On paper, the BRICS Women’s Ministerial Declaration identifies the right priorities: women’s inclusion in leadership roles, higher economic participation and outcomes, entrepreneurship, STEM, digital and financial inclusion, etc. In fact, the two deliverables in the 4th BRICS Women Ministerial Meeting have been laid out as: BRICS Women Digital Repository of Best Practices, a shared knowledge platform documenting best practices and experiences from BRICS Countries; and BRICS Women Digital Capacity Building Guidelines, a roadmap for expanding institutional partnerships, digital learning and capacity-building across the BRICS community. Digital inclusion, entrepreneurship, leadership, capacity building, and knowledge sharing are surely worthy ambitions. Yet, some of the most urgent questions around women’s empowerment, the very questions that determine women’s position and ability to participate in the economy with dignity and agency, were strikingly missing from both the discussion and the discourse of the BRICS Women’s Ministerial Meeting.Where were the discussions on women’s actual participation in the labour force? Where was the discussion on the unpaid and underpaid care and domestic work that continues to define women’s relationship with the economy? The discourse on disproportionate child and elder care burden, lack of social and economic infrastructure, including public services and social protections paradigms to protect women? Missing.In her recent article following this meeting, the minister of women and child development, Annpurna Devi writes, “Numbers track the shift. India’s female labour force participation has risen from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24.” India’s female labour force participation has improved in recent years, but it continues to lag behind several countries, including BRICS members China, Brazil and Russia. If one is to consider female labour force participation a marker of women’s improved position in the economy, the nature of this increase deserves far greater scrutiny than the numbers themselves. Also read: Talk Left, Trade Right: BRICS, Gaza and the Limits of Southern SolidarityHowever, to track numbers from when BRICS was formed, India’s female labour force participation trend from 2006 to 2026 does not indicate much deviation. In fact, a steep decline is followed by a sharp rise after the first deadly wave of COVID-19, which then flattens. The COVID-19 lockdown dealt a severe blow to women-led enterprises, with a survey of over 2,000 women-led micro and small non-farm businesses across four states recording an average 72.5% decline in revenues compared to the pre-COVID period. For many, revenues fell to zero during the core lockdown month of April. Another study found that 79% of women entrepreneurs reported low sales and reduced customer footfall, although 19% reported that their businesses had scaled up during the period. Multiple rounds of the PLFS, ILO estimates, and feminist labour scholarship show that much of this growth has been concentrated in self-employment and agriculture. These are sectors characterised by low earnings, informality, limited social protection and poor working conditions. This is not necessarily a story of expanding opportunity. It is often one of deepening economic distress. Fig 1. India’s Female Workforce Participation Rate over the last two decades.Source: World Bank, ILO Modelled DatabaseAs household incomes stagnate and living costs rise, women are increasingly compelled to undertake whatever work is available. The modest rise in participation reflects, in many instances, the economic compulsion of households rather than a transformation in labour markets or gender relations. Social norms may recede when survival is at stake, but precarious work is hardly empowerment.Nor have Indian women been relieved of the invisible labour that sustains families and economies alike. They have not been freed from unpaid work; they have simply been expected to shoulder more. Reasons reported by women and girls aged 15 and above for not being in the labour force clearly show that 44.5% face difficulty entering into paid work due to their domestic and childcare burdens. Even as women enter paid work, unpaid care is redistributed to another woman within the household – a daughter, a mother, a sister, or a daughter-in-law. The burden is displaced, not dismantled. Also read: Separately Together: What Keeps the BRICS Alive at 20?Such repetition of arguments presented by many who view from the position of feminist economists only to say: Why did a forum like BRICS, organising multiple meetings and announcing declarations, not address these issues? These structural realities rarely feature in declarations celebrating women’s economic participation. Then lie multiple concerns of women who make up 31.2%, which requires its own analysis and space.Even the new Labour Codes deepen the exclusion of women workers who already occupy the most precarious end of India’s labour force: ASHA and anganwadi workers, who form the backbone of public healthcare, nutrition and the ICDS along with other scheme workers, remain outside the legal definition of a “worker”, thus denied the protections, wages and social security that should accompany their labour. What, then, are we to make of a policy discourse that celebrates the “Pashu Didi” and “Lakhpati Didi” while refusing to recognise the women who sustain the state’s essential care infrastructure as workers in the first place? Cash transfers and entrepreneurial schemes cannot substitute for dignified work, living wages, social security and a redistribution of the enormous volume of paid and unpaid care labour that continues to be extracted from women. The official declaration also speaks of building digital capacities. However, here as well, women who are being integrated into the workforce in one of the expanding digital sectors, the digital platform economy, are ignored. In India, platform-mediated work has reproduced old forms of discrimination and exploitation and introduced new ones, from unstable incomes and the absence of social security, POSH protections, maternity benefits and crèches, to algorithmic surveillance, arbitrary ID blocking and retaliation against workers who organise. Women platform workers have repeatedly raised these demands as well as demands for care infrastructure and secure wages, yet digital mediation has too often meant that precarious work becomes precarious work on an algorithm. So what are we actually imagining when we speak of digital integration: integration into technology, or integration into a system of work that still leaves women carrying the costs of care, insecurity and exploitation? Also read: Can the BRICS Bank Really Deliver What the Global South Needs?These are concerns old and new. The BRICS Feminist Watch has consistently argued that BRICS cannot claim to offer an alternative model of development if its leadership is not grounded in feminist principles from the outset. Its analyses of New Development Bank (NDB)-funded projects have repeatedly shown that large infrastructure investments have generated limited gains in secure, decent employment for women, while often overlooking the gendered consequences of displacement, environmental degradation and unequal access to livelihoods. Women continue to bear the costs of development far more often than they share in its benefits.Perhaps that is the question BRICS must confront – not whether it can produce another declaration, another repository or another framework, but whether it is willing to listen to the women whose labour already sustains its economies. The measure of leadership should not be restricted to how often women appear in policy documents. It is whether women workers, Indigenous women, farmers, care workers, domestic workers and informal workers are recognised as political actors with the power to shape those documents in the first place. Only then can BRICS become more than a forum that speaks about women.This article is part of a series on BRICS and Global South cooperation curated by The Wire and the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA).Anjali S. is a researcher with the Centre for Financial Accountability.This article is part of a series on BRICS and Global South cooperation curated by The Wire and the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA). Read part one here, part two here, part three here and part four here.