Feminization of Employment: The Rise of Precarious Work for Women

Walk into any office, garment unit, or gig economy warehouse in India today, and you’ll notice more women at work than a decade ago. That’s not an accident. It’s part of a global economic shift researchers call the feminization of employment. But here’s the twist: more women working doesn’t automatically mean better working conditions for women. In fact, the story is often the opposite.

What does “feminization of employment” actually mean? 🔗

The term was popularised by the United Nations in the late 1990s to describe two things happening at once: a sharp rise in the share of women in paid work worldwide, and a parallel shift in the nature of that work toward less secure, more flexible arrangements. UN research from that period noted that globally, around 70% of women aged 20 to 54 were part of the paid workforce, a proportion that had grown rapidly as economies liberalised and global trade expanded.

It’s important to understand that feminization isn’t simply “more women getting jobs.” It describes a structural change in labour markets, where the kind of work historically associated with women, casual, low-paid, and easy to terminate, has become the norm for a much larger share of the workforce, including many men.

The three markers of feminization 🔗

Economists and labour researchers typically look for three signs to confirm that feminization is happening in an economy.

1. A rising Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) 🔗

This is the most visible marker. As deregulation, export-oriented manufacturing, and service-sector growth created new categories of jobs, women were drawn into the paid workforce in far greater numbers than before, particularly in export processing zones and light industries across Asia and Latin America.

2. A stagnant or falling Male Labour Force Participation Rate 🔗

Feminization isn’t just about women entering work; it’s also about men’s participation rates flattening or slightly declining in several regions, partly due to deindustrialisation in some economies and a shift away from traditionally male-dominated manufacturing jobs.

3. A shift toward informal, flexible hiring 🔗

This is the piece that gives feminization its double-edged reputation. Employers increasingly prefer to hire on their own terms, part-time, contractual, seasonal, or home-based, rather than offering full-time, protected jobs. Women, often seen by employers as a “flexible” or “secondary” workforce, are disproportionately funnelled into these arrangements.

The Indian picture: participation is rising, but quality is falling 🔗

India offers a textbook illustration of this trend, though with a distinctly local flavour. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, India’s FLFPR nearly doubled from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24. On paper, that looks like remarkable progress toward gender parity in the workforce.

Look closer, though, and the picture gets complicated. Much of this increase is concentrated in informal, self-employed, and unpaid work rather than salaried, protected jobs. Rural women, not urban women, are driving most of this growth, often as a response to economic pressure and rising household costs rather than expanding career opportunities. Data shows that the share of rural women working in agriculture actually rose from about 71% in 2018-19 to nearly 77% in 2023-24, even as their presence in industry and services declined. That’s a step away from the structural transformation, moving out of farms and into factories or offices, that usually signals real economic advancement.

Researchers at Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis have pointed out that this rise, while consistent across multiple data sources, needs to be read carefully. Rural female participation surged sharply after 2021, but growth in actual non-agricultural jobs for women has not kept pace with the headline participation numbers, suggesting that a large chunk of “new” female workers are engaged in unpaid family labour or subsistence activity rather than formal employment.

Why employers prefer flexible female labour 🔗

Multinational companies and their supply chains have played a significant role in shaping this trend. As production processes fragmented across borders, companies found it cheaper and more convenient to subcontract work rather than employ people directly. This gave rise to home-based work, piece-rate labour, and casual contracts, arrangements that are difficult to unionise, easy to scale up or down, and largely invisible to labour regulators.

The garment industry is a well-documented example. An estimated 42 million women work in Asia’s garment sector, many of them in home-based production or in small units at the bottom of the supply chain, where wages are lowest and job security is minimal. Assumptions about who should bear household and caregiving responsibilities push women toward this kind of flexible, home-compatible work far more often than men.

Home-based work has a long history in India too, particularly among women in textile and craft-based livelihoods. Despite an International Labour Organization convention specifically protecting home-based workers, adopted decades ago, India has still not ratified it, and labour unions such as the Self Employed Women’s Association continue to push for these workers to be formally recognised with basic rights and protections.

The “patchwork career” 🔗

Feminization also reshapes what a career looks like for most women. Rather than a continuous, linear trajectory, from entry-level job to steady promotions, many women experience what’s often called a patchwork career: a working life stitched together from multiple short stints, broken up by career interruptions.

These breaks aren’t random. They tend to cluster around specific life events: marriage, childbirth, caregiving for children or elderly family members, or periods of unemployment when suitable work isn’t available. Each interruption carries a cost. Women who step away from paid work, even briefly, often return to lower-paying roles, miss out on promotions they would otherwise have earned, and accumulate less in savings or retirement benefits over their lifetime.

The idea of a lifelong, full-time job with built-in security, the kind of employment that defined previous generations of workers, has become the exception rather than the rule in a globalized, market-driven economy. For many women, especially those without access to childcare support or flexible formal employment, informal and part-time work isn’t a preference. It’s often the only option that fits around unpaid domestic responsibilities.

Is this actually informalisation of everyone’s work? 🔗

One of the more nuanced points researchers make is that feminization describes not just what’s happening to women, but what’s happening to work itself. Conditions once considered typical of “women’s work”, casual, insecure, low-status, have gradually become common for a much larger share of the workforce, men included. Globally, women remain concentrated in the most invisible and precarious segments of informal work, including domestic labour, piece-rate homework, and unpaid family enterprises, even as informality itself spreads more broadly across labour markets.

This matters because it reframes the conversation. The question isn’t only “why are more women working?” but “why is paid work, for both genders, becoming less secure, and why are women disproportionately pushed into its most fragile corners?”

Why this matters for gender equality 🔗

Rising female participation numbers are often celebrated as a sign of progress, and in some ways, they are. More women earning an income can mean more bargaining power at home, better educational outcomes for children, and a larger overall economy. But feminization complicates that story. Growth built primarily on informal, unpaid, or precarious work rarely translates into the kind of long-term financial independence, retirement security, or workplace protection that formal employment provides.

For India specifically, closing the gap between rising FLFPR numbers and actual job quality will likely require formalising informal work, extending social security to home-based and contractual workers, and addressing the unpaid care responsibilities that keep many women tied to flexible, low-paying arrangements in the first place.

What do you think? Does a rising female labour force participation rate always represent progress, or does the quality of that work matter just as much as the numbers? And what would it take for employers and policymakers to make flexible work options genuinely fair, rather than just convenient for business?

References

1. https://www.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/11006IIED.pdf
2. https://india.unfpa.org/en/publications/analysis-gendered-pattern-labour-force-participation-india-trends-socio-economic
3. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
4. https://ceda.ashoka.edu.in/too-good-to-be-true-steadily-rising-female-labour-force-participation-rates-in-india/
5. https://webapps.ilo.org/infostories/en-GB/Stories/discrimination/garment-gender.html
6. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/20/as-ilo-convention-turns-30-indias-home-based-workers-demand-equal-rights
7. https://www.ilo.org/media/330681/download