admin
Edits | November, 2025
The face of India’s gig economy is changing — and it is unmistakably feminine. What was once a playground for urban men, often from relatively privileged or mobile backgrounds, is now witnessing a decisive influx of women who are reshaping the meaning of flexible work. The archetypal gig worker — the male delivery rider weaving through traffic or the app-tethered cab driver — is slowly being joined, and in some sectors replaced, by women whose entry into digital labour marks one of the most profound social and economic shifts in contemporary India.
For decades, India’s labour force was starkly gendered. Women’s employment was concentrated in soft-skill or care-oriented professions: teaching, human resources, healthcare, communication, and customer relations. These jobs valued empathy and relational skills but rarely led to economic mobility or recognition. The country’s formal economy, with its rigid structures and fixed-hour jobs, has historically been inhospitable to women. Social norms, domestic responsibilities, and safety concerns restricted their physical and professional mobility.
When the first wave of India’s gig economy emerged in the 2010s, powered by startups like Ola, Uber, and Swiggy, it promised a new model of self-employment. Yet, that promise was largely male. The “freedom” of the gig economy — flexible hours, independence from traditional employers, and income on demand — was accessible mainly to men who could move freely, work late hours, and navigate cities without fear. Women’s participation was marginal, confined mostly to niche service platforms like UrbanClap (now Urban Company), which offered home-based roles in beauty and wellness.
That paradigm began to shift dramatically with the pandemic. The lockdown years of 2020 and 2021 pushed work, education, and consumption online, triggering an unexpected social experiment in digital employment. As traditional jobs evaporated and physical offices shut down, thousands of women — particularly from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — logged into gig platforms for the first time. Some began tutoring through Byju’s or Vedantu; others found work as data annotators, social media managers, voice-over artists, telecallers, and content creators. Platforms like Taskmo and Gigin reported exponential increases — Taskmo noted a 300% rise in women gig workers in 2022, while Gigin saw a 100-fold increase in female registrations, especially from non-metro areas.
This was more than a labour market shift; it was a social reordering. For the first time, women who had been excluded from formal employment due to domestic duties or cultural restrictions found a mode of work that adapted to their realities. Gig work offered something few traditional jobs could: the ability to earn without leaving one’s home, to balance care and career, to set one’s schedule. In a country where female labour force participation remains among the lowest in the G20 — around 28% by recent estimates — the gig economy has become a critical bridge for women entering or re-entering the workforce.
Yet, this transformation is not without its contradictions. The gig economy’s promise of empowerment coexists with precarity. Women gig workers often face lower pay than men for similar tasks, reflecting the same gender wage gap that plagues formal sectors. Many operate without access to social security, health insurance, or maternity benefits. Their classification as “independent contractors” means they are excluded from labour protections that full-time employees enjoy. The Code on Social Security, 2020, made an important step by recognising gig and platform workers as a distinct category, but recognition without rights amounts to symbolic inclusion. Until welfare mechanisms — from micro-insurance to pension contributions — are institutionalised, the flexibility that attracts women will remain inseparable from financial vulnerability.
Safety and societal attitudes remain formidable barriers as well. Many women prefer remote or digital gigs over on-ground ones due to safety concerns or family disapproval of “outside” work. Those who do participate in field-based gigs, such as home-service professionals, often face stigma or harassment. Platforms, while tech-driven, still operate within the social hierarchies of the real world. The digital realm has opened doors, but it has not yet dismantled the biases that guard them.
Another, subtler challenge now looms: automation. Artificial Intelligence, which promises to streamline tasks and boost productivity, could simultaneously erode the entry-level jobs that first pulled women into the gig workforce. AI-driven chatbots threaten to replace telecallers; transcription and translation software are rendering basic digital gigs obsolete. The same technology that once empowered women could soon displace them if adaptation and reskilling do not keep pace.
However, the AI revolution also holds enormous potential — if navigated thoughtfully. The rise of AI has created new micro-industries in data labeling, content moderation, voice recognition, and AI model training. These are areas where women, particularly those with communication or cognitive skills, are well-positioned to thrive. Globally, women already form a large share of the data annotation workforce. With strategic skilling and policy support, India could replicate that model domestically. Digital literacy programmes, women-centric upskilling initiatives, and inclusion incentives for tech platforms could ensure that automation amplifies opportunity rather than erases it.
The gig economy’s transformation through women’s participation has broader economic and cultural implications. It challenges two persistent myths: that women’s work is supplementary, and that flexibility undermines productivity. The emerging generation of female gig workers is proving that economic independence and domestic responsibility are not mutually exclusive. By monetising their skills through digital platforms, these women are altering household dynamics, influencing spending patterns, and reshaping the perception of female labour in both rural and urban India.
Ultimately, the story unfolding in India’s gig economy is not just about work; it’s about agency. The digital platform, for all its volatility, has given women something tangible — a sense of control over their time, their income, and their aspirations. It has blurred the lines between home and workplace, between part-time and full-time, between worker and entrepreneur. But for this revolution to endure, inclusion must be deliberate, not incidental.
The gig economy is no longer a man’s inheritance; it is increasingly a woman’s frontier — flexible, ambitious, and self-directed. As artificial intelligence redraws the map of work, India faces a defining choice: to let women ride this wave as passengers or empower them to steer it. The future of the country’s digital economy, and perhaps its social progress, will hinge on that decision. In this quiet transformation, Indian women are not merely adapting to change — they are driving it, transforming flexibility into freedom and precarity into power, one gig at a time.
CA Divesh Nath
Editor
Woman’s Era
LinkedIn: Divesh Nath