Beyond numbers: Reimagining justice for women in India It is not merely about incorporating women in the prevailing structures, but to change those structures so that they are supportive of the capabilities of all people.
Synopsis: To ensure gender justice, it’s significant to revisit the economic structures, social norms and political institutions that influence the lived realities of women in India.
It can be met with more sophisticated strategies; strategies which appreciate the multidimensionality of gender justice and the need for long-term, coordinated action at economic, social and political levels.
When the world is celebrating International Women’s Day 2026 under the theme ‘Justice for Women and Girls’, it is worth contemplating what justice means in a world where formal equality coexists with structural inequalities.
The Indian experience of gender justice offers a compelling case study, one characterised by constitutional guarantees, progressive legislation, and tangible improvements in some indicators, but marred by deeply seated challenges that can no longer be addressed with mere policy solutions.
To unravel this paradox, it’s significant to revisit the economic structures, social norms and political institutions that influence the lived realities of women.
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According to the World Economic Forum Report 2024, the country ranks 131st in the world on the Gender Gap Index, which is not comfortable to be associated with, as it ranked India the fifth-largest economy in the world.
According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2023, the participation of women in the labour force has been on the increase, as 39.8 percent of women participated in the labour force in 2022-23 compared to 24.5 percent in 2018-19, a phenomenon that the policy circles have been celebrating.
However, this statistical success misleads a more complicated truth that much of this success is a result of distress-related entry into low-quality agricultural and informal sector work instead of a true economic empowerment, as noted by Afridi et al.
(2018), and Klasen and Pieters (2015).
Similarly, the gender wage gap decreased to 24 percent in 2025 compared to 38 percent in 1996 (Deshpande and Singh, 2021; Madheswaran and Khasnabis, 2017), indicating that progress has been made towards pay equity.
Nonetheless, studies have shown that about two-thirds of this disparity is due to discrimination and not because the two have a difference in education, experience and productivity (Khanna, 2012).
The result contradicts the notion that the choice or qualification of women causes wage differences.
In reality, it is based on structural restrictions within the labour markets themselves.
The invisible economy One of the most significant blind spots in conventional economic analysis concerns unpaid care work — cooking, cleaning, childcare, and eldercare that sustains households and communities.
There have always been arguments by feminist economists that mainstream economic structures systemically undervalue this labour since it cannot be transacted in the marketplace (Folbre, 2006; Himmelweit, 2002).
In India, time-use surveys show that women do 82 percent of all unpaid care services, and contribute to 39 percent of the GDP, but this contribution remains invisible in the national accounts (Hirway, 2015).
This invisibility has profound consequences.
In situations where the care work is not included, it cannot be sufficiently supported by the means of the public policy.
Women who spend hours a day on unpaid domestic labour have less time to spend on education, paid labour, or political activity, known as time poverty by economists (Antonopoulos and Hirway, 2010).
This limitation cuts across all social classes, but with the most severe impacts experienced by poor and marginalised women who do not have access to labour-saving technology or have access to paid domestic labour.
The capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum provides a useful perspective to help understand these dynamics.
Rather than focusing solely on income or consumption, this framework asks whether people have the substantive freedom, ie., the capabilities, to live lives they have reason to value.
In this sense, gender justice should not only be formal rights but the actual capacity to exercise them: bodily integrity, practical reason, affiliation with others, and control over the environment (Robeyns, 2003; Nussbaum, 2000).
Quality over quantity in employment The recent rise in women’s participation in the labour force calls for a closer examination.
Although any increase in economic opportunities should be considered, the quality of the employment opportunities is just as important as their quantity.
Currently, 71.8 percent of all working women are engaged in agriculture, as compared to 54.5 percent of all working men, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2023 and the International....
