Imagine being offered a job that pays ₹25,000 a month. Compared with earning nothing, the decision seems almost embarrassingly obvious. But before accepting it, start subtracting. There is the train, bus or auto to work. Perhaps childcare while you are gone. Lunch outside the house. Maybe someone else now has to do some of the work you previously did at home. Then there are two hours spent commuting each day, which never appear on a payslip at all. The salary is still ₹25,000. What the job actually pays you is something else.

Economists have a useful idea for thinking about this: the reservation wage, the minimum return at which working becomes worthwhile. What makes this particularly interesting for women in India is that entering the labour market does not necessarily mean leaving unpaid work behind. India's Time Use Survey found that approximately 81 percent of women participated in unpaid domestic services and spent around five hours a day on them. Among people aged 15 to 59, the gender difference was even more striking: 92 percent of women participated in unpaid domestic work, compared with only 29 percent of men. A woman taking an eight-hour job may therefore not simply exchange eight unpaid hours for eight paid ones. She can end up adding a working day onto work that was already there.

That changes the economics of a job before we have even considered getting to it. A job ninety minutes away and a job fifteen minutes away may offer the same salary, but they do not offer the same economic return. World Bank research on mobility in Mumbai found that among surveyed women who identified commuting as a barrier to working, domestic duties and childcare responsibilities were important reasons. Safety adds another cost that is harder to put on a receipt. Research in Delhi found that women chose colleges around 20 percent lower in the quality distribution because of concerns about travel safety. These were education choices rather than jobs, but they reveal something important about how women value mobility: distance is not measured only in kilometres. Sometimes it is measured in time, money, responsibilities and risk.

The commute, then, is not something that happens before work. Economically, it is part of the job. This matters particularly for women because of how they travel. The World Bank estimates that 84 percent of trips made by women for work in Indian cities involve public, intermediate public or non-motorised transport. Yet the same research notes that public transport has not traditionally been designed around women's safety and travel patterns. A better-paying job further away can therefore produce a strange trade-off: the wage rises, but so can the time, expense and perceived risk required to earn it. The highest salary available is not necessarily the job with the highest return.

Then there is childcare, perhaps the clearest example of a cost that sits between a woman and her wage. Suppose the ₹25,000 job requires ₹7,000 of childcare each month. Nothing about the salary printed on the offer letter has changed, but the economic value of accepting it clearly has. The World Bank describes affordable, quality childcare as an important enabler of women's employment and entrepreneurship, while unpaid care burdens continue to restrict women's labour-market participation. Childcare therefore behaves less like an optional household expense and more like an input into employment. Just as a factory needs electricity before its workers can produce anything, some workers need care infrastructure before they can reach the factory at all.

Put these costs together and the wage begins to look different. We could think of an "effective wage" as the salary left after accounting for transport, childcare, additional household support and the opportunity cost of the time required to work and commute. Not every one of these costs can be neatly converted into rupees, especially safety or exhaustion, but pretending they are zero does not make them disappear. This may help explain why simply raising wages, while extremely important, cannot remove every barrier to women's employment. A higher salary increases the return to working. It does not automatically shorten the commute, create a nearby crèche or redistribute the work waiting at home.

This is where the usual distinction between social policy and economic infrastructure starts to feel slightly artificial. We easily describe a metro line as infrastructure because it allows workers to reach firms. But what about the crèche that allows a mother to board that metro in the first place? Or the working women's hostel that allows someone to take a job in another city? Tamil Nadu offers an interesting example. Its $150 million Women Employment and Safety programme, supported by the World Bank, combines employment and skills initiatives with crèche facilities, elderly care, safe transport and working women's accommodation.

There is already a smaller version of this idea operating through Tamil Nadu's working women's hostels. Ten government-owned, privately managed Thozhi hostels provide accommodation for around 2,000 women and include security and crèche facilities. The hostels have reported occupancy of around 90 percent. Their economic purpose is easy to miss because they do not create jobs directly. Instead, they reduce the cost of reaching jobs that already exist. That distinction matters. An economy can create an employment opportunity on paper while still leaving the infrastructure needed to take it missing.

And this is not a small question for India's growth. Female labour-force participation has increased substantially in recent years, reaching about 35 percent in 2025 according to World Bank data. But a large gap with male participation remains. The World Bank estimates that raising women's labour-force participation to 50 percent could add around one percentage point to India's annual GDP growth. That makes the costs surrounding women's employment more than private household decisions. When transport, safety or care responsibilities prevent someone from taking a productive job, the lost income belongs to the individual, but part of the lost output belongs to the economy.

Perhaps, then, we have been asking the wrong question about women's employment. "How much does the job pay?" tells us something important, but not enough. A job also has a price: the money, time and rearrangement of life required to take it. For some women, that price can become high enough to turn an apparently worthwhile salary into an economically unattractive choice. Increasing wages matters, but so does lowering the cost of earning them. A job has not truly become accessible when an employer offers it. It becomes accessible when taking it leaves the worker better off. The number on the payslip is the wage. What remains after the cost of having the job is what really pays.

Sources

  • Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (India), Time Use Survey 2019 — mospi.gov.in
  • World Bank, "Shaping Women's Access to Opportunities: Gender, Transport, and Employment in Mumbai" — blogs.worldbank.org
  • World Bank Reproducibility Catalog, entry 565 — reproducibility.worldbank.org
  • World Bank, "How to Help Ensure Safe and Inclusive Public Spaces and Public Transport for Women in India" — worldbank.org
  • World Bank, toolkit for gender-inclusive transport and public spaces in India — worldbank.org
  • World Bank, "Childcare That Works: Human Capital, Jobs, Women's Employment" — worldbank.org
  • World Bank, Tamil Nadu Women Employment and Safety programme announcement — worldbank.org
  • World Bank Documents, project detail — documents.worldbank.org
  • World Bank, "Tamil Nadu Working Women's Hostels: A Home Away From Home" — worldbank.org
  • World Bank Data, female labor force participation rate, India — data.worldbank.org
  • World Bank, "International Women's Day: Advancing Towards Gender Equality in India" — worldbank.org