This piece was published in Femme First Foundation in January 2023.
Before policy can address a problem, it must first be able to see it. In India, a substantial portion of women's economic activity is simply not seen — not because it doesn't exist, but because the frameworks used to measure and classify labour were not built to capture it.
This article examines the phenomenon of "invisiblisation": the systematic process by which women's economic contributions are rendered absent from official statistics, labour classifications, and — by extension — from the policy imagination.
The mechanisms are multiple. India's statistical frameworks have historically defined "work" in ways that exclude unpaid care labour — the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elder care that millions of women perform daily and that make all other economic activity possible. When this labour is not counted, it is not valued. When it is not valued, it does not generate entitlements, protections, or bargaining power.
Informal sector participation presents a related problem. Women constitute a significant share of agricultural labour, domestic workers, and home-based producers — categories that sit at the edges of formal classification systems. The periodic surveys and employment data that shape policy decisions routinely undercount these workers, either through survey design, definitional exclusions, or the practical difficulty of reaching dispersed, non-unionised labour.
The consequences are not merely statistical. When women's work is invisible to the state, so are the conditions under which it is performed — the wage gaps, the absence of safety protections, the lack of social security. Invisiblisation is not a passive oversight; it is a policy blind spot that actively reinforces women's economic marginalisation.
Addressing it requires a rethinking of how we define, count, and ultimately value work — with particular attention to the gendered assumptions that have long structured both our data and our policies.
Originally published in Femme First Foundation, January 2023.