Promoting Decent Work for Women: Challenges and Solutions

Work is central to how people sustain their lives, build identities, and participate in society. But what happens when half the population faces systemic barriers to accessing quality employment? For women across the world – and especially in India – the path to meaningful, dignified work is riddled with obstacles that go far beyond the workplace. From shouldering unpaid household labour to navigating discriminatory norms, women’s experience of work remains vastly different from that of men. This is precisely why the concept of “decent work,” championed by the International Labour Organization (ILO), matters so deeply in the context of gender equality.

What is decent work? 🔗

The term “decent work” was introduced by the ILO in 1999 to capture the idea that employment should be productive, fairly compensated, secure, and carried out under conditions of freedom and dignity. It is not simply about having a job. It is about having a job that respects your rights, provides social security, and allows you a voice in decisions that affect your working life.

The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda rests on four strategic pillars:

Employment creation: Ensuring opportunities for productive and remunerative work for all who seek it. Rights at work: Guaranteeing fundamental labour rights, including freedom from forced labour, child labour, and discrimination. Social protection: Providing access to healthcare, pensions, safe working conditions, and parental leave. Social dialogue: Enabling workers, employers, and governments to negotiate and shape workplace policies collectively. Gender equality cuts across all four pillars as a crosscutting objective.

This framework is also deeply connected to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly Goal 8, which calls for sustained, inclusive economic growth and decent work for all. Yet achieving this goal for women requires addressing deeply entrenched structural and cultural barriers.

Why decent work looks different for women 🔗

On paper, decent work is a universal aspiration. In practice, women face a distinct set of challenges that prevent them from accessing it on equal terms with men. These challenges are not merely economic – they are rooted in social norms, cultural expectations, and the way “work” itself is defined.

Traditional economic frameworks tend to recognise only paid, market-based activities as “work.” This means the enormous volume of unpaid labour that women perform – cooking, cleaning, caregiving, childcare – is rendered invisible in national accounts and policy discussions. When work is conceptualised so narrowly, the contributions women make to families, communities, and the broader economy simply do not count.

This narrow lens has real consequences. It means that policies designed to promote employment or extend social protection often fail to account for the realities of women’s lives. And it means that the barriers women face are not just about discrimination in hiring or pay – they begin much earlier, in the home.

The double burden: productive and reproductive work 🔗

One of the most significant obstacles to decent work for women is what scholars and policymakers call the “double burden.” This refers to the expectation that women simultaneously perform productive work (paid employment) and reproductive work (unpaid domestic and caregiving labour). While men’s identity and daily routine are largely organised around paid employment, women are expected to manage the household and care for dependents – regardless of whether they also hold a job.

What the data tells us 🔗

The scale of this imbalance is staggering. According to India’s National Statistical Organisation’s Time Use Survey (2019), women spend roughly eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men. Even women who are highly educated or earn their own incomes do not spend significantly less time on domestic duties – suggesting that social norms around caregiving are deeply entrenched and resistant to individual-level changes in status.

A government policy brief estimated that working-age women spend about 5.6 hours daily on unpaid work, compared to just 30 minutes for men. The gap is even wider in urban areas, where women spend nearly ten times more time on unpaid care work than men. The economic value of this unpaid labour has been estimated at 15 to 17 per cent of GDP – a massive contribution that receives neither wages nor recognition.

More recent data from the 2024 Time Use Survey indicates that an average woman aged six years and above still spends around 426 minutes daily on unpaid care and domestic work – nearly unchanged from 2019. For urban women in paid employment, this creates an acute “double burden,” as they spend comparable time on both employment and domestic tasks.

The consequences of time poverty 🔗

This unequal division of labour creates what is known as “time poverty.” Women who spend most of their waking hours on unpaid domestic work simply do not have enough time left for paid employment, skill development, education, or even rest. Research has shown that this has serious effects on mental and physical health. A study cited by IndiaSpend found that each additional hour of daily caregiving reduces the likelihood of women reporting satisfactory life outcomes and good physical health by significant margins.

The chronic stress associated with managing both paid and unpaid work is also linked to higher rates of depression and anxiety among women. Multiple international studies have confirmed that inequitable distribution of housework contributes substantially to gender differences in mental health outcomes.

Why traditional work frameworks fall short 🔗

The conventional System of National Accounts (SNA) – the global standard for measuring economic activity – does not include unpaid domestic and care work as “productive” activity. This means that when governments design employment policies, social protection schemes, or labour market reforms, they are working with an incomplete picture of how economies actually function.

Feminist economists like Indira Hirway have long argued against this arbitrary separation. The division of the economy into “productive” and “reproductive” spheres ignores the fundamental interdependence of these activities. Paid work cannot happen without someone – overwhelmingly women – performing the unpaid labour that feeds, clothes, and cares for the workforce.

When policymakers ignore this reality, the result is a labour market that appears gender-neutral on the surface but is structurally biased. Women who leave the workforce to care for children or elderly parents are not making a “choice” in any meaningful sense – they are responding to a system that provides no alternatives. Without affordable childcare, elder care services, or adequate parental leave, the burden defaults to women.

Decent work and the care economy 🔗

In recent years, there has been growing recognition that the care economy – both paid and unpaid – is foundational to all other economic activity. The ILO has developed its 5R Framework for Decent Care Work, which provides a structured approach to addressing the care deficit. The five Rs stand for: recognise unpaid care work, reduce the burden of care work, redistribute care responsibilities more equitably between men and women, reward care workers with fair pay and decent conditions, and represent care workers in decision-making processes.

This framework acknowledges something crucial: you cannot promote decent work for women without simultaneously addressing the unpaid work that shapes their participation in the labour market. Investing in care infrastructure – such as creches, daycare centres, and elder care facilities – is not just a “women’s issue.” It is an economic strategy. According to ILO estimates, investing in the care economy could generate 299 million jobs by 2035 and yield a return of $3.76 in global GDP for every dollar invested.

The Indian policy landscape 🔗

India has made some legislative progress in this area. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act of 2017 extended paid maternity leave to 26 weeks for women working in the organised sector. The Act also mandated creche facilities in establishments with 50 or more employees. However, enforcement remains uneven, and the benefits largely exclude women in the informal sector – who constitute the majority of the female workforce.

The UNDP India has been working with government agencies to strengthen urban care ecosystems, focusing not just on expanding access to affordable childcare but also on professionalising the care workforce and encouraging shared caregiving within households. Campaigns like #GharSeShuru aim to shift norms around who is responsible for domestic and care work.

Still, much more needs to be done. The female labour force participation rate remains below global averages despite rising education levels among women. Government estimates suggest that approximately 708 million women worldwide remain outside the labour force due to unpaid care responsibilities, compared to just 40 million men – a gap that reflects systemic failure rather than individual preference.

Gender equality as a crosscutting goal 🔗

The ILO has consistently positioned gender equality as a crosscutting objective of the Decent Work Agenda, not a standalone issue. This means every pillar – employment creation, rights at work, social protection, and social dialogue – must be examined through a gender lens.

Employment creation 🔗

Simply creating more jobs is not enough if those jobs are concentrated in sectors where women face discrimination, earn lower wages, or work without contracts. Targeted interventions are needed to promote women’s entrepreneurship, improve access to credit and training, and ensure that employment growth benefits women in both rural and urban areas.

Rights at work 🔗

Women are disproportionately represented in informal, precarious, and home-based work – precisely the forms of employment where labour rights are weakest. The ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189), adopted in 2011, was a landmark step in extending labour protections to a workforce that is overwhelmingly female. Ensuring ratification and implementation of such standards remains critical.

Social protection 🔗

Social protection systems must be designed to cover not just formal sector workers but also those in the informal economy and those performing unpaid care work. This includes access to maternity protection, healthcare, old-age pensions, and workplace safety – regardless of employment status.

Social dialogue 🔗

Women remain underrepresented in trade unions, employer organisations, and policy-making bodies. Increasing women’s participation in social dialogue is essential for ensuring that labour policies reflect their needs and priorities. Building alliances with women’s organisations and extending union outreach to workers in the informal sector are important steps in this direction.

Rethinking work: from market labour to total labour 🔗

At the heart of the decent work challenge for women is a conceptual shift that remains incomplete. As long as “work” is defined purely in terms of market transactions and wage labour, women’s enormous contribution through unpaid reproductive work will continue to be overlooked. And as long as it is overlooked, policy interventions will remain inadequate.

A comprehensive approach to decent work must account for total labour – both paid and unpaid. This means designing macroeconomic policies that recognise the interdependence of productive and reproductive work. It means investing in care infrastructure not as a welfare measure but as an economic priority. It means reforming social protection systems to cover informal and unpaid workers. And it means actively challenging the gender norms that assign caregiving responsibilities almost exclusively to women.

The shift will not come from policy alone. As the UNDP has argued, meaningful change requires transforming expectations across households, communities, and institutions so that care is recognised as a shared social responsibility. Infrastructure investments can help redistribute unpaid labour. Evidence from countries like Zimbabwe and Uganda shows that access to labour-saving home appliances is associated with greater male participation in domestic work. Similarly, better public transport and safer public spaces expand women’s ability to access employment outside the home.

The road ahead 🔗

Promoting decent work for women is not a matter of adding gender-sensitive provisions to existing frameworks. It requires fundamentally rethinking how work is defined, measured, and valued. The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda provides a robust foundation, but its potential can only be realised when all four pillars are applied with an explicit commitment to gender equality – and when the invisible labour that sustains economies is finally made visible.

Progress will require coordinated action from multiple stakeholders: governments must invest in care infrastructure and enforce labour protections; employers must adopt family-friendly workplace policies; civil society must continue to advocate for recognition of unpaid work; and households must embrace a more equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities. None of these changes is easy, but all of them are necessary.

What do you think? Can decent work for women ever be fully achieved without first resolving the unequal distribution of unpaid care work within households? And in a country where the informal sector dominates female employment, how can social protection be meaningfully extended to women who work outside the formal economy?

References

1. https://www.ilo.org/topics-and-sectors/decent-work-and-2030-agenda-sustainable-development
2. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@europe/@ro-geneva/@ilo-lisbon/documents/event/wcms_667247.pdf
3. https://www.ilo.org/international-labour-standards/benefits-international-labour-standards
4. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data
5. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2024/mar/doc202435319501.pdf
6. https://m.thewire.in/article/gender/why-urban-women-face-a-greater-double-burden-of-paid-and-unpaid-work
7. https://www.indiaspend.com/gendercheck/why-the-double-burden-of-employment-and-unpaid-work-is-greater-for-urban-women-958774
8. https://telanganatoday.com/rewind-work-that-does-not-pay-the-double-burden-women-bear
9. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/care-and-support-all-investing-human-rights-equality-and-decent-work
10. https://www.undp.org/india/blog/who-cares-making-care-everyones-work
11. https://www.ilo.org/topics-and-sectors/gender-equality
12. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_norm/@normes/documents/publication/wcms_088023.pdf
13. https://www.ilo.org/resource/gender-equality-decent-work