Unheard Leaders: Rethinking Women's Informal Leadership in India's Unorganised Sector

Women make up more than half of the workers in India's vast unorganised sector, yet very little of what is written about them treats them as leaders. Most existing research looks at street vendors, domestic workers and home-based artisans through the lens of hardship: low pay, no legal cover, harassment, and constant insecurity. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It leaves out a quieter story that plays out every day in markets, homes and workshops across the country, where women settle disputes among co-workers, teach newcomers the tricks of the trade, bargain with contractors and municipal staff, and hold together informal networks that function as a safety net when nothing else does. This paper argues that these everyday acts deserve to be called leadership, even though they carry no title and appear on no organisation chart. Drawing on feminist political economy and intersectionality theory, and building on a research design originally prepared for consideration under the Indian Council of Social Science Research's Women-Led Development scheme, the paper develops a conceptual framework for studying leadership as it is actually practiced by women in informal work. It reviews the relevant literature on informal labour and gender in India, identifies where that literature falls short, and lays out a qualitative, comparative methodology capable of capturing leadership across three occupational groups: street vending, domestic work, and home-based artisanal work. The paper closes by considering what recognising this kind of leadership could mean for policy, particularly for programmes built around the idea of Women-Led Development and the government's Viksit Bharat @2047 agenda. The central claim is a simple one: before India can talk seriously about women leading development, it needs to notice the leadership that women in the informal economy are already providing.

informal sector, women's leadership, Women-Led Development, intersectionality, unorganised workers, India, feminist political economy

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