Understanding the Gender-Education Connection in India

Walk into any Indian classroom and you’ll find boys and girls sitting side by side, reading the same textbooks and writing the same exams. On the surface, education looks like the great equaliser. But scratch beneath that surface and a different story emerges, one where schools quietly teach far more than algebra and grammar. They teach children what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl”, what work they should aspire to, and whose voice deserves to be heard. Understanding this hidden curriculum is key to understanding why the gender-education connection in India remains so complicated.

Gender as a social construct in education
The two faces of education
Education as a tool for socialisation
What textbooks really teach
Teacher attitudes and the hidden curriculum
The school as a site of secondary socialisation
Impact of cultural attitudes on women’s education
Access, enrolment, and dropout
Why girls leave school
The roles women are expected to fulfil
Education as a tool for transformation
Policy and the road ahead

Gender is not the same as sex. While sex refers to biological differences, gender is the set of roles, behaviours, and expectations that a society attaches to those differences. In other words, gender is learned, not inherited. Schools are one of the most powerful places where this learning happens, often without anyone realising it.

The feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin offered one of the most influential frameworks for understanding this. In her 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women”, Rubin argued that every society has a “sex/gender system”, a set of arrangements through which biological differences are transformed into social hierarchies. She suggested that the oppression of women is not natural but is produced and reproduced through kinship structures, cultural practices, and institutions that treat women as objects of exchange between men.

Rubin’s insight matters for education because schools are exactly the kind of institution that produces and reproduces these arrangements. When a textbook repeatedly shows fathers reading newspapers and mothers cooking, it is not just describing the world. It is teaching children that this is how the world should be. As scholars have noted, Rubin’s framework helps us see how a “hierarchy of value” systematically devalues women’s work, women’s voices, and women’s aspirations, often through institutions that appear neutral.

The two faces of education

Education has a curious double character. It can perpetuate gender norms by passing on existing stereotypes through curriculum, classroom practices, and school culture. But it can also challenge those same norms when it gives girls the tools to question, critique, and reimagine their place in society. Research on gender and school reform in India shows that policy visions and practices around schooling have always been shaped by competing ideological currents, some progressive, some deeply traditional. The classroom is, in this sense, a contested space.

Education as a tool for socialisation

Sociologists distinguish between primary socialisation, which happens in the family, and secondary socialisation, which takes place in institutions like schools. Both work together to shape a child’s sense of gender identity. The school, however, has a unique authority because it carries the stamp of official knowledge. What schools teach feels true.

What textbooks really teach

Textbooks are perhaps the clearest example of how gender norms are transmitted. A recent analysis of NCERT books published between 2020 and 2022 found that only 34 percent of gendered words were female, while 66 percent were male. The same study showed that South Asia, and India in particular, has the strongest male bias in language around achievement and work, and the strongest female bias in language around appearance, compared to other English-speaking regions.

This is not new. An examination of NCERT textbooks in Hindi, mathematics, English, and environmental studies found that soldiers, doctors, and officials are repeatedly portrayed as men, while women are confined to cooking and cleaning. More than half the illustrations featured men, while only about 20 percent showed women. Another review of NCERT books noted that teachers are nearly always shown as women, while roles like grocer, wrestler, farmer, and magician are reserved for men. Even shadows, in one English textbook, were referred to as “he”.

The cumulative effect of such representation is profound. Children learn that public life belongs to men and domestic life to women, that ambition is masculine and care work is feminine. These are not lessons written on the blackboard, but they are absorbed nonetheless.

Teacher attitudes and the hidden curriculum

Textbooks are only part of the story. Teachers, often unconsciously, also reinforce gender norms. Boys may be called on more often in physics and mathematics classes, while girls are praised for neatness, obedience, and good handwriting. Boys are asked to lift chairs and arrange equipment, girls to decorate the bulletin board. These small, daily interactions form what educators call the “hidden curriculum”, the unspoken values and expectations that students absorb alongside the formal lessons.

Educational researchers have argued that these biases, when ignored, lead to bias in the classroom, shaping students’ sense of what they can and cannot do based purely on their gender. A girl who is never encouraged to speak up in a maths class may grow up believing that maths is not for her, even when her marks suggest otherwise.

The school as a site of secondary socialisation

The sociologist Karuna Chanana argued that family socialisation and formal schooling are not separate processes. They interact with and reinforce each other. A comparative study of two schools in India found that in rural settings, parental concerns and gendered expectations shape what girls can do even after they enter school. For many girls from socially and economically marginalised communities, schooling is their first sustained encounter with a world outside the home, and yet the school often mirrors the same gender divisions they encounter at home.

Impact of cultural attitudes on women’s education

Cultural attitudes do not just influence what happens inside the classroom. They determine who gets to enter the classroom in the first place, and for how long.

Access, enrolment, and dropout

India has made remarkable progress in enrolling girls in school. The Right to Education Act of 2009 was a turning point, and enrolment rates for girls rose from around 73 percent in 2000 to about 93 percent in recent years. Yet the journey from enrolment to completion is uneven. According to official data, the literacy rate for women stands at 64.63 percent compared to 80.88 percent for men, a gap of roughly 17 percentage points. Women now make up only 42.5 percent of STEM students, and dropout rates climb sharply after Class 8, when free education under the RTE Act ends.

There are signs of change. Recent NSO data show that female enrolment in higher education has crossed 30 percent and overtaken male enrolment in many streams. Female literacy in India has risen from just over 30 percent in the early 1980s to more than 70 percent today. Yet the broader cultural picture is more complex than these numbers suggest.

Why girls leave school

The reasons girls drop out are rarely about academic ability. A study on adolescent education identified the burden of sibling care, domestic work, physical and sexual insecurity, and parental attitudes as primary reasons girls fall behind. In many households, when resources are scarce, sons are prioritised because they are seen as future earners and inheritors of the family name. Daughters are often expected to help with housework or be married off, and education for them is treated as a luxury rather than a right.

Child marriage, the burden of menstrual hygiene without proper facilities, lack of safe transport, and the absence of female teachers in some areas all push girls out of school. The pandemic worsened these trends. While school enrolment among 6 to 14 year olds actually rose to 98.4 percent in 2022, learning outcomes fell, and adolescent girls bore a disproportionate share of household responsibilities during lockdowns.

The roles women are expected to fulfil

Cultural attitudes do not only restrict access. They also shape what women are educated for. For decades, girls were nudged towards “soft” subjects like home science, languages, or teaching, while boys were directed towards engineering, medicine, and commerce. Even today, the assumption that a woman’s primary role is to be a wife and mother persists in many households, meaning that her education is often valued for the marriage market rather than the labour market. A graduate degree becomes a qualification on a matrimonial profile rather than a launchpad for a career.

Education as a tool for transformation

Despite all these barriers, education remains one of the most powerful tools for challenging gender inequality. When girls stay in school longer, they marry later, have fewer and healthier children, earn more, and participate more actively in civic life. Education does not just give girls knowledge. It gives them voice.

Some educators argue that simply enrolling girls is not enough. Urvashi Sahni, founder of the Prerna School in Lucknow, has shown that introducing gender education as a compulsory subject in the school curriculum can produce dramatic results. At Prerna, the school completion rate is 88.1 percent, and 97 percent of students progress to higher education. Child marriage rates among students have declined significantly. The school’s approach demonstrates that when schools actively teach equality rather than passively reproducing inequality, they can transform lives.

Policy and the road ahead

The Indian government has launched several schemes to address the gender gap in education, from Beti Bachao Beti Padhao to Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan. These have helped narrow disparities, particularly at the primary level. But policy alone cannot dismantle deeply rooted cultural attitudes. What is needed is a sustained effort to revise textbooks, train teachers to recognise their own biases, and create classrooms where girls feel safe, seen, and challenged. Rubin’s framework reminds us that as long as the underlying sex/gender system remains unchallenged, surface-level reforms will only go so far.

What do you think? Did your own schooling reinforce traditional gender roles in ways you only noticed later, perhaps through textbooks, teachers’ expectations, or the activities you were nudged towards? If you could redesign one element of the school curriculum to make it more gender-equal, what would it be and why?

References

PDF 📄

Understanding the Gender-Education Connection in India

Table of Contents

Gender as a social construct in education 🔗

The two faces of education 🔗

Education as a tool for socialisation 🔗

What textbooks really teach 🔗

Teacher attitudes and the hidden curriculum 🔗

The school as a site of secondary socialisation 🔗

Impact of cultural attitudes on women’s education 🔗

Access, enrolment, and dropout 🔗

Why girls leave school 🔗

The roles women are expected to fulfil 🔗

Education as a tool for transformation 🔗

Policy and the road ahead 🔗