India's gig economy is on track to become one of the country's largest sources of new employment — and one of its least gender-balanced. A Redseer report released in July projects that India's monthly active gig internet workforce, already above 6 million, could grow to between 17 million and 21 million by 2030. At that scale, the report estimates the gig sector could meet nearly 70% of India's annual non-farm job creation needs, making it a genuinely significant part of how the country absorbs new entrants to the workforce, not a side category.
The report's detail on who gig workers are is as notable as the growth projection. More than 90% of gig workers choose part-time engagement over full-time gig work, and about 54% had no paid work of any kind before joining the gig economy — meaning for a majority of participants, gig platforms are a first entry point into earning income rather than a shift away from a traditional job. For those who do work full-time in gig roles, Redseer found they earn, on average, up to 2.5 times the monthly net income of workers in comparable formal and informal occupations — a figure that helps explain why the sector keeps attracting new entrants despite the lack of traditional job security.
Despite that growth and earning potential, women remain almost entirely absent from the gig internet workforce. Female participation has risen from around 0.5% in 2020 to roughly 1% in 2025 — a near-doubling in relative terms, but still a tiny fraction of a workforce where India's overall female labour force participation rate is about 28%. Where women do participate, they're concentrated almost entirely in home services, making up an estimated 35–45% of workers in that category, while their presence in delivery and ride-hailing — the largest gig categories by volume — stays below 1%. Research from the ILO and NCAER points to a specific, overlapping set of barriers: gaps in digital skills, limited mobility, safety concerns tied to delivery and ride-hailing work specifically, and social norms that discourage women from taking visible, on-the-road gig roles.
The gig gender gap looks especially odd next to a separate, recent finding: the India Skills Report 2026 found that women's employability score, at 54%, surpassed men's score of 51.5% for the first time in five years, with the report crediting hybrid work options and digital skilling programs for the shift. In other words, women are becoming more employable by standard measures at the same time one of the fastest-growing segments of the job market remains almost closed to them in practice. For platforms and policymakers aiming to capture the projected 17–21 million gig jobs by 2030, closing that specific gap — through safer delivery and ride-hailing conditions, targeted digital-skills access, and more flexible categories beyond home services — looks less like an equity add-on and more like untapped labour supply the sector will need if it wants to hit its own growth numbers. More on the Redseer projections is available via the Free Press Journal.