A ‘status of Indian women’ report card in the second decade of the new millennium would present a very contradictory picture. Let us start from where most of those reading this book will be: the field of higher education. Although the presence of women in higher educational institutions has reached a very creditable 49 per cent, it is against a broader backdrop of at least 35 per cent female illiteracy, according to the latest All India Survey on Higher Education, 2019–20. No doubt, the demand for education, from primary to high school to college, is growing in leaps and bounds, as women, and sometimes their families, recognize the importance of a greater chance of employability among the educated.

But women's access to the world of paid employment, which ideally opens up fresh avenues of independence and opportunities for self-assertion among women, is ironically in decline: women constituted a mere 21.9 per cent of the above-15 workforce in 2011–12, down from 35 per cent in 1990, and an even sharper decline has been noted in the Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2017–18. Even those women who do work outside the home for wages are systematically lower paid, overwhelmingly concentrated in some sectors (rural and unorganized) and afforded little or no legal protection.

Gender Discrimination in India Today

Even after more than 70 years of independence, therefore, Indian women still face a formidable degree of discrimination in public and private life. The ratio of women to men in India has steadily fallen since 1911, when there were 965 women to every 1,000 men; the most recent census (2011) reveals a slight improvement after a long period of decline, at 943 per 1,000 men. But the child sex ratio (of girls under six) is an alarming 914. A single indicator such as this speaks of sex-selective abortions, the neglect of girl children and criminally negligent maternal health care facilities. In other words, the demographic disparity between the sexes speaks volumes of the systematic, rather than just the episodic or occasional, forms of discrimination against women. In post-independence India, ‘adverse child sex ratios … have become practically synonymous with gender discrimination’.