Empowering Women of India

Before you start reading, go through the following words and expressions in pairs or small groups. Explain the meaning of the words in English. Use a dictionary if you need to.

Women’s empowerment can be defined as promoting women’s sense of self-worth, their ability to determine their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others. While this is something Norwegian girls and women to a large extent take for granted, the same is not true for India. Strong cultural norms and a deeply rooted patriarchal society have been keeping women away from educational and professional opportunities.

One factor that greatly limits women’s empowerment is poverty. Poverty limits a persons access to education, jobs, resources, and political participation, and this disproportionately affects Indian girls and women.

The most efficient way to lift women out of poverty, is to invest in girls' education. The patterns are clear: girls who receive an education marry later, have fewer children, and are more likely to lead healthy, productive lives. It also benefits society as a whole, by reducing poverty, increasing the country's GDP, and resulting in more economic growth.

This was one of the motives behind The Right to Education Act, which was passed by the Indian Parliament in 2009. The act makes it obligatory for the government to provide free and compulsory elementary education to all children between six and fourteen. The result of the act has been an increase in girls' enrolement in primary schools, and this has again resulted in an improvement in the literacy rate among girls. Today, India has an estimated female literacy rate of 66%, while the male literacy rate is estimated at 82%. While this is an improvement, India still has the lowest female literacy rate in Asia.

Despite the introduction of The Right to Education Act, many Indian girls drop out of school after a few years. Girls are often expected to contribute to the household much earlier than boys, and they are responsible for household chores like cooking and looking after siblings. Moreover, many girls marry at a very young age, which is often an obstacle to their education. There is also the question of safety: travelling alone to school is not always considered safe, and girls often face restrictions on mobility. Infrastructural barriers, such as lack of functional toilets in school buildings, will also contribute to keeping girls from getting an education; many girls drop out of school once they start menstruating because of inadequate toilet and hygiene facilities. Today, as many as four million girls in India are not attending school.

We see the result of inadequate education for girls later in their lives: only 39% of Indian women over the age of 25 have completed secondary education, and only 20% of women take part in the formal labour force of the country. This is among the lowest in developing countries. The majority of Indian women instead work in the informal sector, in jobs with limited social protections and very low wages. As a result, women's contribution to the country's GDP is only 17%. Also, women earn, on average, 65.5% of what their male colleagues earn for performing the same work.

There are some positive trends for the women of India. These are the result of hard-working organisations and inspirational individuals working every day to empower women so they can create a better future for themselves. Three of the organisations that work actively to promote women's education and gender equality are Pratham, Educate Girls, and Girls Who Code.

Pratham is the largest non-governmental organisation working to provide quality education to underprivileged children in India. They reach out to millions of children living in both urban and rural areas. Pratham has reached 4.5 million children through their education programmes, and many girls have been given a second chance to complete their education.

Learn more about Pratham here: link to Pratham's website

Another non-governmental, non-profit organisation is Educate Girls, which was established in 2007. They work to improve access to primary education for children, especially girls living in India’s rural and educationally backward areas in the north-western parts of the country.

Learn more about Educate Girls here: link to Educate Girls' website

Girls Who Code is also an organisation worth mentioning. This is a non-profit organisation that focuses on closing the gender gap in technology by teaching girls coding and computer science. Summer programmes and after-school clubs enable young girls to seek knowledge in addition to their formal education, and they may also get scholarships to continue their higher education.

Learn more about Girls Who Code here: link to Girls Who Code's website

According to the UN, only 20% of all Indian employees are women. This means that there is a lot of unused potential. The government of India's initiative the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) is trying to amend this situation.

As the first of its kind, the WEP is an access portal that brings together women from different parts of India to help them realise their entrepreneurial aspirations. They provide partnerships, networking, workshops, and marketing assistance, as well as funding and financial assistance. This provides women in India with a unique opportunity to find support for their ideas, regardless of their starting point.

Initiatives like these are important because there is a great need for more women in business. The gender pay gap will not be reduced before more women have a say in the boardroom. Women also have different experiences than men, and they often bring a different set of perspectives to problem solving. This makes businesses stronger and can improve the quality of the decisions that are made. Bringing more women into the workforce, either as business owners or employees, will result in social development and economic growth for the entire country.

Indian women who manage to break the glass ceiling and make it on their own prove that the tide is turning. They bring motivation and inspiration to other women on their way up. Three such women are Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Falguni Nayar, and Aditi Gupta. They have all succeeded in building their own businesses in widely different areas: Shaw is the founder of Biocon Limited, a successful biopharmaceutical company. Falguni Nayar is the founder of the beauty and cosmetics brand Nykaa. Aditi Gupta is a co-founder of Menstrupedia Comic – a comic and online resource that aims to educate people about menstruation and tackle taboos around women’s issues.

Empowering women is not only a matter of giving them a place in the workforce and the boardrooms; it is also a matter of giving them a voice in media. On average, only 37% of all stories presented in newspapers and television are reported by women. This has motivated the founders of the newspaper Khabar Lahiriya (Waves of News), which is the only newspaper in India run only by women. Not only that – these women are also Dalit women, or casteless women, and thus considered of less worth than the lowest caste.

Dalit women comprise about 16% of India’s female population, and they face a triple burden of gender bias, caste discrimination, and economic deprivation. Gruesome incidents in the past years have sparked many social riots, however, and Dalit women all over India are speaking up more often than before. The Dalit women of Khabar Lahiriya play an important role here, since their region of publication, Uttar Pradesh, is the most populous state in India with close to 200 million inhabitants. When the newspaper was first created in 2002, it was expected to fail, but it has experienced continuous growth and has now manifested its role as an important news source.

The caste system in India

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (farmers, traders, and merchants), and Shudra (labourers). The main castes were further divided into about 3000 castes and 25 000 sub-castes, each based on their specific occupation.

The system was defined by early Hindu scriptures and is generally accepted to be more than 3000 years old. However, it became what we know it as today under colonial rule. Both the Portuguese and, later, the British colonial regimes would give the higher castes most privileges, while lower castes were denied access to basic healthcare and education.

Dalits were defined as 'untouchables'. They would be excluded entirely from society and were not considered to be part of the caste system. They would suffer particularly badly under this system. Today, this group consists of 167 million Indians.

In 1947, after India achieved independence, discriminating against the lower castes was made illegal and quotas on employment ('reservations') were introduced into the Constitution.

In recent decades, the influence of caste has somewhat declined, especially in cities, where different castes live side-by-side and inter-caste marriages are becoming more common. However, rural India remains, to a large degree, a caste-based society.