As India races toward an Artificial Intelligence-driven future, public debate has been centred primarily on skills. Who has them, who needs to acquire them, and who stands the risk of being replaced by machines. This anxiety is understandable in a country seeking to leap from the Information Age to what is now being called the Intelligence Age. However, beneath this discussion lies a more fundamental question, especially for women.
For millions of Indian women, the real scarcity is not talent, ambition, or opportunity, but time. Unless this unequal burden of time is recognised and reduced, AI will not act as an equaliser. Instead, it is likely to increase the gender gap rather than reduce inequality. India’s Time Use Survey 2024 clearly reveals that women work longer hours than men when paid and unpaid work are combined. On average, women work 9.6 hours a day, as opposed to men who work 8.6 hours. The difference is certainly not because women are less efficient or less productive. It is because women are the ones who do the unpaid domestic and care work. The survey further shows that 80% of men’s working time is spent on paid jobs. In contrast, women spend a considerable amount of time on childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, and managing households. Although this work is essential, it is largely ignored in economic data and policy decisions. To make things worse, women’s unpaid work is at its highest during their key career years, between the ages of 25 and 39. During this period, women often work more than 10 hours a day, primarily due to childcare responsibilities. Men’s workloads, by contrast, stay fairly stable across their lives and are mostly in the form of paid work. This results in a deep imbalance because while men continue to gain experience, skills, and qualifications, women continue to struggle to find time to invest in their careers.
This time deficit has serious consequences in an economy increasingly shaped by AI. On average, women have 10 fewer hours per week on self-development than men. These are precisely the hours required for upskilling, reskilling, online courses, and digital learning. In AI-driven workplaces, where continuous learning is no longer optional, this gap is not a minor inconvenience. It is a
decisive disadvantage. Policy frameworks that urge workers to constantly adapt and upgrade often assume the availability of free time. For many women, that assumption simply does not hold.
The burden of the so-called double shift also forces difficult trade-offs. Time Use data show that women often cut back on sleep and self-care to manage the combined demands of paid and unpaid work. Men’s sleep patterns, by contrast, remain largely intact across age groups. This chronic time stress affects health, well-being, and long-term productivity. It also helps explain why nearly 40% of women outside the labour force cite household responsibilities as the primary reason for not working, according to the survey. The issue is not a lack of aspiration or ability, but the absence of social and institutional support that would make sustained employment possible.
Crucially, rising female workforce participation has not reduced women’s unpaid labour. Paid work is being added to women’s daily load rather than replacing domestic responsibilities. The gendered division of labour within households remains essentially unchanged. The economy benefits twice from women’s labour, once through paid work and again through unpaid care, but rewards them inadequately for both. This reality is reflected in a striking macroeconomic figure: women contribute only about 17% to India’s GDP. This is often read as underperformance. In truth, it reveals how much essential labour remains unpaid and excluded from national income calculations.
AI can make this problem worse by keeping women’s work invisible. AI-based performance systems often reward people who are always available, work long hours, and can keep upgrading their skills without breaks. They do not account for caregiving or domestic responsibilities. Women are rarely excluded explicitly, but they are quietly penalised. Time poverty becomes a professional liability, even though it is socially produced rather than individually chosen. This problem must also be seen within a larger structural context. As some experts have argued, India’s transition from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age is not a routine technological upgrade. It is a fundamental shift in the economic model. Growth can no longer depend solely on labour arbitrage or services. Innovation, intellectual property, and human-centred design will matter far more. However, women’s participation in India’s workforce remains around 30%. Excluding such a large share of the population from the core of the technology economy is not merely unjust. It is economically reckless.
So it is time to grasp this truth: India’s AI challenge is as much about time as it is about technology. Skilling programmes that ignore women’s time constraints risk failure and may trap them in low-paid, low-growth jobs, harming both gender equality and AI-led growth. The solution is straightforward: invest in childcare and eldercare, ensure safe transport, provide flexible and modular learning, and normalise career breaks through re-entry and returnship programmes.
If India wants an inclusive AI future, it must ask whose time pays the price of progress. And we all know technology is not neutral. Without gender-aware action, AI will therefore automate inequality, not reduce it. The future of work, we must remember, depends on whether women’s time is really valued.
P. John J. Kennedy is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru