Despite gains from the women’s movement and state policy of women empowerment, gender equality is far from achieved. Identify two major challenges that prevent this goal from being reached. (2017, 20 Marks)
India’s record is one of formal gains without structural closure. The Vishaka guidelines (1997) became the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013; the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, confirmed in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020), made daughters coparceners by birth; 1.4 million women, about 46% of panchayat representatives, hold elected office (2024). Yet female labour force participation (15+) was only 40.0% in the Periodic Labour Force Survey, January–December 2025. Two challenges explain the gap: patriarchy’s material base in household, property and work, and the internal fracturing of the category “woman” by caste, class and community.
Challenge one: patriarchy is a structure, not an attitude
- Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) locates patriarchy in six interacting structures — production in the household, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and culture. Law reaches the state and, partially, violence; it barely touches the first.
- Leela Dube showed how kinship ideology, including the seed-and-earth metaphor, naturalises the wife as receptacle and the household as the husband’s domain; patrilineal, patrilocal, patronymic kinship makes the daughter transient in her natal home.
- The consequence is the sexual division of labour. Unpaid domestic and care work is neither counted nor shared; women withdraw from paid work at marriage and childbirth, and a large part of the recent rise in rural participation is unpaid family labour rather than wage employment.
- Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) argued that only independent rights in land give a woman intra-household bargaining power. Legal coparcenary has not become actual titling, because sisters are pressed to relinquish claims to preserve kin relations.
- The structure shows in the numbers: son preference keeps the sex ratio at birth at about 928 (Civil Registration System, 2023); 29.3% of ever-married women aged 18–49 reported spousal physical or sexual violence, and roughly 87% of survivors never sought help (National Family Health Survey-5, 2019–21); crimes against women registered numbered 4,45,256 in 2022, cruelty by husband or relatives forming 31.4% (National Crime Records Bureau).
Challenge two: there is no single “woman” for policy to empower
- Uma Chakravarti‘s “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy” (1993) shows caste and gender as one apparatus: endogamy requires control of women’s sexuality, so caste hierarchy and female subordination reproduce each other. A gender policy silent on caste cannot work.
- Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint and Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s intersectionality explain why the Dalit or Adivasi woman’s experience of sexual violence, land dispossession and labour is not the savarna woman’s experience intensified but qualitatively different.
- Community boundaries cut the same way. The Shah Bano judgment (1985) and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 forced the movement to choose between gender justice and minority rights; that unresolved tension still shadows the uniform civil code debate, despite Shayara Bano (2017).
- The result is that the benefits of state policy are captured by women already advantaged in class, caste and location — what Nivedita Menon describes as feminism being absorbed into the language of the state.
Conclusion
Neither challenge yields to more legislation alone. Closing the first requires valuing care work, enforcing land titling and raising women’s access to secure paid employment; closing the second requires policy disaggregated by caste, class and community rather than addressed to an abstract woman. Equality of rights has been largely won; equality of entitlements, in Amartya Sen‘s sense, has not.