The Servicisation of Women’s Employment: Trends in the Service Sector

Over the past few decades, economies around the world have undergone a significant structural shift. Employment has steadily moved away from agriculture and manufacturing toward the service sector. This phenomenon, often called servicisation, has had a particularly notable impact on women’s work. While the expansion of services has opened new employment doors for women, it has also concentrated them in roles that mirror traditional caregiving expectations – teaching, nursing, and domestic work. Understanding servicisation is essential to grasp both the opportunities and the deep-rooted challenges that shape women’s participation in the labour market today.

What is servicisation? 🔗

Servicisation refers to the economic transition in which the service sector gradually becomes the dominant source of employment and GDP contribution, overtaking agriculture and manufacturing. In the Indian context, the service sector now contributes over 50% of GDP and has been responsible for the majority of new jobs in recent years. Sub-sectors like IT, finance, healthcare, education, hospitality, and retail have all expanded rapidly.

For women, this shift carries specific implications. Research shows that the service sector’s share in urban women’s employment rose from about 35.7% in 1977-78 to over 60% by 2017-18. However, rather than being evenly distributed across all types of service jobs, women have been funnelled into specific sub-sectors – primarily those connected to care, nurturing, and domestic responsibilities. This is the crux of why servicisation, despite being a story of economic progress, is also a story about gender.

Where are women concentrated in the service sector? 🔗

The service sector is vast and diverse. Yet, when we look at where women actually work within it, a clear pattern emerges. Women are overwhelmingly present in education, healthcare, social services, and domestic work. Let us look at each of these in more detail.

Education 🔗

Teaching has long been considered a “suitable” profession for women. It aligns with societal perceptions of women as natural nurturers and caregivers. As a result, women make up a large proportion of school teachers, especially at the primary and pre-primary levels. Roles like Anganwadi workers – who provide nutrition, immunisation, and pre-school education – are almost entirely staffed by women. However, as we move toward higher education and leadership positions, women’s representation drops significantly. Studies indicate that women faculty across 100 Indian universities comprised only about 16.6% as of 2023. So while teaching is feminised, authority within education is not.

Healthcare 🔗

Nursing, community health work, and midwifery are roles where women are heavily concentrated. The COVID-19 pandemic made the essential yet undervalued nature of this work starkly visible – women healthcare workers bore disproportionate burdens during the crisis, often without adequate pay or recognition. Similar to education, women are clustered in direct care roles, while specialised medical positions and hospital leadership remain male-dominated. The skills required – empathy, patience, and attentiveness – are frequently labelled “soft skills” rather than professional competencies, which contributes to the systematic undervaluation of this work.

Social services and public employment 🔗

Data shows that nearly 70% of women in regular public employment work in the feminised sectors of education, health, and social services, with an additional 18% in public administration. Compare this with men, where a much larger share – around 34% – is in public administration. Public sector employment is critical for women, particularly in rural areas. However, many of these roles, such as Anganwadi workers or ASHA workers, are classified as “honorary” or “volunteer” positions, paying below minimum wages and offering little job security or growth.

Domestic work 🔗

Paid domestic work is perhaps the most striking example of servicisation’s gendered dimension. According to the ILO, women represent nearly 80% of all domestic workers globally. In India, this figure is even higher – close to 90%. Domestic work has become one of the largest sources of employment for urban women, especially those from marginalised communities with limited formal education. The proportion of urban women employed as domestic workers grew from 5.9% to 12.3% between 2019 and 2023, underscoring how rapidly this sector is expanding.

Why does the service sector reinforce traditional gender roles? 🔗

At first glance, servicisation seems like a positive development – more jobs for women, more participation in the formal economy. But a closer look reveals a troubling pattern. The jobs women occupy in the service sector are essentially extensions of unpaid work they have always performed at home: cooking, cleaning, caring for children, nursing the sick, and teaching the young.

This is not a coincidence. Gender norms play a powerful role in shaping which occupations are considered “appropriate” for women. When women enter the labour market, they are often channelled into roles that society perceives as natural extensions of femininity. The skills these roles require – communication, patience, empathy – are dismissed as innate female traits rather than recognised as professional competencies developed through training and experience. This mischaracterisation has real consequences: it keeps wages low, limits career progression, and maintains occupational segregation.

Research highlights that women earn on average 20-30% less than men across sectors, and this wage gap is particularly sticky in care-oriented service roles. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has estimated that at the current pace, it will take 169 years to achieve economic gender equality. Within the service sector, where women form a substantial portion of the workforce, these disparities are especially pronounced.

The rise of paid domestic work in urban India 🔗

The growth of paid domestic work in urban areas deserves special attention. It reveals how servicisation creates a complex chain of care labour that is stratified along both gender and class lines.

As more educated, middle-class women enter professional workplaces, they hire other women – typically from lower socioeconomic backgrounds – to manage household duties. This creates what scholars call a care chain: care work remains feminised throughout, but it becomes commodified and split along class lines. The professional woman gains freedom from domestic responsibilities, but the domestic worker who takes on those responsibilities faces a new set of challenges.

Challenges faced by domestic workers 🔗

Domestic workers face some of the most precarious working conditions in the entire labour market. Government estimates place the domestic workforce at about 4.75 million, while the ILO estimates the number closer to 20 million, and worker unions cite figures as high as 50 million. This massive discrepancy itself illustrates how invisible this workforce is to the state.

Most domestic work arrangements remain informal. There are no written contracts, no fixed hours, and no guaranteed minimum wages in most states. The majority of domestic workers are illiterate or minimally educated and are among the poorest and most exploited groups of workers. Job security is almost non-existent – workers can be dismissed on a whim. Many domestic workers are migrants from rural areas or from Dalit, Adivasi, and other marginalised communities, adding layers of caste and ethnic discrimination to the already difficult conditions.

On top of all this, many domestic workers carry a double burden: they perform paid care work in someone else’s home while also shouldering unpaid care responsibilities in their own households. The Economic Survey 2024 notes that women’s unpaid care work contributes 3.1% to GDP, compared to just 0.4% for men. This invisible labour rarely translates into income, assets, or social security for the women who perform it.

The legal gap 🔗

Despite decades of advocacy, domestic workers remain largely unprotected by labour law. India voted in favour of the ILO Convention 189 on Domestic Workers when it was adopted in 2011, but has not yet ratified it. Several draft bills – in 2015, 2017, and within the Labour Codes of 2019-2020 – have acknowledged domestic workers, but none have translated into meaningful legal protection. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, does cover domestic settings, but awareness and enforcement remain extremely weak.

The broader picture: women’s labour force participation 🔗

To understand servicisation fully, it helps to zoom out and look at the larger employment landscape for women. According to the PLFS 2023-24, the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) for women aged 15 and above stood at 41.7%, a significant increase from 23.3% in 2017-18. On the surface, this looks like progress.

However, the picture is more nuanced. The increase has been driven largely by rural women entering the workforce, often in unpaid or self-employment roles, particularly in agriculture. In urban areas, where servicisation is most visible, progress has been slower. Rural FLFPR increased by 23 percentage points between 2017-18 and 2023-24, while urban figures rose much more modestly. And while the proportion of women in the services sector is growing, much of this employment remains informal, low-paid, and without social protection.

Over 90% of employed women work in the informal sector, lacking access to social security, maternity benefits, or legal safeguards. The quality of employment matters just as much as the quantity, and by that metric, servicisation has not yet delivered on its promise for most women.

What needs to change? 🔗

Addressing the gendered dimensions of servicisation requires action on multiple fronts. Here are some key areas that need attention.

Recognising and valuing care work 🔗

Care work – whether in education, healthcare, or domestic settings – is essential to the functioning of the economy and society. Yet it remains systematically undervalued because it is associated with women. Policy frameworks must recognise the professional skills involved in care work and ensure that wages and working conditions reflect the true value of this labour. Minimum wage guarantees, social security coverage, and formal contracts for domestic workers would be important first steps.

Breaking occupational segregation 🔗

Women need greater access to service sector roles beyond traditional caregiving – in technology, finance, management, and entrepreneurship. This requires investment in skills training, mentorship programmes, and removing barriers to entry such as restrictive social norms, lack of safe transport, and inadequate childcare infrastructure. According to one estimate, closing the employment gap between men and women could expand India’s GDP by nearly a third by 2050. The economic case for action is as compelling as the moral one.

Investing in care infrastructure 🔗

The burden of unpaid care work is one of the biggest barriers to women’s economic participation. Public investment in creches, childcare centres, elder care facilities, and community kitchens can help redistribute this burden. Without addressing the care economy, efforts to bring women into the paid workforce will continue to push them into the same low-paid, feminised roles that servicisation has created.

Strengthening legal protections 🔗

Ratifying ILO Convention 189, enacting comprehensive domestic worker legislation, and enforcing existing laws like the Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act are overdue. Labour laws need to be extended meaningfully to cover informal and home-based work where the vast majority of women are employed.

The paradox of servicisation 🔗

Servicisation presents a genuine paradox for gender equality. On one hand, the expansion of the service sector has created millions of employment opportunities for women who previously had few options outside agriculture. It has brought women into the paid economy, given them incomes, and in some cases provided a degree of financial independence.

On the other hand, the nature of this employment often replicates the very gender hierarchies it should be dismantling. Women move from performing unpaid care work at home to performing paid care work in schools, hospitals, and other people’s homes – at low wages, with little security, and with limited prospects for advancement. The work changes, but the gendered valuation of that work does not.

True progress will come not just from increasing the number of women in the service sector, but from transforming the terms on which they participate. That means better pay, stronger protections, broader occupational choices, and a fundamental shift in how society values work that has historically been performed by women.

What do you think? Can servicisation truly empower women, or does it simply formalise their confinement to caregiving roles? And what would it take for care work – in all its forms – to be valued and compensated fairly in our economy?

References

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