Evaluating Development: Its Impact on Women

Development is often celebrated as the engine of progress – lifting incomes, expanding access to education, and creating new opportunities. But when examined through a gender lens, the picture becomes considerably more uneven. For women around the world, development has brought both real gains and new forms of disadvantage. Greater access to schooling and a presence in the workforce are visible improvements. Yet intensified economic burdens, entrenched stereotypes, and systematic exploitation in the informal economy have accompanied these gains. Understanding this duality is essential to understanding development honestly.

The mixed gains of development for women
Women and the unorganised sector: exploitation by design
Exploitation as a structural feature, not an exception
Invisibility compounds the problem
The double burden: paid work plus unpaid care
How gender stereotypes lock in this inequality
The economic cost of excluding women from development’s gains
Development that works for women: what needs to change

The mixed gains of development for women

Over the past few decades, women’s enrolment in education has risen sharply. Maternal mortality rates have declined. Women have entered sectors and occupations previously closed to them. These are genuine outcomes of development, and they matter. However, the World Bank acknowledges that while women and girls have made major strides in education and health, these gains have not fully translated into economic opportunities. Barriers such as unpaid care responsibilities, restrictive social norms, and limited access to finance and digital tools continue to constrain women’s participation in the workforce and the broader economy.

This gap between social progress and economic inclusion is one of development’s central paradoxes for women. Literacy increases but wages remain unequal. More women join the labour force but predominantly in its most insecure segments. The OECD notes that gender inequality persists across all areas of social and economic life, and that discriminatory laws and social norms often create disparities that are invisible until you start counting – such as the gender pay gap and women’s under-representation in politics and leadership.

Women and the unorganised sector: exploitation by design

One of the sharpest indicators of how development bypasses women is their disproportionate concentration in the informal or unorganised sector of the economy. According to UN Women, nearly 60 per cent of women worldwide work in the informal economy, a figure that rises to over 90 per cent in low-income countries. A large proportion of them are employed as domestic workers, street vendors, construction labourers, or seasonal agricultural workers – roles that are unstable, low-paid, and entirely without social security coverage.

Working in the informal or unorganised sector means operating largely outside the reach of labour law. UN Women’s analysis of women in the informal economy shows that this leaves women routinely without labour protections, social benefits such as pension or health insurance, and paid sick leave. They work for lower wages and often in unsafe conditions, including exposure to sexual harassment. The absence of social protections has long-term consequences: globally, fewer women receive pensions, and as a result, more elderly women now live in poverty. Even in developed economies like France, Germany, and Italy, women’s average pension is more than 30 per cent lower than men’s.

Exploitation as a structural feature, not an exception

In the context of developing countries like India, women in the unorganised sector face what researchers have described as a systemic rather than incidental form of exploitation. Research on informal women workers in India documents unfair labour practices including low wages, extremely long working hours, unsafe workplaces, and direct gender-based discrimination. In India, over 90 per cent of the total workforce is engaged in informal employment, and women form a significant share of this labour force. Despite the existence of laws such as the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, enforcement remains persistently weak. Most women in the informal sector lack access to grievance mechanisms, are unaware of their legal rights, and face cultural barriers that make raising complaints practically impossible.

The system of informality, as researchers studying the Indian informal economy have observed, treats female workers as a reserve pool – called upon during periods of high demand and discarded when no longer needed. Women workers in this sector are among the least unionised, which sharply limits their ability to collectively challenge exploitation. This vulnerability is compounded when women are also migrants, facing social stigma, financial precarity, and in many documented cases, sexual assault and street extortion.

Invisibility compounds the problem

A further dimension of this exploitation is statistical invisibility. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has pointed out that women are more likely than men to work in small-scale economic units where their contributions are not counted, or in agricultural activities excluded from the scope of employment surveys. Home-based piece-rate workers – women who stitch garments, roll tobacco, or assemble products from home – are almost invariably left out of official employment data. Their work sustains national and global supply chains, yet their labour remains unrecognised and therefore unprotected.

The double burden: paid work plus unpaid care

Development has not reduced women’s domestic responsibilities in proportion to their expanded economic roles. In fact, for millions of women, entering the paid workforce has simply added a second full shift to an already demanding day. This is the phenomenon widely referred to as the double burden. Research compiled by Global Citizen shows that before the COVID-19 pandemic, women spent three times as many hours as men on unpaid domestic and care work. During the pandemic, this gap widened further, as school closures and increased caregiving needs fell disproportionately on women’s shoulders.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that women globally carry approximately 74 per cent of all unpaid care work. The ILO has calculated that around 16.4 billion hours are devoted to unpaid care work daily worldwide – equivalent to 2 billion people working full-time without any pay. Valued at even a minimum wage, this unpaid labour would equal 9 per cent of global GDP, or roughly USD 11 trillion. Yet it is nowhere counted in national accounts, and nowhere rewarded.

How gender stereotypes lock in this inequality

The persistence of the double burden is not accidental – it is underwritten by deeply rooted gender stereotypes. UNDP’s analysis of care work and gender identifies that this unequal distribution of labour is routinely justified through a “naturalist” discourse – the widespread presumption that women have an inherent tendency toward caregiving. This is not a biological fact but a socially constructed norm, one that conveniently frees men from domestic responsibility while keeping women out of the public sphere. Girls absorb these expectations from an early age, and the education system, family structures, and media often reinforce rather than challenge them.

The OECD’s comprehensive gender equality report confirms that gender norms and stereotypes around paid and unpaid work are learned at an early age. These norms interact with social, policy, and economic environments to disadvantage women in the labour market: women work fewer hours in paid employment, are more likely to work part-time, are less likely to be entrepreneurs, and earn, on average, lower wages than men. These gaps accumulate through a lifetime to produce lower pension entitlements and greater poverty risk in old age.

The economic cost of excluding women from development’s gains

The consequences of gender inequality under development are not limited to individual women – they are a drag on entire economies. A survey of the theoretical literature published in the Review of Economics of the Household argues that gender inequality acts as a source of inefficiency, resulting in the misallocation of productive resources including labour and talent. When girls are expected to manage domestic roles rather than pursue education, human capital accumulates more slowly. When women are funnelled into informal, low-productivity employment, aggregate output suffers.

Research from the Brookings Institution estimates that closing gender gaps in entrepreneurship alone could yield global economic gains of USD 5 to 6 trillion. Gender inequalities in education affect long-term growth both directly, by lowering average human capital levels, and indirectly, by reducing investments in both male and female children. Crucially, these inequalities reproduce disadvantage across generations. A daughter born to a mother denied education and economic agency is likely to face similar constraints herself.

Development that works for women: what needs to change

Acknowledging that development’s impact on women has been uneven is not an argument against development. It is an argument for development designed with women at the centre. Several evidence-based directions stand out. Formalising women’s employment – moving them from unregulated, exploitative informal work to decent, protected jobs with social security – is a foundational step. UN Women’s work on gender equality and poverty reduction highlights that expanding women’s access to formal employment and to social welfare programmes including healthcare, pensions, and maternity protection addresses the root causes of inequality while shielding women from workplace bias and violence.

Equally important is recognising and redistributing unpaid care work. The OECD’s policy analysis on unpaid care work emphasises that how societies address care either expands the capabilities and choices of women and men, or confines women to traditional roles associated with femininity and motherhood. Investing in public childcare, non-transferable paternity leave, and social protection systems that count caregiving as economically meaningful activity would begin to dismantle the double burden structurally. Without this, development will continue to count women’s gains in half measures – their names in the workforce registry, but their unpaid hours nowhere on the ledger.

What do you think? If development has opened new doors for women while deepening old inequalities, what should be the primary focus of policy – improving formal employment access, reducing unpaid care burdens, or challenging the gender stereotypes that underpin both? And at what point does “economic inclusion” without genuine social transformation simply mean women doing more work for less recognition?

References

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Table of Contents

The mixed gains of development for women 🔗

Women and the unorganised sector: exploitation by design 🔗

Exploitation as a structural feature, not an exception 🔗

Invisibility compounds the problem 🔗

The double burden: paid work plus unpaid care 🔗

How gender stereotypes lock in this inequality 🔗

The economic cost of excluding women from development’s gains 🔗

Development that works for women: what needs to change 🔗