Hidden barriers stall India’s women

India’s discourse on women’s empowerment is rich in rhetoric, laws, flagship programmes, and well-crafted slogans on global platforms. Yet beneath this façade lies a deeper truth: a sovereign patriarchal system that not only resists gender equality but absorbs it, repackaging empowerment as governance optics rather than radical transformation. Unless empowerment engages with the underlying architecture of power, challenging the norms that justify women’s subordination, it will remain symbolic, not liberatory.

India’s educational gains speak to this dichotomy. Female literacy has improved, and enrolment in secondary education is rising. PLFS (2023–24) reports female workforce participation increasing from 21.1% in 2017-18 to 35.6%. Yet this apparent progress is constrained by conservative norms that prioritise marriage and caregiving over women’s autonomy. A growing section of educated women finds itself in dead-end jobs or categorised as ‘skilled housewives’, echoing feminist economist Nancy Folbre’s critique that empowerment without structural redistribution of care is not empowerment at all, but a reinforcement of the status quo.

This illusion of progress is further evident in how the labour force is accounted for. While FLFPR rose to 41.7%, deeper scrutiny reveals a reclassification of domestic work as self-employment, turning survival into statistical growth. Indeed, the rise in women’s work participation is heavily rural and overwhelmingly in low-pay, informal sectors, hardly the hallmark of genuine liberation. Folbre (2001) argues that patriarchal systems extract invisible labour from women to sustain both households and markets. In India, this manifests in schemes that position women as passive beneficiaries, rather than acknowledging their economic agency or redistributing the burdens of care and production.

MNREGA’s gender provisions seem progressive; women currently contribute between 56% and 59% of person-days nationally, with states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu reaching nearly 90%. Uttar Pradesh recently recorded 45.05% female participation, the highest yet. These numbers suggest inclusion, but they also underline dependence. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, argues that the household is not merely a private domain; it is a site of economic exploitation. MNREGA becomes a burden-bearing structure, not a liberating one when women’s participation is driven more by economic compulsion than by choice.

This structural marginalisation is reinforced by constraints on mobility. Bans on night shift work in 24 states, framed as safety provisions, effectively restrict women from higher-value occupations in manufacturing, healthcare, and services. With a 13% rise in reported crimes against women, families use “safety” as a moral justification for confining women, a tactic of protective patriarchy as a form of societal control. As Alice Walker (1983) argued, systems that claim to protect often do so by limiting women’s self-expression and agency.

But real empowerment transcends income; it demands bodily autonomy and control over one’s life. NFHS-5 reports that 57% of women aged 15-49 are anaemic, over double the male rate, undermining energy, confidence, and freedom. Worse still, female participation in household decisions has dropped from 84% (NFHS-4) to 71%. Walker’s womanist lens reminds us that inclusion without empowerment is participation without sovereignty. Women who earn are still often subordinated in their own homes.

Political representation, while superficially improved, remains limited. Panchayat reservations (33%) have boosted rural female leadership, sometimes beyond quotas. But at the federal level, women occupy only 14.3% of Lok Sabha seats, with minimal Cabinet presence. Walker’s call to centre Black and brown women in political movements echoes here: India’s Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim women are grossly underrepresented in elite spaces of power. For these communities, patriarchal control is compounded by caste and religious exclusion, further limiting their access to leadership and autonomy. Still, pockets of radical success breakthrough.

Inclusion to liberation

Kerala’s Kudumbashree collective empowered women economically, socially, and politically. Yet Kerala’s high literacy and labour participation mask persistent domestic violence, dowries, and a disproportionate burden of unpaid care, underscoring that empowerment gains can be overtaken by patriarchal backlash.

Drawing on radical feminist thought, six transformative measures are needed: First, agency-driven jobs: Women must be moved from informal survival work into formal, secure employment. Integrate Skill India and MUDRA with private-sector gender mandates and universal social security. Second, mobility infrastructure: Instead of banning women from night work, invest in public transit, safe streets, gender-aware policing, and penalise harassment, addressing root causes rather than symptoms of patriarchy. Third, shift narratives: Launch campaigns and engage men to dismantle the “virtuous victim” archetype, ensuring that women’s bodies are not national property, but individual sovereign spaces.

Fourth, strengthen autonomy: Invest in nutritional and health programmes to reduce anaemia, paired with autonomy metrics such as reproductive agency, legal awareness, and educational mobility. Fifth, political pipelines: Quotas at local levels must be paralleled by quotas in Parliament, bureaucracy, and corporate boards, followed by mentorship and leadership training to ensure influence, not token presence. Lastly, support ecosystems: Scale up childcare, eldercare, paid menstrual leave, and affordable transport to break the confines of domesticity.

A transformative feminist future also demands unlearning from men through educational reforms, shared caregiving responsibilities, and dismantling masculine norms that perpetuate hierarchy. Policymakers must move beyond measuring female participation and begin evaluating how power, autonomy, and dignity are institutionally redistributed. Without such a paradigm shift, empowerment remains patriarchal theatre, a series of appearances that maintain, rather than dismantle, the structures of male dominance. Our nation’s data-driven gains highlight presence, not power; visibility, not liberty. Radical feminist insight calls us to shift from inclusion to liberation: to recognise that empowerment must challenge the very terms of women’s participation, not merely expand them.

As India charts its path to a $5 trillion economy and Viksit Bharat 2047, we must aim for liberation grounded in choice, autonomy, and sovereignty over bodies, decisions, and destinies. As Alice Walker reminds us, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Empowerment, to be real, must begin where obedience ends.

(The writer is an assistant professor at IFMR GSB Krea University)