One thousand women across India are wearing sensors right now that track exactly how extreme heat is wrecking their bodies, their wages, and their health, one workday at a time.
Story Snapshot
- Researchers from Harvard, working with the Self Employed Women’s Association, are tracking 1,000 women in India’s informal labor economy for 13 months using wearables, microsensors, lab tests, and surveys.
- The study, called Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies, measures how heat and humidity affect health, wages, and daily wellbeing.
- Earlier surveys already show heat cuts work hours, slashes productivity, and triggers health problems for informal women workers far more than formal employees.
- The Self Employed Women’s Association has responded with pilot heat insurance programs now covering hundreds of thousands of workers.
A Study Built to Count What Gets Ignored
The Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies study recruits 1,000 women who work in India’s informal economy, from street vendors to home-based tailors. Researchers strap wearables and microsensors onto them, run lab tests, and collect surveys over 13 months. The goal is simple: measure exactly what heat and humidity do to their bodies, their paychecks, and their daily lives.
This is not the first attempt to put numbers on the problem. Harvard researchers, teaming up with the Self Employed Women’s Association and a building science center at CEPT University in India, launched an earlier version of this work tracking hundreds of women across South Asia’s varied indoor and outdoor job sites. The current 1,000-woman study builds on that foundation with a bigger sample and longer tracking window.
Numbers That Explain the Urgency
Informal work leaves women exposed in ways formal jobs do not. A Delhi-focused study found 74 percent of home-based women workers saw less demand for their services during heat waves, 84 percent cut their working hours, and 88 percent reported falling productivity. Those numbers matter because there is no employer absorbing the loss. When the heat hits, the worker eats the cost directly, in fewer hours and thinner pay.
Health data tells a similarly stark story. One cross-sectional study found heat-related illness struck 83 percent of informal workers, including farm laborers, street vendors, tailors, and sanitation crews, far more than their formally employed counterparts. Separate research found each degree rise in wet-bulb globe temperature raised the odds of productivity loss by 339 percent for female workers, compared with 44 percent for older male workers. That gap is not small. It points to something structural, not incidental.
Why Informal Workers Carry the Heaviest Load
The Self Employed Women’s Association represents 1.8 million women working outside formal employment protections in India. Ninety-two percent of Indian women in paid work hold informal jobs, meaning most lack fixed hours, contracts, sick leave, or legal heat protections that cover salaried employees. When temperatures spike, there is no manager required to send them home with pay. They simply lose income, get sick, or both.
India’s newer labor codes do include some climate-risk guidelines, but definitions and minimum thresholds leave most workers in small firms and informal jobs outside their reach [7 in neutral set references newslaundry]. That gap between law on paper and protection in practice is exactly what worker-tracking studies like this one are built to expose. Data collected directly from workers’ bodies is harder to dismiss than anecdote alone.
Insurance Pilots Show What Comes Next
The Self Employed Women’s Association has not waited for more data before acting. It launched a pilot heatwave insurance program in 2023 covering 21,000 women, though high payout thresholds meant no claims were triggered that year. By 2024, an improved version covered 52,000 members, and a later pilot expanded coverage to more than 225,000 women across 34 districts in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, requiring two consecutive days of extreme heat to trigger a payout.
Globally, extreme heat costs poor women workers an estimated 57 billion dollars in lost earnings every year, a figure projected to triple or even quintuple by 2050 without targeted action. That is not an abstract climate statistic. It is wages that never reach kitchen tables and school fees that never get paid, concentrated among women who already had the least cushion to begin with. The 1,000-woman study aims to turn that abstraction into hard evidence policymakers cannot easily wave away.
Sources:
time.com, sddirect.org.uk, cgap.org, heathealth.info, mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu
