Women’s Economic Empowerment as a Pathway Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Development in India

Key Points

• Many sociocultural norms have shaped women’s participation in the formal economy based explicitly on conventional gender roles in Asia.
• The unequal burden of care work is a significant structural barrier preventing women from joining the formal workforce in developing and developed countries.
• Apart from this, lack of safety in public spaces; unavailability of care infrastructure; and difficulty accessing productive resources such as land, finance, and digital technology pull them further down the economic ladder.
• Despite the low percentage of women in India’s formal workforce, a large proportion of women are engaged in agriculture, informal sectors, and small business-based entrepreneurship; however, this excludes them from formal employment, which is disadvantageous for gender equity and socioeconomic well-being.
• Recognizing and measuring women’s labor through official government data is the first step in supporting women to enter the workforce.
• Enabling full participation in the workforce is essential to Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE), which needs to focus on equitable and sustainable growth.