Informalisation and women's workforce participation

A consideration of recent trends in India

By: Ghosh J
Produced by: United Nationas Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) 2004

In mainstream discussion, the importance of women's work generally receives marginal treatment simply because so much of the work regularly performed is "invisible" in terms of market criteria or even in terms of socially dominant perceptions of what constitutes "work". This obviously matters, because it leads to the social underestimation of women's productive contribution. This paper examines this marginalisation in the contexts of recent trends in Asia.

This is particularly true in developing countries, where patterns of market integration and the relatively high proportion of goods and services that are not marketed have implied that female contributions to productive activity extend well beyond those which are socially recognised, and that the conditions under which many of these contributions are made entail significant pressure on women in a variety of ways.