The Favour Economy Has a Gender

Every workplace has two economies. The first is visible: salaries, titles and performance reviews. The second runs quietly underneath: who gets the early morning coffee chat with the managing director, whose name gets floated before a project is announced, who is called “a pleasure to work with”, and who is simply called available. This hidden economy of favours, introductions and informal access is not neutral. In India, it has a gender, and it exacts a price that never appears on any balance sheet.

The Hidden Economy

In most Indian workplaces, the most consequential decisions — promotions, project allocations and client introductions — happen long before they are formalised. They emerge during post-meeting dinners, after town halls, or over an informal chai. These moments are shaped by who is in the room and who has already left for home.

Research published in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy (2024) shows that workplace networks evolve through homophily, the tendency to refer and recommend people who resemble ourselves. When senior leadership is predominantly male, informal sponsorship and referrals naturally favour men. With India ranking 129th out of 146 countries in the WEF Global Gender Gap Index 2024, these informal networks often become the primary route to senior leadership.

Yet exclusion is only half the story. Women do not merely remain outside the favour economy; they also sustain it. Women are 48 per cent more likely to volunteer for non-promotable work, while managers are 44 per cent more likely to assign such work to them. They organise onboarding, resolve conflicts and make introductions that benefit colleagues. When men perform these tasks, they are recognised as exceptional. When women do, it becomes the baseline expectation. The favour generates career capital for others while costing women time, visibility and advancement.

The Currency of Favour and Access

To understand why women participate less in these networks, one must follow them home. India’s NSO Time Use Survey 2024 shows women spend nearly five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, almost eight times more than men. An IIM Indore study estimates that women generate 87 per cent of the economic value of unpaid care work in India, labour that remains invisible in GDP calculations, performance reviews and promotion decisions.

The woman leaving work at 6.30 pm is often not disengaging from work but beginning another shift. She misses the networking dinner or after-hours conversation where opportunities emerge. Research on Indian corporates shows that leaving on time is frequently interpreted as a lack of commitment, even when domestic responsibilities make that choice unavoidable. The workplace rewards time, presence and availability — resources women are structurally less able to offer.

The Cost of Being ‘Easy to Work With’

There is a particular compliment many professional women learn to receive cautiously: “She’s so easy to work with.”

Often, it describes someone who accepted the last-minute presentation, stayed back for the difficult client, or quietly absorbed additional responsibilities without asking for recognition.

Women carrying this invisible workload are 21 per cent less likely to be promoted and earn 18 per cent less than men. Every hour spent on non-promotable work is an hour unavailable for high-visibility projects or career-building skills. Over time, this becomes a structural transfer of career capital from women to the organisations that depend on their invisible labour.

When Flexibility Becomes an Expectation

Once a woman has shown she will absorb the overflow — staying late, remaining flexible and avoiding conflict — the favour quickly becomes an expectation.

Norms that reward constant availability reinforce the sticky floor, keeping women in roles filled with invisible work, while the glass ceiling limits movement into leadership. These are not separate barriers but parts of the same system. The hidden economy of favours connects them.

Opening the Ledger

If organisations are serious about gender equity, invisible labour must become visible. Companies should audit who performs non-promotable work and recognise those contributions in performance evaluations.

They must also move beyond mentorship to formal sponsorship, ensuring senior leaders actively advocate for women’s advancement instead of leaving access to informal networks. Finally, flexibility should become a structural policy through hybrid work, shared parental leave, and reducing reliance on after-hours networking for career progression. Many multinational companies and several Indian firms have already begun adopting these practices.

None of these reforms eliminates the unequal care burden overnight. But workplaces that wait for society to change first will continue extracting labour from women who are effectively working two full-time jobs, only one of which appears on a payslip or advances a career.