Servicisation of Women’s Employment: The Growth of Domestic and Care Work

Open the classifieds or scroll through a placement agency’s WhatsApp group in any Indian city, and you’ll notice a pattern. The jobs on offer for women are rarely in factories or farms anymore. They are in schools, hospitals, salons, and homes. Economists have a name for this shift: servicisation, the movement of employment away from agriculture and industry and into the service sector. For women, this shift has a particular character. It has opened doors, but it has also pulled a large share of women into work that looks a lot like the unpaid care they have always been expected to do at home, only now for a wage.

Why women’s work is moving into services 🔗

India’s economy has been tilting toward services for decades, and women’s employment has followed that tilt closely. As agriculture mechanises and shrinks as a source of livelihood, women who once worked on family farms are increasingly found in classrooms, clinics, shops, and other people’s kitchens. Research tracking these shifts shows that the share of women in agriculture is falling while their presence in the service sector keeps rising, alongside a broader move toward salaried and self-employed work rather than casual daily-wage labour.

Not every service job is equally welcoming 🔗

This does not mean women are entering every part of the services economy equally. Urban job growth in recent years has been concentrated in construction, low-end retail, and informal services, sectors that women largely avoid. Instead, women cluster in occupations that are socially coded as acceptable extensions of their existing roles, such as healthcare, education, retail chains, and business process services. This is servicisation with a gendered filter attached. Women aren’t simply moving into “services” as a neutral category. They are being funnelled into specific corners of it that mirror the caregiving, teaching, and nurturing roles society already assigns them.

Concentration in community, social and personal services 🔗

Within the services umbrella, one sub-category stands out for how many women it employs: community, social, and personal services. This bucket includes government-run programmes like primary education and public health outreach, but it also includes something far less visible in policy documents: paid domestic work. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elder care performed inside someone else’s home have become one of the fastest-growing sources of urban employment for women with little formal education.

The phenomenal rise of paid domestic work 🔗

The scale of this growth is striking. Data tracking India’s workforce composition shows that the number of women working as domestic workers has grown from roughly 1 million to over 5 million in the past quarter century, a figure now nearly matching the number of women employed in healthcare. Domestic work has become the third-largest source of urban female employment in the country, trailing only retail trade and education, and more than one in ten women in the services sector today works as a domestic worker. Women dominate this occupation overwhelmingly, making up more than 70 percent of the domestic workforce.

This growth isn’t accidental. As more middle-class households in Indian cities have both spouses working, or simply more disposable income, demand for someone else to manage cooking, cleaning, and childcare has grown alongside it. That demand is met almost entirely by women, many of them migrants from rural areas or economically weaker urban neighbourhoods, who have few other formal employment options available to them.

Why is domestic work seen as “natural” for women? 🔗

Here lies the deeper issue that gender studies asks us to sit with. Paid domestic and care work is rarely treated as a skilled profession requiring training, fair wages, or job security. Instead, it is treated as a natural extension of what women are already assumed to be good at: nurturing, cleaning, and caregiving. This assumption does real damage. It suggests that because a woman is “naturally” suited to this work, she doesn’t need formal contracts, fixed hours, or protections that other workers take for granted.

The same assumption also shapes how much time women are expected to have left over for their own households after a day of paid work. Employers, families, and even policy frameworks often presume that a woman’s paid job, especially one that resembles domestic labour, leaves her with enough energy and hours to also run her own home without complaint. This is rarely true.

The double burden of paid and unpaid work 🔗

The numbers on unpaid care work make the scale of this burden clear. An analysis of India’s national Time-Use Survey found that Indian women spend roughly eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men, a gap far wider than the global average of three times. Women spend well over five hours a day on unpaid domestic duties compared to a fraction of that for men, creating what researchers call “time poverty,” a condition where women simply have too little discretionary time left to pursue better-paid work, skills training, or education. Regionally, the pattern holds up too: across Asia and the Pacific, women perform roughly four times more unpaid care work than men, with Indian men among the lowest contributors to household care duties in the entire region.

Put these two facts together, heavy unpaid care work at home and heavy concentration in paid care work outside it, and a troubling cycle emerges. Women are pushed into paid service roles precisely because those roles are seen as compatible with their “real” job of running a household, and then the underpayment and precarity of that paid work is justified because it is seen as secondary to that same household role. The paid work and the unpaid work reinforce each other’s low status rather than balancing each other out.

Skilled at one end, invisible at the other 🔗

It’s worth remembering that the service sector isn’t a single, uniform space. It stretches from highly paid, credentialed professions like medicine, teaching in elite institutions, and corporate consulting, all the way down to unskilled, poorly regulated work like domestic help and informal caregiving. Women are present at both ends, but they are heavily overrepresented at the lower end, where wages are lowest, job security is weakest, and recognition as “real work” is hardest to come by. A doctor and a domestic worker may both technically sit inside the “services” category in economic data, but their working conditions, bargaining power, and social standing could not be more different.

Legal recognition is still catching up 🔗

Despite how central domestic and care work has become to India’s urban economy, the legal protections around it remain thin. India has still not ratified the ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention, which sets international standards for fair wages, enforceable contracts, and social protection for this workforce, even though the country voted in favour of adopting it back in 2011. Domestic workers are technically covered under India’s broader labour codes, but as legal analyses of these codes point out, the specific vulnerabilities of domestic and care workers, such as working inside private homes with no inspection or oversight, are not meaningfully addressed, leaving large gaps in practice. Some states have begun trying to fill this vacuum on their own, with draft legislation proposing basic standards like fixed working hours and social security coverage, but a comprehensive national framework is still missing.

This legal gap matters because it keeps the cycle of undervaluation going. Without enforceable minimum wages, written contracts, or access to grievance mechanisms, paid domestic and care work stays informal, insecure, and easy to dismiss as “just housework done for money” rather than skilled labour deserving of protection.

What do you think? If paid domestic and care work is treated as skilled, regulated employment with contracts and minimum wages, do you think this would change how families in India value the women who do it? And why do you think similar caregiving work performed by men, such as male nurses or caretakers, rarely faces the same assumption of being “natural” or unskilled?

References

1. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-female-workforce-in-india-emerging-trends-and-insights
2. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/policy-update/female-education-and-workforce-participation-plfs-2017-18-to-2023-24-evidence-from-the-u-shaped-worker-population-ratio-in-india/
3. https://www.dataforindia.com/is-indias-workforce-feminising/
4. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data
5. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-women-do-4-times-more-unpaid-care-work-men-asia-and-pacific
6. https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/from-invisible-help-to-constitutional-workers-the-supreme-courts-call-for-domestic-workers-rights-in-india/
7. https://www.actionaidindia.org/recognizing-the-invisible-the-legal-landscape-of-domestic-workers-in-india-and-the-road-ahead