“Critically examine the position of women in the informal economy.” (2026)
Keith Hart coined the term “informal sector” (1971, from fieldwork in Ghana) for work outside state regulation and contract. In India this economy is visibly female: women make up 54.28% of the 31.89 crore workers on the e-Shram portal (August 2026). Their position is usually read as double subordination, by class and by patriarchy. That reading is largely right but needs qualifying.
The case for marginality
- Bottom of the ladder: home-based piece-rate work (beedi, agarbatti, garment finishing), domestic service, construction and, above all, agriculture. PLFS 2025 shows 64.2% of women workers are self-employed, many as unpaid helpers in household enterprises with no income of their own.
- Invisibility: Maria Mies (The Lace Makers of Narsapur, 1982) showed that lace made by secluded women for export was defined as leisure, not work. She called this “housewifisation”.
- Exclusion from protection: maternity benefit covers only establishments with ten or more workers. India has not ratified ILO Convention 189 on domestic workers, and harassment in employers’ homes rarely reaches a Local Committee under the POSH Act, 2013.
- Time poverty: the Time Use Survey 2024 records 289 minutes a day of unpaid domestic work by women against 88 by men.
- Caste: Dalit and Adivasi women dominate brick-kiln work, farm labour and sanitation work.
Critique: beyond the victim image
- Choice and flexibility: liberal economists see informality as flexibility that women sometimes choose. Naila Kabeer (The Power to Choose, 2000) found that wage work gave Bangladeshi garment workers bargaining power at home.
- Organisation: SEWA, founded by Ela Bhatt in 1972, unionised vendors, home-workers and waste-pickers. Its members built cooperatives and a bank of their own.
- Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” (1988) shows women negotiating constraints strategically.
- Heterogeneity: a SHG entrepreneur and a bonded kiln worker do not share one “position”.
- Policy: the Labour Codes in force from 21 November 2025 ban gender wage discrimination and bring gig workers into social security. Coverage, though, depends on registration and enforcement.
Assessment
The critiques correct the victim image but do not overturn the structural diagnosis. Agency operates within narrow limits, and much of the recent rise in women’s participation is distress self-employment, not autonomy.
Conclusion
Women’s position is best called subordinated inclusion: they are central to accumulation but marginal to rights. Changing it requires counting unpaid work, portable universal social security, and the kind of collective voice SEWA models, not registration drives alone.