Invisible Workforce: Employment Barriers Faced by Disabled Women in India By Manya Khanna

According to the 2011 Census of India, around 26.8 million people in India live with a disability, of whom roughly 11.8 million are women (Addlakha, 2022). The World Health Organization (2011) places the likely figure considerably higher, at about 15% of any population. Yet disabled women in India remain doubly absent from public life. The mainstream women’s movement has often treated them as a footnote rather than a constituency, and the disability rights movement, long led by elite urban men, has framed disability as gender-neutral (Addlakha, 2022; Ghai, 2002). Disabled women therefore sit on a precarious intersection that neither side fully claims (Addlakha, 2022).

This paper argues that disabled women in India form an invisible workforce. They work, often hard, but their labour is not counted, paid fairly, protected, or recognised as labour at all. The reason is not their impairments. It is the intersection of patriarchy, ableism, and socio-economic inequality, which together decide whose bodies and whose work the labour market is willing to value. Drawing on Crenshaw’s (1989) intersectionality, Ghai (2002, 2015) on disability in India, Erevelles (2011) on structural inequality, Garland-Thomson (2002) on body norms and femininity, and Nussbaum’s (2011) capability approach, the paper reads disabled women’s exclusion as a problem produced by social systems, not by disabled bodies.

Understanding Disability and Gendered Expectations in India

Women in Indian society have very limited social roles including a role of being a wife; mother; caregiver and/or doing unpaid domestic work for their male breadwinners (Deshpande & Kabeer, 2021). However, when a girl with a disability is born, there is no longer any male-dominant script for women. For example, Bhardwaj and Kumar (2025) state families often view having a daughter with disabilities as bad luck, or a punishment by God, meaning that women cannot perform their traditional family roles of wife, mother, and homemaker (Ghai, 2002).Addlakha (2022) shows that disabled women in India are far more likely than disabled men to remain unmarried, divorced, or widowed.

The result is a double bind. Disabled women are excluded from the role of “good worker” because productivity in the labour market is imagined through able-bodied norms (Erevelles, 2011). They are also excluded from the role of “good woman” because femininity is imagined through equally narrow body norms (Garland-Thomson, 2002). Garland-Thomson’s concept of the normate, the unmarked standard against which other bodies are measured, captures this neatly. Disabled women are then declared dependent and “less productive,” which becomes self-fulfilling: families do not invest in their education, employers do not hire them, and many internalise the belief that they have nothing to offer (Gupta et al., 2021; Nair, 2025). As Erevelles (2011) reminds us, productivity is not a neutral measure; it is a social standard tied to capitalism’s preference for certain bodies. 

Structural Barriers to Employment

What appears as individual inability is actually a series of failures within the system.  According to Bhardwaj and Kumar (2025), approximately 1% of disabled women in India can read and write. Many Indian schools still do not have ramps, accessible toilets, trained teachers, or Braille materials available to students who are blind (Jan 2025). All modes of public transportation assume that we will be getting from one place to another with the use of an ability-based user, and according to Gupta et al. (2021), disabled women in rural India must hire an entire auto rickshaw and use an attendant at great expense to get to work.

Most workplaces also have physical barriers to disabled women throughout India. Both the public sector and private sectors in India are not providing enough access because of inadequate adaptations in construction for people with disabilities, thus limiting the number of alternative forms of access, through many different types of construction alternatives available at the workplace, for a person with disabilities, according to a new study by Ansari (2024). As part of the Rights of People with Disabilities Act in 2016, the allocation of 4% of government jobs for persons with disabilities has been accomplished, and the act is being enforced in limited conditions; however, Ojha et al. (2023) found enforcement is widely variable based on jurisdiction. In a survey conducted by Nair (2025) of women with disabilities in Kerala, the researchers found that only 18.67% of the women surveyed were employed full-time in some form of low-waged, unprotected jobs; most were isolated from their coworkers and/or supervisors and/or experienced discrimination in work situations based on their coworker and/or supervisor status. Inaccessibility and being used as a basis for the judgment of ‘fit’ by hiring managers (Abusalha, 2024) have also created barriers to employment; thus, hiring managers evaluated candidates based on their personal experience of themselves rather than the abilities of the disabled woman. Erevelles (2011) points out that barriers created by inaccessibility are the result of constructed vs. natural barriers; e.g., a constructed barrier would be a staircase because someone decided to build a staircase instead of a ramp. 

Double Marginalisation in the Labour Market

The Census of India (2011) shows that only 47% of male disabled Indians were working, compared to only 23% of female disabled workers (Census of India, 2011; Addlakha, 2011). Crenshaw’s (1989) framework for analysing multiple intersections of identity must be applied to understand the discrimination faced by disabled women compared to other groups of disabled people; the intersection experienced by disabled females exists outside of the traditional understanding of exclusion based on the concepts of ableism and patriarchy or the ability to add to or combine these concepts. According to Nair (2025), Mitra and Sambamoorthi (2018) estimate that 87% of the disabled population in India works informally. Disabled women largely work informally, performing low-wage, low-skilled "piece" wage work in their homes, creating products, or providing typically “women’s work” services, and are classed as small entrepreneurs in the formal labor market (Sahu & Behera, 2025). According to the study by Sivasubramanian et al. (2020), women who are homemakers/neighbours in the city of Chennai earn an average of approximately Rs. 164 per completed order. They are not provided with a written employment contract from their employer, nor do they have a written policy for taking time off from work or for any unions to represent them. According to Ansari (2024), the majority of working women with disabilities have low-income jobs in the formal workforce and have limited opportunities for career advancement. Society has not only undervalued the physical selves of women with disabilities but also continues to not value the work women do caring for their families. 

Invisible Labour and Social Erasure

Addlakha (2022) notes that small-scale studies consistently show disabled women in India engaging in housework, agricultural support, and informal economic activity that simply does not appear in official statistics. Deshpande and Kabeer (2021) distinguish between income-generating, expenditure-saving (such as food processing or tending livestock), and unpaid domestic work, showing that women perform large amounts of expenditure-saving work that is productive but uncounted. For disabled women, this is often the only work available—and they are still recorded as “non-workers.”

The erasure is not accidental. As Erevelles (2011) argues, capitalism defines productivity through wage labor in particular kinds of public spaces, pushing care, reproductive, and home-based work into a category of “non-work” that need not be paid for. Garland-Thomson (2002) adds that disabled women’s bodies are typically absent from popular cinema, advertising, and political imagery except as objects of pity. Visual erasure reinforces labor-market erasure. Nussbaum’s (2011) capability approach unsettles the usual question by insisting that the proper measure of a society is not the wage labor it extracts but whether each person can develop central human capabilities. By that standard, an economy that hides disabled women’s work is not successful but morally incomplete.

Towards Inclusion and Structural Change

The definition of disability has been broadened by the 2016 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. With this broader definition comes an increase in the number of jobs available to people with disabilities by reserving four per cent of jobs for people with disabilities (Government of India, 2016). The implementation of the act is not very consistent (Ansari, 2024; Nair, 2025). Genuine change happens at many levels: the implementation of universal design in schools and workplaces, trained teachers, and materials that are accessible to all persons with disabilities, enforceable accommodations at the time of hiring, and equal pay across gender and disability lines. Representation is another important factor. Addlakha (2022) discusses the recent development of platforms, such as the Women With Disabilities India Network, that are led by disabled women. The ongoing temptation is tokenistic inclusion, with one public face of a disabled woman used to demonstrate diversity while leaving unchallenged the very structures that created exclusion. Erevelles (2011) makes an incisive point—cosmetic inclusion does not produce resource redistribution. A viable agenda must encompass both gender justice and disability rights with economic redistribution. 

Conclusion

Disabled women in India are not absent from the labor market because they cannot work. They are absent or pushed to their lowest margins because of how the market and the wider society are organised. Patriarchy decides what counts as a respectable woman; ableism decides what counts as a productive worker; socio-economic inequality decides whose access will be paid for. When all three intersect, as Crenshaw (1989) warned and Ghai (2002), Erevelles (2011), Garland-Thomson (2002), and Nussbaum (2011) each illuminate, the result is a population whose labor is real but uncounted and whose presence is constant but unseen. Closing the gap between possibility and reality (Addlakha, 2022) is less about disabled women becoming visible than about a society finally learning to look.

References

Abusalha, S. (2024). Insights into employment experiences of women with disabilities: A comparative qualitative study across seven countries. Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 15(2), 161–201. https://doi.org/10.14267/CJSSP.2024.2.8

Addlakha, R. (2022). Slow progress for women with disabilities in India. Current History, 121(834), 129–134. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2022.121.834.129

Ansari, H. R. (2024). Challenges of disabled women in the workplace: A comparative analysis of public and private spaces in India. International Journal of Education, Knowledge and Society, 3(9), 552–558. https://doi.org/10.70333/ijeks-03-09-005

Bhardwaj, R. K., & Kumar, N. (2025). Gender and disability: The challenges faced by Indian women. International Journal of Social Science and Education Research, 7(1), 439–443. https://doi.org/10.33545/26649845.2025.v7.i1f.232

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Deshpande, A., & Kabeer, N. (2021). Norms that matter: Exploring the distribution of women’s work between income generation, expenditure-saving, and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India (WIDER Working Paper No. 2021/130). UNU-WIDER. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2021/070-2

Erevelles, N. (2011). Disability and difference in global contexts: Enabling a transformative body politic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 1–32.

Ghai, A. (2002). Disabled women: An excluded agenda of Indian feminism. Hypatia, 17(3), 49–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2002.tb00941.x

Ghai, A. (2015). Rethinking disability in India. Routledge.

Government of India. (2016). The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016. Ministry of Law and Justice.

Gupta, S., de Witte, L. P., & Meershoek, A. (2021). Dimensions of invisibility: Insights into the daily realities of persons with disabilities living in rural communities in India. Disability & Society, 36(8), 1285–1307. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1788509

Jan, R. (2025). Challenges faced by women with disabilities in India. The Academic, 3(11), 572–585. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17921705

Nair, S. S. (2025). Workplace challenges faced by differently abled women: An empirical study from Kerala. International Journal of Applied Research, 11(11), 460–465. https://doi.org/10.22271/allresearch.2025.v11.i11Sa.13136

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

Ojha, G. J., Khanna, A., Moirangetham, S., Sharma, V., Maheshwari, R., & Azad, S. (2023). Factors influencing employability of persons with disabilities in India: A systematic review protocol. International Journal of Research and Review, 10(4), 231–238. https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20230429

Sahu, P. R., & Behera, D. K. (2025). Barriers to women’s empowerment in India’s informal sector: Structural and socio-economic constraints. Discover Sustainability, 6, Article 514. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-025-01398-0

Sivasubramanian, K., Pushpa, A., Raju, V., & Kumar, M. D. (2020). Women and informal employment: An analysis of socio-economic and health conditions of women home-based workers in Chennai, India. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(5), 97–106.

World Health Organization. (2011). World report on disability. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241564182