India's Female Labour Force Participation Rate has climbed sharply, from 23.3% in 2017–18 to 41.7% by 2023–24, one of the most cited statistics in conversations about women's economic progress. Yet this headline conceals a harder truth. More women are working, but most are working without protection, without predictability, and without a pathway upward.Gender equality (Pixabay)Using the ILO's definition of informal workers as those without social security cover, India's informal jobs work out to around 90% of all employment and that share is rising. For women, the situation is even worse. According to the ILO's World Social Protection Report 2024–26, only 26% of Indian women are covered by at least one social protection measure, compared to 39% for men. The gender gap here is not incidental, it is structural, built into the kinds of work women are pushed into and the terms on which they participate.This is the central problem. India has succeeded in getting more women into the workforce. It has not yet succeeded in making that participation meaningful.The gig economy illustrates this contradiction with particular clarity. India's gig workforce surged to 12 million in FY 2024–25, growing at a compounded annual rate of 17%. Platforms have been widely celebrated as a route for women to earn independently, without navigating the barriers of traditional employment. Women now make up nearly 28% of India's gig economy workers. But participation figures do not tell the whole story. The informal and flexible nature of gig work has produced what researchers call the feminisation of casual work, concentrating women in traditionally feminine roles with inferior wages and inferior conditions. Flexibility, in practice, often means absorbing the risks that platforms and employers no longer want to carry.Beneath the income question lies a financial literacy gap that compounds everything else. When women lack the knowledge to manage irregular earnings, navigate credit, or build savings, a single disruption, an illness, a failed monsoon, a slow market month can unravel years of fragile progress. A NITI Aayog report found that 90% of gig workers lack savings and face high vulnerability to emergencies. For women at the intersection of informal work and limited financial awareness, resilience is not a given, it has to be deliberately built.The question, then, is what actually builds it.The strongest evidence points to collective models. By 2024, over 91.75 lakh Self-Help Groups covered 10 crore rural households, extending ₹51,697 crore of bank credit in FY 2024–25 alone. Women's access to formal credit through SHG membership improved from 9% to 71%, while participation in household decision-making rose from 18% to 62%. These numbers reflect something beyond financial inclusion, they describe a shift in agency. When women organise collectively, they access not just credit but information, networks, and negotiating power.Yet even the best-functioning SHGs run into the same ceiling of skills without markets. A woman trained in food processing or handicrafts still needs buyers, supply chains, and fair pricing. Without those connections, micro-enterprises remain micro. The government's Lakhpati Didi initiative targeting three crore women earning ₹1 lakh or more annually is a step toward addressing this, but intent must be matched with market infrastructure, especially in rural and semi-urban regions where the gap between production and commerce remains wide.Research shows that women are more likely to exit the gig and informal economy as soon as conditions improve. A pattern that reveals the distress-driven nature of much of their economic participation. The goal, then, cannot simply be to increase the numbers. It must be to change the conditions under which women work, from precarious to protected, from supplementary to sustainable.The Economic Survey 2024 estimates that women's unpaid care work contributes 3.1% to India's GDP, yet this labour rarely translates into income or asset ownership. India counts what women produce in the market; it has yet to fully reckon with what women absorb outside it. Until both are addressed the unpaid burden and the unprotected earnings participation rates will keep rising while genuine economic security remains out of reach for most.India is not short of ambition on women's livelihoods. What it needs now is integration, where skills are connected to markets, credit designed for irregular incomes, and social protection that follows the worker rather than the employer. Because the measure of progress is not how many women are working. It is how many of them can afford not to stop.(The views expressed are personal)This article is authored by Rajani Jalan, director, CSR & People Relations, mPokket.