India’s Worsening Gender Gap is Not Just a Statistical Concern, It’s a Structural Crisis
According to the latest rankings in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap (GGG) Index 2025, India ranks 131st out of 148 nations. Although India’s performative score rose marginally from 64.1% in 2024 to 64.4%, this nominal improvement is more superficial without any critical endogenous (or internalised) changes seen in its gender-gap landscape.
The numbers here which suggest progress do not move with lived experiences of the average Indian women who say otherwise. Despite being literate, qualified, eager to participate in the nation’s development story, women as part of the gendered community continue to find most doors to real, economic opportunity firmly shut.
Progress on paper, reality in stagnation
India’s performance across the four dimensions of the GGG Index economic participation: educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment, tell a story of stalled momentum.
The slight rise in estimated earned income parity (from 28.6% to 29.9%) mask deeper structural barriers.
For many girls and women, the promise of access has stopped short of securing actual power in position and/or representation.
Economic participation too remains worryingly low, despite some relative progress, with women now making up just 45.9% of the labour force. Even in sectors where they lead in degrees, their leadership or employer-representation of/by women is still nowhere in sight.
This disjuncture is starkest in political representation too.
India has seen a continued decline in women’s political empowerment. Female representation in Parliament has dropped from 14.7% to 13.8%, while ministerial roles held by women fell from 6.5% to 5.6%. These regressions point not just to underrepresentation but to a systematic failure to create durable pathways for women in power. The Women Reservation Bill is still ink on paper without a clear implementation plan in sight.
A hollow access: The gender paradox
It was studied and analysed earlier how under the current Union Government, ‘real’ reform for women in terms of access to real economic opportunity has still remained a pipeline dream for many. While its Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme appeared to mere platitude, the real situation of women across class, caste, ethnicity and other identity based markers, has only gone from bad to worse.
India’s gender paradox, then, is not that access has been denied it is that access has been hollow.
The contrast with countries like Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Namibia is instructive. Despite having fewer resources, they have made remarkable strides by adopting intentional, equity-driven reforms. Bangladesh, for instance, jumped 75 spots in just one year not due to increased wealth, but because of a focused commitment to gender inclusion.
Within South Asia, India remains one of the slowest movers, trailing behind Bangladesh (24th), Nepal (117th), Sri Lanka (122nd), and Bhutan (124th), with only Pakistan (145th) and Maldives ranking lower.
Meanwhile, countries like Australia have demonstrated that rapid improvement is possible, it rose from 24th to 13th, its best standing since 2006, propelled by progress in political representation, economic participation, and education. At the global forefront, Iceland continues to lead, having closed 93.5% of its gender gap, the only country to surpass the 90% mark.
Insights from the Access (In)Equality Index: A ground-level reality check
At the subnational level, our Access (In)Equality Index (AEI) Report 2025 reveals similarly troubling patterns.
National-level gains often hide the uneven and exclusionary realities playing out across states and districts. Whether in education, health, legal access, or basic public services, many Indian women particularly those in rural, tribal, and historically marginalised communities face barriers that are not just physical but structural. In many regions, what appears as “access” on paper is little more than an illusion.
The gaps are starkest in basic services. Access to clean cooking fuel essential for both health and dignity remains abysmally low in Nagaland (6.7%) and Manipur (8.3%), compared to 82.8% in Goa. Meanwhile, only 41.56% of Indian women have ever used the internet. In Bihar, that number drops to just 20.6%. Far from narrowing, these divides are reinforcing and reproducing cycles of inequality.
Maternal healthcare is no exception. The proportion of women receiving the recommended four antenatal care visits ranges from 93% in Goa and 89.9% in Tamil Nadu to as low as 25.2% in Bihar and 20.7% in Nagaland.
While postnatal care has improved slightly, Bihar reports 65.3%, and Nagaland 43.9% these numbers remain far below those of southern states, where institutional births and follow-up care are almost universal. The rural-urban divide compounds these disparities. Urban women report 68.1% antenatal care coverage versus 54.2% in rural areas; institutional births stand at 93.8% in urban India, compared to 86.7% in rural areas.
Layered onto these divides are social hierarchies. Among Scheduled Caste (SC) mothers, only 55.3% received adequate antenatal care, compared to 64.4% among women categorised as 'Others.' Postnatal care within two days of childbirth shows a similar gradient, with SC women trailing slightly behind ST, OBC, and general category women. These figures reveal how caste, location, and gender intersect to form a triple bind for many women.
Even in education, foundational infrastructure is lacking. In 2025, while Goa ensured 100% provision of girls’ toilets in schools, only 68.8% of schools in Arunachal Pradesh had such facilities. The absence of safe sanitation is a proven cause of school dropout among adolescent girls. That the Supreme Court recently directed the Union government to develop a national model for school sanitation speaks to the long-standing policy inertia in this domain.
Public institutions, too, mirror this unevenness. Women’s representation in the judiciary remains appallingly low: 0% in Maharashtra, Manipur, Telangana, and Tripura, compared to a modest 33.3% in Rajasthan and West Bengal. In police forces, the numbers are just as skewed. While Ladakh (28.3%) and Chandigarh (21.6%) fare better, states like Jammu & Kashmir (3.3%) and Himachal Pradesh (6.2%) lag far behind. Even in regions where one sector shows progress, the other often does not exposing the fragmented and piecemeal nature of gender reform.
From symbolism to systemic reform
The Access (In)Equality Index (AEI) thus reveals a more unsettling truth for most: the structural problem of gender gap is also just not in the absence of opportunity, but the erosion of meaningful access. The Indian nation-state has mistaken visibility for inclusion, and tokenism for transformation. Patchwork schemes and symbolic gestures cannot resolve the deep-rooted causes of gender disparity including unpaid care burdens, unsafe public spaces, patriarchal institutions, and a persistent digital divide.
Until access is made functional, it leads to agency, decision-making, and economic freedom India’s gender gap will continue to widen. The cost of inaction is not just individual it is national. A future where half the population remains locked out of systems of power and opportunity is a future stalled in place.
Parity is not a distant ideal; it is a prerequisite for progress. Only when access becomes real when it becomes power can India truly claim to be on the path to inclusive growth and justice.
Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics, Dean, IDEAS, and Director, Centre for New Economics Studies. He is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics and an Academic Visiting Fellow to AMES, University of Oxford.
Aditi Desai is a Senior Research Assistant with the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), O.P. Jindal Global University.
Anania Singhal is a Research Analyst with the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), O.P. Jindal Global University.
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