Opinion Every day is Women’s Day — with or without support

It is often easy to lose sight of the struggles and assertions that paved the way to International Women’s Day. In 1909, spurred by labour movements across the world, close to 20,000 female garment factory workers took out a march in New York, demanding better pay, shorter work hours and voting rights. The New York Shirtwaist Strike would become the inspiration for the International Women’s Day proposed by German activist Clara Zetkin during the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910 and adopted over time across the world. The Indian Constitution guaranteed many of these hard-won rights — universal suffrage and equality before the law, among them — to women from the moment it came into existence. But, in practice, like their counterparts elsewhere, Indian women have had to work twice as hard, and more, to make themselves seen and heard. It is, therefore, a mark of their remarkable resolve and determination that, today and going ahead, women-led development has become one of the foundational promises of governance in the country. Political parties across the spectrum are reaching out to them with competing promises and schemes, which keep their aspirations at their core.

In a sense, political parties have only acknowledged, and responded to, an upsurge from below. The Female Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) has overtaken Male GER since 2017-18. In medicine, for every 100 men, there were 100 women enrolled in medical colleges in India in 2020-21. At premier institutes of higher education such as the IITs, there is an increasing representation of women, supported by good-faith affirmative action. These changes signal an innate resilience where progress is achieved despite hurdles, with or without the support of men. Their irrepressible force has ensured that every day is women’s day in the country. A female gaze that nurtures their passage from home to the larger world is being empowered and institutionalised in the system.

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Yet, the male gaze continues to constrict the imagination of women’s rights — in the way that the same schemes that address women and acknowledge their agency, such as the Ladki Bahin Yojana and the Mahalakshmi Scheme in Maharashtra, the Kanyashree in West Bengal or Ladli Behna Yojana in Madhya Pradesh, can also reduce the woman to a mere beneficiary of doles; or, in the design of public spaces and transport systems that don’t take into account women’s safety. A report published by the UN on March 6 shows that in 2024, nearly a quarter of governments worldwide reported a backslide on women’s rights. In India, legal provisions such as the Uniform Civil Code introduced in Uttarakhand, for instance, infantilise their choice by insisting upon regulating who they fall in love with or choose to share a home with. The Time Use Survey 2024 (January-December), released by the MoSPI last month, shows that women spend more time in unpaid work at home compared to men, that despite a rise in labour force participation – 41.7 per cent as per data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24 — they still account for a small proportion of the total workforce and much of it remains self-employment. Despite the roadblocks, like the Maya Angelou poem, she still rises.