Urban women in gig work: The Economic Survey 2025-26 highlights the rise in female labour force participation as a sign of progress. The aggregate trend is real. But it conceals a more important weakness: urban India still does a poor job of drawing women into paid work. National female labour force participation rose from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, with the gains driven far more by rural India than by cities. That matters because cities are where structural transformation is meant to happen, through movement into higher-productivity, higher-wage work. When women remain excluded from that transition, the cost is not only social; it is macroeconomic.
The constraint is not difficult to identify. It begins at home. The Time Use Survey 2024 shows women still spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services, against 88 minutes for men. The labour market then compounds that burden. Many cities still lack safe and affordable public transport, dependable childcare, usable public toilets and public spaces where women can move without negotiating daily risk. Formal employment offers little relief. Part-time work remains thin, flexibility is limited, and the burden of adaptation is pushed back onto the worker rather than the employer or the city.
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Platform work is not yet a ladder
This is why platform work attracts interest. It appears to offer exactly what cities and formal labour markets do not: low entry barriers, flexible schedules and a route into paid work without the rigidities of conventional employment.
The sector is large and expanding. NITI Aayog estimated 77 lakh gig workers in 2020-21 and projected the number to reach 2.35 crore by 2029-30. More recent estimates place the long-run number much higher. Yet the promise of scale should not be confused with a pathway to mobility.
There is another gap in the discussion. Reliable gender-disaggregated data on platform workers remain poor. That alone tells its own story. A labour market that celebrates technological sophistication still does not measure women’s participation properly.
Where URBAN women do enter platform work, they are concentrated in services that mirror older labour-market hierarchies: domestic work, caregiving, and beauty services. The digital interface is new; the occupational sorting is not. Delivery, logistics and ride-hailing, where visibility and earnings are often higher, remain overwhelmingly male. The reasons are structural rather than cultural shorthand: access to vehicles, smartphone ownership, digital literacy, safety, sanitation and the ability to travel across the city at odd hours.
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Urban women and the flexibility trap
The usual defence of gig work is flexibility. That defence is only partly true. Platform work is governed by algorithmic management. Ratings, task allocation, incentives, penalties and deactivation are all shaped by systems the worker does not control and rarely understands. These systems reward constant availability and fast response. For workers with care responsibilities, that is not flexibility. It is a new form of rigidity.
Evidence from a recent NBER study of ride-hailing drivers in India, Indonesia and Kenya shows why platform work can look attractive at first. The flexibility of platform work lets drivers work longer hours and earn more per month than many casual alternatives, even when hourly earnings are comparable or lower. In India and Indonesia, some later move into better-paying full-time work. But it is a large leap from that evidence to assume similar mobility for women in India’s platform economy, especially when women are clustered in low-visibility service segments with weaker earnings power and fewer exit options.
Financial exclusion deepens the problem. Insurance products for gig workers are typically built around accident cover or vehicle-related risk. They are designed around male-coded work patterns. Products that matter more to many women workers, such as family health cover, income smoothing, maternity support or childcare-linked benefits, remain scarce. Even where digital financial products exist, access is blunted by lower trust, weaker digital familiarity and lower control over household finances.
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Urban women in platform work lack protection
The deeper problem is classification. Platform workers are usually treated as independent contractors. That keeps them outside the core protections associated with formal employment: written contracts, paid leave, health coverage, grievance redress and enforceable accountability. For women, the exclusions are sharper. Maternity protections are uncertain in practice, menstrual leave is rare, and sexual-harassment safeguards are often not designed for platform-mediated work.
The law has moved, but slowly. The Code on Social Security, 2020, formally recognised gig and platform workers and took effect with the labour-code rollout in November 2025. The e-Shram portal, launched in 2021, had registered over 31 crore unorganised workers by January 2026, more than half of them women. But registration is not protection. It is an administrative starting point, not a welfare architecture.
State governments have moved faster than the Centre. Rajasthan enacted a social-security law for gig workers in 2023. Karnataka’s 2025 law created a welfare framework and board. Telangana circulated a draft law that includes algorithmic transparency and grievance mechanisms. Jharkhand has also moved on legislation. What is missing is coherence, especially on enforcement and on the specific constraints faced by women workers.
Public attention sharpened after delivery-worker protests during Christmas and New Year in 2025. Reports suggested the Union labour ministry pressed Blinkit to drop its “10-minute delivery” claim after the strike. Even if that episode produces more cautious advertising, it is not the same as a regulatory settlement on working conditions.
What women need from platform work
If India wants more urban women in paid work, platform employment is an obvious place to begin. But it cannot be sold as inclusion while operating as digitised informality.
The first requirement is regulatory clarity. The social-security framework for gig workers must become operational in a form workers can actually use. Protections against harassment should apply irrespective of employment status. Gender-disaggregated reporting on participation, pay, attrition and complaints should be mandatory.
The second is urban infrastructure. Urban women’s time poverty will not be solved by apps. It will be reduced only through public investment in childcare, eldercare, safe mobility, public toilets, street lighting and responsive policing. Without those, labour-market reform remains rhetorical.
The third is algorithmic accountability. If platforms determine access to work, they must disclose how pay, ratings, incentives and deactivation work. Workers need usable grievance systems, not templated responses. Women workers need in-app safety tools backed by rapid human escalation, not merely automated alerts.
India’s platform economy is presented as a frontier of innovation. It is also becoming a test of whether the country can expand work without reproducing old vulnerabilities in digital form. If urban women enter platform work only on terms of insecurity, invisibility and weak protection, then the economy will have widened access without widening opportunity.
Kaushiki Sanyal is Fellow at JustJobs Network. Views are personal.