New Delhi: As the government seeks to measure specific challenges faced by women entrepreneurs, experts have flagged several structural barriers in running their own businesses, describing time as their scarcest capital.
The government recently announced adding specific questions to its annual survey of unincorporated enterprises to capture the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs, including time constraints, limited mobility and caregiving responsibilities.
The government is looking to measure unpaid household work as part of the revised Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) from January 2027. The survey has been conducted since 2017 to measure unemployment and labour force participation.
Population Foundation of India Executive Director Poonam Muttreja told PTI that most women-led enterprises in India are small, informal and are run from home.
"Every door to growth is narrower for women. Few women own land or property in their own name, so they don't have collateral, and they are pushed towards small loans that keep businesses at survival scale in a few cases," she added.
Limited mobility, safety concerns, restrictive gender norms and disproportionate unpaid care responsibilities cut them off from markets, suppliers and buyers, limiting their economic participation and opportunities, Muttreja said.
While India ranks lower than most countries in terms of overall gender parity, women entrepreneurs also face several structural barriers globally.
According to the World Economic Forum's latest Global Gender Gap report, women's share among business founders rose at an accelerated pace ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, but has tapered off in subsequent years.
With the rise of AI, entrepreneurship is surging again. The number of people adding 'founder' to their LinkedIn profile increased by 60 per cent between 2024 and 2025, while women's overall share among founders remained static at 28 per cent globally, the report said.
Neeraj Ahuja, Practice Director, Transform Rural India (TRI), said women entrepreneurs, particularly in rural India, face a combination of structural barriers that reinforce one another.
"Lack of ownership of assets restricts access to formal credit, social norms constrain mobility and venturing into male-dominated enterprises, and limited access to childcare services, markets, business networks and information limits their ability to grow. Most of the women entrepreneurs therefore are single-person enterprises," Ahuja underlined.
Muttreja said that for many women, running a small business is not a choice made from a position of strength.
"It's what is left when secure jobs and care support are out of reach. That's why it matters that the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) will finally ask what holds these women back," she added.
Limited entrepreneurial, digital, technical and marketing skills training constrains women's ability to build viable enterprises and access profitable markets.
"Skilling programmes are often held at times and places that don't fit women's realities. Trade associations and procurement networks are dominated by men. While women's access to phones and the internet has improved, the gender gap is still wide. Women entrepreneurs aren't failing but are being made to stay behind. The system was never designed with them in mind," she rued.
Ahuja said India's Time Use Survey 2024 shows that women participating in unpaid domestic work spend over five hours a day on it, compared with less than one and a half hours for men.
"This unequal responsibility directly affects women's ability to travel to markets, build networks, attend training and expand their businesses," Ahuja added.
Muttreja said time is the scarcest capital a woman entrepreneur has.
"Women are also nearly twice as likely as men to be caring for someone, and they spend almost twice as long doing it. When she is the default caregiver for children, the elderly and the sick, her business runs on whatever hours are left over," she added.
"As India ages, the care burden on women will grow. Without affordable childcare and eldercare, we'll keep seeing women start businesses but not scale them. That is a loss for women and for the economy," Muttreja said.
Asked about necessary policy interventions, she said promoting women's enterprise without investing in care is like building a road without a bridge.
"Policy must treat care infrastructure as economic infrastructure. That means affordable, good-quality creches at anganwadis, industrial clusters, markets and self-help group hubs, with hours that match working days," she said.
"Men must share care work through parental leave reforms and changes in social norms. The potential for India's gender dividend is too large to leave untapped," she added.
Ahuja said the government's proposal to capture specific challenges faced by women entrepreneurs is an important step because what we measure shapes what we prioritise.
"Equally important is access to enterprise credit, markets, business support services and mentorship. Our focus needs to move beyond the number of women-owned enterprises to their revenues, profitability, and employment generation," he added.
"Women's entrepreneurship cannot grow at scale unless we invest in the social and economic infrastructure that allows women to participate fully in the economy," he noted.
This report was published from a wire feed. Apart from the headline, the EdexLive Desk has not edited the copy.