Breaking down the question
The keyword is “emerging”. The examiner is not asking for a timeless list of women's disadvantages, but for challenges that are newly sharpened by contemporary trends — the informalisation of work, digital gig platforms, and the growing overlap between paid and unpaid labour. A strong answer foregrounds what is changing, not only what has long been true.
The setting is fixed as the informal sector — work outside the protection of labour law, without secure contracts, social security or collective bargaining. In India this sector absorbs the vast majority of women workers, so the question is really about why gender equality is so hard to secure precisely where most women earn their living. Keep the two variables — gender and informality — interacting rather than treated separately.
Our note on labour and society provides the wider context on informal work.
How to approach it
Begin by defining the informal sector and noting the scale of women's concentration within it, so the stakes are clear. Then organise the body around distinct, contemporary challenges rather than a loose list — occupational segregation and the concentration of women in the lowest-paid tiers, the invisibility of home-based and care work, the absence of social security and maternity protection, and vulnerability to harassment where no formal grievance mechanism exists.
Sharpen the “emerging” angle with two current forces: the platform and gig economy, which extends informality into new digital forms while reproducing old gender gaps, and the double burden intensified when paid work moves into or near the home. Draw on Kabeer's idea that employment need not translate into empowerment. Close with a brief note on why formalisation efforts have struggled to reach women, keeping the answer analytical to the last line.
Model answer
The informal sector comprises economic activity that falls outside the reach of labour regulation — casual, self-employed, home-based and contract work without secure wages, social security or the right to organise. In India this sector accounts for the overwhelming majority of the workforce, and women are disproportionately concentrated within it, so the pursuit of gender equality is decided largely on this terrain. The emerging challenges here arise from the way older patterns of gender disadvantage are being reproduced and reshaped by new economic trends.
A first challenge is deepening occupational segregation. Women cluster in the lowest-paid, least secure niches — domestic work, home-based piece-rate production, street vending and agricultural labour — while better-paid informal work remains male-dominated. This vertical and horizontal sorting means that rising female participation does not by itself narrow the earnings gap. A second, related challenge is the invisibility of much of women's work. Home-based and care labour blurs into unpaid household duty, so it is under-counted in official statistics and slips beneath the notice of policy, making it structurally hard to protect or reward.
Third is the social security deficit. Because informal work lacks maternity benefits, paid leave, childcare or pensions, women bear the full cost of reproduction and caregiving alongside earning, entrenching the double burden. Fourth is vulnerability to harassment and coercion: without formal contracts, complaint mechanisms or unions, women workers such as domestic helpers have little recourse against exploitation, and workplace safety law rarely reaches the private home or the roadside stall.
The distinctly emerging edge of the problem lies in two trends. The platform and gig economy extends informality into digital forms — app-based delivery, care aggregators, online piecework — that promise flexibility but reproduce the old gender gaps under an algorithmic guise, offering women neither stability nor benefits. At the same time, the movement of paid work into and around the home intensifies the collision between earning and unpaid care, so that flexibility becomes a heavier, not a lighter, load. As Naila Kabeer argues, access to paid employment does not automatically confer empowerment; whether it does depends on the terms of that work, and in the informal sector those terms remain deeply gendered.
Formalisation drives have struggled to reach precisely these workers, because their sites of work are dispersed, unregistered and often domestic. Establishing gender equality therefore requires not only bringing women into paid work but transforming the conditions — recognition, security and voice — under which that work is performed.
Examiner's perspective
For a 10-marker the examiner rewards a tight, well-organised set of distinct challenges over a sprawling essay. The commonest weakness is to describe general gender inequality without tying it to the specific features of informality — the absence of contracts, security and organisation. Keep the two ideas fused in every point.
The mark of a strong script is a genuine engagement with “emerging”. Bringing in the gig economy and the intensified double burden shows awareness of current shifts, and a single conceptual anchor — Kabeer's distinction between employment and empowerment — lifts the answer above a list. End on why women are hard to formalise, and the response reads as diagnosis rather than description.