India’s Gig Economy Faces a Gender Gap

India’s gig and platform economy is expanding rapidly, powered by smartphones, digital payments, e-commerce, mobility platforms and changing employment preferences. The platform workforce is estimated to have grown from 7.7 million in 2020-21 to around 12 million in 2024-25, while NITI Aayog projects the broader gig workforce could reach 23.5 million by 2029-30. Yet this employment revolution has a striking weakness—women remain severely underrepresented.

A newly released ILO-NCAER policy brief highlights the scale of the challenge. Despite platform work offering flexibility that could potentially benefit women balancing employment with household responsibilities, industry estimates cited in recent reporting suggest women constitute only around 1% of India's platform workforce. Their absence is particularly visible in location-based jobs such as ride-hailing and delivery services.

The problem extends beyond simply providing jobs. Women face interconnected barriers involving digital literacy, financial access, mobility, safety and restrictive social norms. Even where women have bank accounts, gaps remain in their ability to effectively use digital financial services and access formal credit—capabilities increasingly essential for participating independently in app-driven work.

Platform work itself is also diversifying. NITI Aayog estimates that about 47% of gig work is medium-skilled, 31% low-skilled and 22% high-skilled. This creates opportunities beyond delivery and transportation, including professional services, finance, sales, technology, education and other digitally enabled occupations where greater female participation could be encouraged.

Social security represents another critical concern. Gig workers frequently operate outside conventional employer-employee structures. The Code on Social Security, 2020 formally recognizes gig and platform workers and provides a framework for measures covering accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, disability protection and old-age security.

Closing the gender gap therefore requires coordinated intervention. Platforms can introduce stronger safety mechanisms, flexible work models and gender-sensitive onboarding, while government and industry can strengthen digital skilling, financial literacy, affordable credit, insurance and social protection. The ILO-NCAER findings particularly underline digital financial inclusion as an important pathway to increasing women's participation.

India's gig economy could ultimately become one of the country's most important employment engines, accounting for about 6.7% of the non-agricultural workforce by 2029-30. But scale alone will not make the sector inclusive. The real opportunity is to ensure that the digital economy does not reproduce traditional workforce inequalities. India's gig revolution will be truly transformative only when women participate in—and benefit from—its growth at scale.