How Gender Equality Impacts Poverty and Economic Growth in India

India’s economy has grown fast over the past decade, yet its women haven’t shared equally in that growth. Women make up close to half the population but their labour goes largely uncounted, their property largely unowned, and their presence in decision-making rooms largely absent. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the outcome of structural barriers that economic growth, on its own, hasn’t been able to dissolve. Understanding how gender equality, poverty, and growth interact is central to understanding why India’s development story remains unfinished.

Why gender gaps run deeper in poorer economies 🔗

Gender inequality doesn’t appear evenly across the world. It tends to be sharper in lower-income countries and within poorer households, because economic scarcity magnifies existing social hierarchies. When resources are limited, families often invest first in sons, treating daughters as a cost rather than an asset. This isn’t unique to India, but India’s specific mix of inheritance customs and social norms makes the pattern especially persistent.

Patrilineal inheritance and the property trap 🔗

For generations, land and family property in most Indian communities passed down through sons. Even where laws have changed, custom often continues to override legal entitlement, so women frequently sign away their inheritance rights to brothers to preserve family harmony. The consequence goes beyond fairness. Land is usually the only asset accepted as collateral for a loan, so a woman without land often cannot access credit to start a business, invest in a farm, or absorb a financial shock, according to research on inheritance rights and household outcomes in India. Being asset-poor keeps women economically dependent on male relatives, which in turn limits their bargaining power within the household.

Social norms that start at birth 🔗

Skewed sex ratios, early marriage, and restrictions on women’s mobility all stem from the same underlying belief: that a son is a long-term investment and a daughter is a short-term liability who will “belong” to another family after marriage. These norms shape decisions long before a woman ever enters the workforce, affecting how much nutrition, schooling, and healthcare she receives as a child. Poverty deepens the effect. Wealthier families can often afford to educate daughters and sons equally; economically stressed households, forced to choose, disproportionately choose sons.

Growth alone hasn’t closed India’s gender gap 🔗

A common assumption is that as economies grow and incomes rise, gender gaps shrink automatically. India’s own record complicates that story. Despite being one of the world’s fastest-growing large economies, India ranked 131st out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, slipping two places from the previous year even as its overall score improved slightly, since other countries closed their gaps faster.

What’s revealing is where the gap sits. India has nearly closed the gap in educational attainment, scoring around 97.1 percent parity. But economic participation and opportunity languishes at just 40.7 percent, and political empowerment is lower still, with women’s representation in Parliament and in ministerial positions actually declining year-on-year. In other words, Indian women are getting educated at rates close to men, but that education isn’t translating into paid work, income, or a seat at the table.

This mismatch shows that growth can raise the ceiling on opportunity without actually opening the door. Economic expansion creates jobs and income, but whether women can access them depends on separate factors: safety, mobility, childcare, workplace norms, and whether families consider paid work “appropriate” for women at all.

Where the gaps show up most 🔗

Education: near parity on paper, drop-off in practice 🔗

India has made genuine progress in getting girls into classrooms, and enrolment figures at the school level are now close to those of boys. The gap resurfaces later. Many girls drop out around adolescence due to safety concerns, the cost of continuing education, and early marriage. The result is a workforce where highly educated women remain a small slice of employed women overall, and where women continue to be underrepresented in STEM careers relative to their share of STEM graduates, according to India’s own Economic Survey findings on labour market indicators.

Health: an invisible burden 🔗

Women in India often eat last and least within households, face higher rates of anaemia, and receive less healthcare investment than men across their lifetimes. Maternal health remains a significant driver of poverty for poorer families, who face out-of-pocket costs for childbirth and postnatal care. Poor health outcomes early in life also depress a woman’s future earning potential, creating a link between health inequality and economic inequality that’s easy to overlook.

Employment: participation, informality, and wages 🔗

This is where the gender-poverty connection is most visible. India’s female labour force participation rate stood at 40 percent in 2025, compared with 79.1 percent for men, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report. Rural women fared better, at 45.9 percent, than urban women, at roughly 25 percent, largely because urban jobs demand commuting that many families consider unsafe or unaffordable for women. The rate has improved meaningfully in recent years, rising from 23.3 percent in 2017-18 to 41.7 percent by 2023-24, but a large share of that growth is concentrated in low-paid, informal, or unpaid family work rather than secure employment. Women who do work are also paid less than men for comparable roles, and they carry a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and care work, which limits how much paid work they can take on in the first place.

The growth India is leaving on the table 🔗

The economic argument for closing these gaps is not abstract. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that advancing women’s equality could add $770 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, a 16 percent boost over business-as-usual growth, with most of that gain coming from raising female labour force participation by ten percentage points. Separately, IMF research cited by economists estimates that closing India’s gender gap in labour force participation entirely could expand GDP by as much as 27 percent, a figure driven by how unusually wide India’s gender gap in work is compared with other economies.

The logic runs in both directions. Growth that excludes half the population is growth that underuses its own workforce, its own consumer base, and its own tax revenue. And exclusion isn’t neutral, it’s costly: every year that women are kept out of paid, secure work is a year of foregone productivity that the economy doesn’t get back.

What actually moves the needle 🔗

If growth alone doesn’t fix gender gaps, what does? Evidence points to a combination of deliberate investments rather than any single lever.

Education that leads somewhere 🔗

Keeping girls in school past adolescence, particularly through secondary and vocational education tied to actual job market demand, matters more than enrolment numbers alone. Skilling programmes aligned with sectors like manufacturing, digital services, and renewable energy can help translate education into employment rather than a credential that goes unused.

Healthcare that reaches women directly 🔗

Investment in maternal health, nutrition, and reproductive healthcare has ripple effects well beyond the individual. Healthier women are more able to work, and healthier mothers raise healthier children, who in turn have better long-term earning potential. This is one of the clearest channels through which gender equity reduces intergenerational poverty.

Economic opportunity, backed by rights 🔗

Access to land and property rights, formal credit, and safe, well-paid jobs gives women genuine economic agency rather than dependence. Legal reform matters: states that equalised inheritance rights for daughters saw measurable shifts in parental investment and women’s bargaining power within families. So does infrastructure: safe public transport and accessible childcare directly determine whether women can take up urban jobs at all. And so does formalisation: moving women out of unpaid or informal work and into regular wage employment is where most of the available GDP gains are concentrated.

Taken together, these levers suggest that gender equality isn’t a side effect of economic development, it’s a precondition for the kind of development that actually reduces poverty broadly rather than concentrating gains among those who already have access to opportunity.

What do you think? Why do you think India’s progress on girls’ education hasn’t translated into similarly strong gains in women’s employment? And what would it take, in your own city or state, to make paid work genuinely accessible to more women?

References

1. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/where-world-do-women-still-face-legal-barriers-own-and-administer-assets
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2021.2003333
3. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/india-slips-to-131st-position-in-global-gender-gap-index-2025-3582394
4. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2097939
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2246009&lang=1&reg=3
6. https://www.mckinsey.com/in/our-insights/the-power-of-parity-advancing-womens-equality-in-india
7. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/productivity-innovation/unlocking-women-s-workforce-potential