Women Economic Empowerment Policies: Challenges and Opportunities

Women’s empowerment has emerged as the center of discussion among social scientists, as it is seen as a necessary condition for women’s and national development. Recently, women’s economic empowerment (WEE) has gained prominence. WEE looks at the empowerment of women from various angles of development like economics, social rights, education, gender inequality, ownership over assets, and household decision-making. In this chapter, we examine the WEE policies adopted by the Government of India over the last two decades, both in terms of their type, impact, and the challenges being faced. There has been a major policy thrust towards achieving gender equality through WEE. New policies have been formulated, and existing policies have also been made more gender sensitive and gender equality oriented. This has yielded some positive results like an increase in the literacy of women, better outcomes in health parameters like institutional deliveries, antenatal care, menstrual hygiene methods, more women’s labor market participation, and more financial support to women entrepreneurs through schemes like MUDRA Yojana. But progress has been slowed down by hurdles in implementation due to rigid social norms and gender biases, which have led to high amounts of crime against women, low women workforce participation, unwillingness to adopt safe institutional deliveries, low household decision-making by women, more unpaid household work and caregiving by women, and men’s control over woman’s earnings. Schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, MUDRA Yojana, Stand Up India, PMSMA, Fast Track Special Courts for Fighting Crime Against Women, Skill India Mission, PMMVY, and PMBJP are steps in the right direction of successfully fulfilling the goal of WEE.