Recognizing Women’s Economic Contributions: Towards National Wealth and Equality

India’s economy is often celebrated for its rapid growth, its booming technology sector, and its rising global profile. But beneath these headline numbers lies an enormous and largely invisible engine: the work of women. From cooking meals and raising children to farming fields and running micro-enterprises, women contribute in ways that keep families, communities, and the broader economy functioning – yet much of this work is never counted, compensated, or acknowledged in the official measures of national wealth. Understanding and correcting this blind spot is not just an issue of fairness. It is a prerequisite for accurate economic thinking and genuinely inclusive development.

What “national wealth” fails to see 🔗

A country’s economic output is most commonly measured through its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the total monetary value of all goods and services produced in a given year. The problem is that GDP, as it is currently constructed, only counts activities that pass through markets. According to the World Economic Forum, the founding framework for GDP measurement, established in the 1940s, deliberately excluded unpaid work from its calculations. Because women perform the majority of this unpaid labour, the metric is structurally skewed against them.

This is not a minor technical oversight. As Oxfam has noted, the feminist economist Marilyn Waring described GDP as a system that counts oil spills and military spending as productive activity, while treating the unpaid care of children and families as worthless. Nearly 90 billion hours of unpaid care work are performed globally every week – work without which economic growth would simply stop – yet none of it registers in GDP calculations. The Conversation notes that as early as 1941, researcher Phyllis Deane warned that excluding unpaid household labour from national income calculations was a fundamental error – but her recommendations were ignored when the United Nations published its first System of National Accounts in 1953, setting a flawed global standard that persists to this day.

The scale of women’s unpaid work in India 🔗

The data on women’s unpaid labour in India is striking. According to a 2023 State Bank of India report, unpaid work contributes approximately ₹22.7 lakh crore to the Indian economy – roughly 7.5% of GDP. This figure, enormous as it is, still represents only a partial picture of the real contribution.

India’s own Time Use Survey 2019, conducted by the National Statistical Office, reveals the depth of this disparity. Around 81% of women aged 6 and above spend more than five hours every single day on unpaid domestic work, a figure that rises to 92% for women between the ages of 15 and 59. By contrast, only 24.5% of men aged 6 and above spend even one hour daily on unpaid domestic work. As IndiaSPend’s analysis shows, women spend about 150% more time than men on domestic and caregiving work overall – and this time comes directly at the cost of paid employment, skill development, and financial independence.

The UN Women frames this starkly: women’s unpaid work effectively subsidizes the cost of care that sustains families and supports economies, filling gaps that governments and markets leave behind – yet it is rarely recognized as “work” at all.

The informal sector: women’s second invisible contribution 🔗

Beyond unpaid domestic labour, women make up a vast portion of India’s informal economy – and this work, too, is systematically undercounted. According to Accion, approximately 85% of India’s total workforce is employed in the informal sector, which contributes over 50% of GDP. Within this, more than 17 million Indian women are engaged in home-based work alone, and 12.48 million in non-agricultural informal activities. Despite these numbers, women in the informal sector remain largely invisible to the formal systems that distribute finance, social protection, and economic opportunity.

A detailed analysis from Socio.Health describes the reality clearly: over 95% of women workers in India operate within the informal economy. A typical day for a rural woman might involve agricultural work at dawn, street vending in the afternoon, and home-based garment production in the evening. This multiplicity of roles makes women’s economic contributions nearly impossible to capture in standard labour statistics – not because the work doesn’t exist, but because the tools used to measure the economy were not designed to see it.

The Council on Foreign Relations points out that because women’s informal labour in markets, service jobs, garment work, and handicraft manufacturing is not captured by official definitions of economic productivity, national analyses value women’s contributions to India’s GDP at only about 17%. This is a dramatic undercount. The same analysis projects that if women participated in the formal economy at the same rate as men, India’s GDP could grow by an additional 27%, adding the equivalent of $2.9 trillion.

Self-help groups: grassroots economic power 🔗

One of the most significant – and often underappreciated – sites of women’s economic contribution in India is the Self-Help Group (SHG) movement. As Down to Earth reports, India currently has around 12 million SHGs, of which 88% are all-women groups. Together, these groups operate what is regarded as the world’s largest microfinance programme, covering 142 million families with savings deposits of ₹47,240 crore – and with a loan repayment rate of over 96%, consistently outperforming the formal banking sector.

Women-led SHGs under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) have enabled over 8 crore rural women to engage in income-generating activities, from food processing and handicrafts to dairy farming and small trade. These groups do not merely supplement household income – they build financial literacy, community resilience, and local economic infrastructure. Yet their contributions remain largely absent from the high-profile economic narratives that shape national policy.

Why GDP is the wrong measuring stick 🔗

The problem of undercounting women’s work is not simply about data collection. It reflects a deeper flaw in how economies are conceptualized. An Oxfam report found that a staggering 65% of women’s weekly working hours are excluded from official measures of economic activity. Unpaid care work accounts for 45% of all adults’ working hours globally – yet none of it is counted in GDP.

The India Brand Equity Foundation sums up the policy consequence of this blind spot plainly: when economic policies are drafted, women are rarely considered, even though they have always been part of the economy through wage work, self-employment, unpaid care, and family enterprise. Because their work is not fully measured, their contribution tends to be undervalued – and even when women are counted, they are clustered at the base of the economic pyramid.

The World Economic Forum and the IMF both acknowledge that because unpaid work is not measured, it is consistently overlooked by economic policy. This creates a feedback loop: invisible work produces no data, no data produces no policy, and no policy means no redistribution of the burden or recognition of the contribution.

Towards recognition: what needs to change 🔗

Acknowledging the problem is the first step; changing the system requires both political will and structural reform. Several frameworks point towards what a more inclusive approach could look like.

Counting what counts 🔗

Time-use surveys are among the most powerful tools available. Rather than measuring only market transactions, they track how people spend their time – making unpaid care work visible in national data. India’s own NSO Time Use Survey 2019 is a step in the right direction, and expanding its scope and frequency would give policymakers a far more honest picture of who is doing the work that keeps the country running. The United Nations’ SDG 5.4 specifically calls on governments to recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through supportive national policies and shared household responsibilities.

Policy reforms that redistribute the burden 🔗

Recognizing women’s economic contribution must go hand-in-hand with reducing the unequal distribution of unpaid work. IBEF advocates for a “3R” approach in all areas of policymaking: Recognizing, Reducing, and Redistributing unpaid care work. Practically, this means investing in public childcare infrastructure, expanding parental leave policies for both parents, and ensuring that programmes like MGNREGA deliver equal wages and work opportunities for women – which India’s legal framework already mandates but implementation still struggles to achieve consistently.

Formalizing the informal 🔗

A significant portion of women’s economic contribution could be better captured simply by creating pathways from the informal to the formal economy. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, India needs more policies that support women workers and promote investment in services and skills training for informal labourers. Financial inclusion initiatives – including the SHG-Bank Linkage Programme, digital banking access through Aadhaar, and microfinance expansion – have already shown what is possible when women informal workers are given tools, not just recognition.

Moving beyond GDP 🔗

More broadly, there is a growing global consensus that GDP is no longer an adequate measure of a nation’s health. Oxfam’s research points to alternative frameworks – including wellbeing indices, time-use adjusted national accounts, and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index – that capture economic reality more honestly by including unpaid labour, environmental sustainability, and social equity. For India, incorporating such measures into policy planning would not only give women’s contributions their due – it would produce better, more effective economic decisions overall.

The cost of not counting 🔗

There is a direct and measurable cost to India of continuing to ignore women’s economic contributions. Research cited by IBEF indicates that simply offering equal economic opportunities to women could add US$ 770 billion to India’s GDP by 2025. India currently has 432 million women of working age, of whom 343 million are employed in the unorganised sector – yet the formal economy largely fails to see, support, or reward their labour. The World Inequality Report 2026 documents that globally, excluding unpaid labour, women earn only 61% of men’s hourly income; when unpaid labour is factored in, this figure drops to just 32%. These are not abstract statistics – they represent real constraints on women’s autonomy, opportunity, and dignity.

Women’s economic contributions to national wealth are not marginal. They are foundational. The unpaid labour that feeds children, cares for the elderly, maintains households, and sustains communities; the informal work that produces goods, trades in markets, and fuels rural enterprise; the micro-finance discipline that outperforms commercial banks – all of this is economic activity of the highest order. The question is not whether women contribute to national wealth. The question is when our systems of measurement, policy, and recognition will be honest enough to say so.

What do you think? If India redesigned its national accounting system to include unpaid domestic and care work, how might that change the way we design public services and social policy? And at a more immediate level – whose daily labour in your own community goes unrecognized and uncounted, and what would it take to change that?

References

1. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/04/why-economic-policy-overlooks-women/
2. https://views-voices.oxfam.org.uk/2023/08/a-flawed-gdp-bypasses-womens-unpaid-care-work/
3. https://theconversation.com/womens-unpaid-work-must-be-included-in-gdp-calculations-lessons-from-history-98110
4. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/recognising-the-economic-value-of-unpaid-work-in-india
5. https://scroll.in/article/1083393/six-charts-show-how-indian-womens-unpaid-labour-underwrites-the-economy
6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work
7. https://www.accion.org/building-financial-resilience-for-women-in-the-informal-economy/
8. https://socio.health/women-in-economy/women-india-informal-economy-contributions-struggles/
9. https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-global-economy/case-studies/india/
10. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/economy/economic-survey-2022-23-special-mention-of-women-self-help-groups-will-it-translate-to-largesse-87404
11. https://tarunias.com/exams/upsc-notes/india-informal-sector/
12. https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/almost-two-thirds-of-womens-working-hours-excluded-from-gdp-globally/
13. https://www.ibef.org/blogs/roadmap-for-women-s-economic-empowerment-in-india
14. https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/wp/2019/wpiea2019225-print-pdf.pdf
15. https://www.nextias.com/ca/current-affairs/02-11-2024/contribution-of-unpaid-work-by-women
16. https://m.thewire.in/article/political-economy/in-charts-world-inequality-report-2026/amp