Empowering Marginalised Women in India: Challenges and Solutions

In India, women make up nearly half the population, yet they remain one of the largest groups pushed to the social and economic margins. The marginalisation is sharpest for women in rural areas, women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and those working in the vast informal economy. They labour long hours for low pay, carry the unpaid burden of housework and caregiving, and are routinely shut out of decisions that shape their own lives. Understanding how this happens, and what is being done about it, is essential to grasping the larger project of human security and inclusive development.

Who counts as a marginalised woman? 🔗

Marginalisation describes a process where a group is pushed to the edges of social, economic, and political life and denied access to the resources and opportunities available to others. For women, this exclusion is layered. A woman may be disadvantaged because of her gender, and then disadvantaged further because she is poor, lives in a remote village, or belongs to an oppressed caste. Scholars call this overlapping disadvantage intersectionality, and it explains why a Dalit woman agricultural worker faces hurdles that are different in kind, not just in degree, from those faced by an urban, upper-caste, salaried woman.

Rural women form the core of this marginalised group. Women comprise close to 48% of the population but only around a fifth of the formal workforce, with most of those who do work concentrated in agriculture. They grow food, tend livestock, and sustain households, but they rarely own the land they till or control the income they help generate.

The everyday challenges marginalised women face 🔗

The disadvantages are not abstract. They show up in the daily working life of millions of women, and they reinforce one another in a cycle that is hard to break.

Poor working conditions and the informal economy 🔗

The overwhelming majority of working women are employed in the informal sector, as farm labourers, domestic workers, construction workers, home-based artisans, and street vendors. These jobs offer no written contracts, no job security, no pension, and no protection if a worker falls sick or is injured. Because the work is invisible in official records, it is also invisible to most labour protections. A woman who stitches garments at home or weaves coir for a contractor has almost no way to demand safer conditions or fair treatment.

The wage gap and unequal pay 🔗

Even when women do the same work as men, they are frequently paid less. This persists despite laws against it because women are crowded into low-wage occupations and given different job titles, which makes direct comparison with male colleagues difficult. As the International Bar Association notes, equal pay legislation in India struggles against deep-rooted occupational segregation that concentrates women in poorly paid sectors. The result is that women earn less over a lifetime, save less, and remain financially dependent on male family members.

The double burden of multiple roles 🔗

A working woman rarely works only one job. She is expected to perform paid labour and then return home to cook, clean, fetch water and fuel, and care for children and the elderly, almost always without pay or recognition. This double burden limits the hours she can devote to income-earning work, restricts the kind of jobs she can take, and leaves her with little time for education, skill-building, or rest. The unpaid care economy effectively subsidises the rest of the economy, and women bear its weight.

Discrimination rooted in caste and gender 🔗

Social norms remain a powerful brake on women’s opportunities. Restrictions on mobility, early marriage, and the expectation that women should defer to male authority keep many women out of public life and out of decision-making bodies such as gram sabhas and panchayats. For women from marginalised castes, this is compounded by caste-based exclusion. UN Women describes how, in India, an initiative supported by its Fund for Gender Equality helped women marginalised by the caste system claim work under the national rural employment guarantee scheme, a reminder that legal entitlements often need active support to reach those at the very bottom.

How the state has responded: laws and policies 🔗

Over the decades, the policy approach has shifted from treating women as passive recipients of welfare to recognising their empowerment as central to development. This shift is reflected in a body of protective legislation aimed at the workplace.

The Maternity Benefit Act 🔗

The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 protects the employment of women around the time of childbirth. The Office of the Chief Labour Commissioner explains that the Act regulates the employment of women for a certain period before and after childbirth and provides maternity and other benefits in establishments employing ten or more persons. The 2017 amendment was a major step forward, extending paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks and mandating crèche facilities in larger establishments.

The judiciary has expanded the Act’s reach as well. In the case of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi versus its female muster-roll workers, the Supreme Court held that maternity benefits cannot be denied to casual and daily-wage women, since nothing in the law restricts the benefit only to permanent staff. The principle of maternity benefits has since been carried into the new Code on Social Security, under which a woman generally needs to have worked at least 80 days in the preceding year to qualify.

The Equal Remuneration Act and the Code on Wages 🔗

The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 placed a duty on employers to pay men and women the same wages for the same work or work of a similar nature, and prohibited discrimination in recruitment on the basis of sex. Its core principles have now been folded into the broader Code on Wages, 2019, which consolidates several wage laws and extends equal-pay and non-discrimination protections to new categories of workers. On paper, this is a strong commitment to gender equality at work. In practice, as discussed below, enforcement remains the weak link.

Programmes for employment and financial assistance 🔗

Beyond protective laws, the government runs a range of schemes designed to put income, skills, and credit directly into women’s hands. These programmes recognise that economic independence is the foundation of broader empowerment.

Self-Help Groups and microfinance 🔗

Perhaps the most influential grassroots model has been the Self-Help Group (SHG), a small collective of women who pool savings and access small loans, or microfinance. Research published in the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship finds that through microfinance and SHGs, marginalised women can break out of the cycle of poverty, build sustainable livelihoods, and gain greater bargaining power within the household. Beyond the money, SHGs build confidence, social networks, and collective voice, often becoming a platform for tackling issues such as gender- and caste-based discrimination.

Skill training and self-employment schemes 🔗

A cluster of schemes focuses on equipping women with skills and capital to earn a living. The Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women (STEP) provides grants to institutions that train women in marketable skills with the goal of securing employment. For those wanting to start a business, the Stand-Up India scheme is a flagship effort. The India Brand Equity Foundation reports that, as of October 2025, banks had sanctioned over Rs. 62,800 crore to roughly 275,000 beneficiaries under Stand-Up India for promoting entrepreneurship among women and SC and ST communities. The scheme offers loans between Rs. 10 lakh and Rs. 1 crore to set up new enterprises.

Other targeted credit and self-employment programmes add to this ecosystem. The National Commission for Women lists schemes such as the credit-linked subsidy programme that gives women a higher subsidy of 25% instead of the standard 15% for setting up new micro-enterprises, along with coir-industry support and dedicated lending schemes for women entrepreneurs. Collateral-free loans under the Mudra scheme have also helped many women fund small ventures like tailoring units and food businesses.

Rural employment and wage work 🔗

The national rural employment guarantee scheme deserves special mention. By guaranteeing days of paid manual work and reserving a share of that work for women, it has put cash directly into the hands of rural women, many of whom had never earned an independent income before. For Dalit and Adivasi women in particular, this wage work has been a route to a measure of financial autonomy.

Why the gap between policy and reality persists 🔗

India has an impressive architecture of laws and schemes, so why does marginalisation endure? The answer lies largely in implementation. Many women, especially those on informal contracts or in tiny establishments, simply do not know their legal rights, and there is no one to inform them. Enforcement machinery is thin, and complaints are hard to pursue for a woman who cannot afford to lose a day’s wage or risk her job.

There is also an unintended consequence at work. Because the cost of 26 weeks of maternity leave falls entirely on the employer, some private firms quietly avoid hiring women of childbearing age, which can shrink rather than expand women’s job prospects unless the government shares that cost. Meanwhile, occupational segregation keeps women clustered in low-paid roles where equal-pay law is hard to apply. Deep-rooted social norms, restrictions on mobility, low literacy, and the relentless burden of unpaid care work continue to limit how much any single scheme can achieve. Genuine empowerment requires the legal, economic, and social dimensions to advance together, not in isolation.

What do you think? If protective laws like generous maternity leave can sometimes discourage employers from hiring women, how should the cost of these benefits be shared between the state and employers to genuinely expand women’s opportunities? And which matters more for lasting empowerment: changing the laws, or changing the social norms that decide whether those laws are ever used?

References

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13731-024-00419-y
2. https://www.ibanet.org/rethinking-Indian-law-on-equal-pay-towards-gender-pay-equality-in-workplace
3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/rural-women
4. https://clc.gov.in/clc/acts-rules/maternity-benefit-act
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/FactsheetDetails.aspx?Id=150499&reg=3&lang=1
6. https://www.ibef.org/government-schemes/stand-up-india
7. https://www.ncw.gov.in/publications/women-centric-schemes-by-different-ministries-of-government-of-india-goi/