services. Moreover, innovative digital solutions can address mobility, cost and literacy barriers and significantly increase the penetration of these benefits. Haqdarshak is an innovative mobile application developed by Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Ltd (HESPL), in collaboration with Save the Children and Nokia.  The app provides a ready reference of more than 200 central and state government welfare schemes and programmes, and the benefits promised, eligibility criteria, documents required, and application process for each. The brief brings a snapshot of the model.

 

IWWAGE- ISST Briefs

The series of research brief presented below identifies the barriers to women’s labourforce participation and highlights each issue in a separate brief based on available evidence. This is a collaborative series between IWWAGE and ISST.  The briefs have been prepared by IWWAGE and ISST team members and reviewed by an internal team comprising of Ratna Sudarshan, Aasha Kapur Mehta, Sona Mitra and Soumya Kapoor Mehta.

Mobility and Safety of Women: Interlinkages with Labour Force Participation

One of the major factors limiting the participation of women in the labour force is concern for their safety. These include fear of sexual violence in streets, in and around public transportation, schools, workplaces and other public and private spaces. This reality decreases women’s and girls’ freedom of mobility by impacting their ability to participate in school, work and public life; access to essential services; and enjoyment of cultural and recreational opportunities. In particular, ensuring a safe city and a safe workplace by investing in safe and affordable modes of public transportation, infrastructural additions to make cities more accessible for women, and inclusive legal provisions for safety at work can be important enablers of female LFPR. This policy brief attempts to describe the issues underpinning women’s safety as a barrier to their participation in the labour force; and shares recommendations to ensure that safety does not act as a barrier to mobility and the ability to access services that might improve life prospects and opportunities for women and girls.

Women’s Entrepreneurship in India: Harnessing the Gender Dividend

India’s economic growth story has eluded a large section of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs)—in fact the smallest of the enterprises led by women. This is evident in the fact that, despite the growing number of MSMEs in India, as of 2018–19, only one in every five enterprises was owned by women (21.5 per cent). Not only is women’s representation across sectors low, the growth of existing enterprises also seems to have stagnated over time. This brief seeks to highlight the key challenges to women’s entrepreneurship in India, including social norms and biases, lack of education, unequal opportunities for affordable financing, and limited networking opportunities which prevent them from exploring their full entrepreneurial potential. It also seeks to document some of the key recommendations to address these social, economic and technological constraints.

Financial Inclusion and Female Labour Force Participation

The rapid growth in India over the past decade has been coupled with a steady decline in female labour force participation. Despite rising GDPs, improvements in higher education attainment as well as fall in fertility rates, India’s female labour force participation rate (LFPR) has continued to drop. This has been further aggravated by job stagnation and high unemployment rates in recent years which have impacted women disproportionately and may worsen due to the ongoing pandemic. In India, existing societal norms, low literacy levels as well as lack of access to fixed assets further excludes women from the formal financial structure, thereby hampering their socio-economic growth. The brief analyses the barriers faced by women while accessing financial services and products, the lack of gender- specific policies, discrimination towards women entrepreneurs and geographic distance to financial institutions. Attempt is also made to look at policy interventions, and schemes designed to address some of the supply side barriers.

Barriers for Women in Public Employment

Despite high economic growth and improved health and economic outcomes since the 1990s, female labour force participation (FLFP) has stagnated or declined in India, falling to 17.5 per cent in 2017–18 according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). For working women, the public sector is the largest provider of formal or regular salaried jobs in the Indian economy. Given stagnating FLFP according to official data, the severe impacts of COVID-19 on unemployment, and the necessity to boost economic growth and recovery, removing barriers to women’s opportunities in public employment is more important than ever. The brief looks at the role of women’s public employment prospects in not only creating needed jobs, but delivering indirect benefits such as improved public service delivery, greater social protection for women, and boosts to consumption from increased household incomes. Addressing them will help guarantee the right to safe working conditions, adequate compensation, and deserved social protections that will benefit women workers and the economy at large.

Women in the Indian Informal Economy

Globally, two billion of population aged 15 years and above works in the informal economy, representing 61.2 per cent of world employment. Informal employment is a greater source of employment for men (63 per cent) than women (58.1 per cent). In India, although the absolute numbers are lower, a slightly higher percentage of women workers are in informal employment as compared to men. In India, women are almost always involved in some kind of productive and/or reproductive activity, but much of their work is invisible, and they are largely employed in low skilled, low paid informal work with little or no social security, with a consolidation of caste or religion-based disadvantages, even within a larger context of women’s marginalisation. Within this informal workforce with its persistent gender-based occupational segregation, the COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection. The brief analyses gender dimension of informality, its implications and captures the gendered experiences of informal workers during the lockdown and the post-lockdown period.

Women and Unpaid Work

Women’s workforce participation rates (WPR) in India, as measured by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), have been low and consistently declining over the last 15 years or so. An important part of the reason for this is women’s unpaid and unaccounted work. Time is spent on activities which remain excluded from the radar of large sample surveys on employment. Feminist scholars have been arguing for recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid activities to be able to move towards gender equality. With the transformation of the household into the site of work and livelihood due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, power relations are seen manifesting both within and outside the household, forcing women to spend hours in backbreaking work, often not even recognised as work in surveys or discourses. The brief assesses the impact of the pandemic and the consequent lockdown on women workers in informal sectors and shares recommendations to recognise and redistribute unpaid work.