Women empowerment: The annual rituals of International Women’s Day tend to confuse visibility with power. India now celebrates women’s achievements in politics, education and public life with increasing confidence. Laws have been enacted, welfare schemes have multiplied, and the language of empowerment has moved to the centre of public policy. Yet the lived reality for many women remains shaped by dependence, violence and constrained choice.
India has improved girls’ access to schooling. U-DISE data show enrolment rising from 11.32 crore in 2023-24 to 11.93 crore in 2024-25. That is important progress. But education by itself does not settle the harder question. Has it altered power inside the household, in the labour market, or in the terms on which women live their lives?
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Women empowerment and the limits of education
Education is often treated as the foundation of women empowerment. It is certainly one part of it. But the connection is neither linear nor automatic. Women live within social structures that shape how education is used, valued and sometimes contained. A girl may go to school, complete higher secondary education, even earn a degree. None of that guarantees a greater say in marriage, work, mobility or family decisions.
That gap between schooling and agency is the real issue. At the policy level, women empowerment is often presented as a development objective or as a metric of economic progress. But behind official language lies a more basic struggle for identity, dignity and control over one’s own life. The problem is not only lack of opportunity. It is the unequal distribution of power in homes, workplaces and communities.
Female labour force participation remains weak
If economic independence is a serious marker of empowerment, then more women should be entering and staying in paid work. That is not happening at the required scale. According to the International Labour Organisation, female labour force participation in India was 32.8% in 2023. The number is still low for a country that speaks of demographic dividend and inclusive growth.
One reason is visible in the Time Use Survey 2024. Women spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services. Men spend 88 minutes. This is not a marginal gap. It is a structure of constraint. Women do not merely face a lack of jobs. They face a prior claim on their time.
For many educated women, social expectations close the route from classroom to career. Education is often valued less as preparation for work than as an asset in the marriage market. Henrike Donner’s Domestic Goddesses captured this tension well in the context of middle-class families in Calcutta. Education enhanced status, but it also prepared women for the role of the “committed mother,” responsible for producing the next generation’s human capital. That logic has not disappeared.
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Crime against women narrows economic choice
The labour market is also shaped by fear. NCRB data show registered crimes against women rising by 5.4% between 2022 and 2023. This is not only a law-and-order issue. It affects economic behaviour. A woman’s decision to seek work, travel, stay late, migrate for employment or accept a better opportunity is filtered through risk.
Recent empirical work by Tanika Chakraborty and Nafisa Lohawala shows that rising crime against women discourages labour force participation. That finding should not surprise anyone. Public insecurity acts as an invisible tax on women’s mobility.
Domestic violence exposes the fiction of safety at home
The private sphere is no refuge. NCRB data have long shown cruelty by husband or relatives among the largest categories of crimes against women. That single fact should puncture the easy assumption that the home is naturally a site of safety and support. For many women, it is the first site of coercion.
The Covid-19 years only made this harder to ignore. UN Women described the surge in domestic violence during the pandemic as a “shadow pandemic.” Lockdowns did not create the problem. They exposed and intensified an existing one. Behind the rhetoric of family values lay conditions of confinement, dependence and abuse.
Economic independence does not automatically create agency
It is tempting to assume that once a woman earns, empowerment follows. The evidence is less comforting. NFHS data for 2019-20 show that 11% of working women reported severe physical violence, compared with 6% among women who were not employed. Employment, by itself, does not dissolve patriarchal control.
In some households, women’s earnings may unsettle established authority without changing attitudes. Financial independence can create bargaining power, but it can also trigger backlash where traditional gender roles remain deeply entrenched. That is why empowerment cannot be reduced to income alone. Agency is about the capacity to make choices without fear of punishment.
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Workplace safety is still a women empowerment issue
The question of safety extends into formal employment. India’s legal framework on workplace harassment rests on the foundation laid by the Vishakha judgment of 1997 and the 2013 law on prevention of sexual harassment at the workplace. But law and institutional culture do not always move together.
A workplace is only a smaller version of society. It carries the same prejudices, hierarchies and silences. Harassment is not limited to the act itself. It also includes retaliation, disbelief, humiliation and the career costs imposed on those who complain. NCRB data for 2023 reported about 356 cases of sexual harassment at work or office premises. The figure looks small only if one ignores under-reporting, informal employment and the reluctance of women to enter hostile complaint systems.
Women empowerment must mean power, not ceremony
The real test of women empowerment is simple. Can women exercise choice in education, work, mobility, marriage and everyday life without dependence, intimidation or violence? India has made progress in expanding access. It has not yet made comparable progress in redistributing power.
That is why women empowerment cannot be treated as a subsidiary of development policy or as a ceremonial slogan attached to official programmes. It is a question of rights, autonomy and equal citizenship. Until that is accepted in practice, not just in speeches, empowerment will remain more aspiration than fact.
Indrani Sengupta is Assistant Professor of Economics at Shiv Nadar University Chennai.