Promoting Gender-Inclusive Globalisation: Strategies for Equity

Globalisation has reshaped economies, opened new labour markets, and connected once-distant communities. But its gains have rarely been gender-neutral. Women, especially those in the informal sector and rural economies, often absorb the costs of trade liberalisation while reaping fewer of its rewards. Promoting gender-inclusive globalisation means actively designing policies and programmes that close this gap, ensuring that integration into global markets translates into real economic, social, and political empowerment for women.

Why gender mainstreaming matters in a globalised economy
From welfare to mainstreaming
Strategies for gender-inclusive policies
Gender budgeting
Microfinance and self-help groups
Sector-specific employment policies
Global and local efforts
The role of international organisations
Grassroots movements and community action
The unfinished agenda

Why gender mainstreaming matters in a globalised economy

Globalisation expanded export-led industries like garments, electronics assembly, and IT-enabled services, drawing millions of women into paid work. Yet the same processes intensified informal employment, wage gaps, and care burdens. The Female Labour Force Participation Rate in India stood at 41.7 percent in 2023-24, well below male participation, even as the economy globalised rapidly. Without a deliberate gender lens, market integration tends to deepen existing inequalities rather than dissolve them.

Gender mainstreaming is the strategy adopted to correct this. It refers to integrating a gender perspective into every stage of policy design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. The approach was formalised globally through the Beijing Platform for Action and adopted by the UN in 1997, and has since shaped national strategies across the world. The core idea is simple: policies that look gender-neutral are often gender-blind, ignoring how women and men experience the same intervention differently.

From welfare to mainstreaming

Earlier development approaches treated women as a separate welfare category, with schemes focused narrowly on maternal health or childcare. Mainstreaming shifts the frame: instead of designing a small set of “women’s schemes,” every sector – trade, infrastructure, agriculture, taxation – is examined for its differential impact on women and men. A study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations on gender mainstreaming at India’s land ports illustrates this well. Trade infrastructure had long been treated as gender-neutral, but the study found that poor information access, unsafe facilities, and weak grievance redressal kept women traders out of cross-border commerce. Recommendations covered seven areas including infrastructure, digitisation, staffing, and capacity building.

Strategies for gender-inclusive policies

Translating mainstreaming from principle to practice requires concrete fiscal and programmatic tools. Three strategies have shown measurable impact: gender budgeting, microfinance and self-help groups, and sector-specific employment policies.

Gender budgeting

Gender budgeting is a fiscal tool that examines how public expenditure affects women and men differently, then reallocates resources to close gaps. India adopted gender-responsive budgeting in 2005-06, introducing the Gender Budget Statement in the Union Budget. The Ministry of Finance now identifies allocations across two parts: Part A covers schemes with 100 percent allocation for women, and Part B covers schemes with at least 30 percent allocation. According to an analysis by the Observer Research Foundation, gender-responsive budgeting has proven to be an efficient tool, when used strategically, to bridge gaps and achieve gender equality by allocating funds to areas where inequalities are more persistent.

The 2025-26 Union Budget continued this trend, with significant allocations for women-led development. Programmes like the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) saw their gender budget allocation rise sharply, and a new initiative was launched to support first-time women entrepreneurs through term loans of up to Rs 2 crore. However, challenges persist. Many ministries still do not collect gender-disaggregated data, which makes it difficult to evaluate whether the money actually reaches women on the ground.

Microfinance and self-help groups

Microfinance has been one of the most visible tools of gender-inclusive economic policy. By offering small loans, savings products, and insurance to women excluded from formal banking, microfinance institutions enable them to start small businesses, smooth household consumption, and build assets. In India, the Self-Help Group (SHG) Bank Linkage Programme, launched by NABARD, has grown into the world’s largest microfinance network, channelling credit to crores of rural women through community-managed groups.

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), founded in Ahmedabad, has become a global reference point for this model. It has grown into the largest union of informal women workers in India, with 3.2 million members. SEWA combines union organising, cooperative enterprise, and financial services, helping women in trades like street vending, garment stitching, and agricultural labour negotiate better wages, access markets, and weather economic shocks. As noted by the European Commission’s capacity development platform, the organisation has assisted millions of women in acquiring marketable skills in agriculture, textiles, and small business management, facilitating their transition from low-paid labour to entrepreneurship.

Microfinance is not a magic solution. High interest rates from some private MFIs, over-indebtedness, and lack of complementary services like training or market linkages can blunt its impact. Yet when paired with financial literacy and collective organising, it has demonstrably expanded women’s economic agency.

Sector-specific employment policies

Employment policies that recognise the realities of the informal sector – where the majority of Indian women workers are concentrated – are central to inclusive globalisation. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is a notable example. Women account for roughly 57.8 percent of person-days worked under MGNREGS, reflecting how a wage guarantee combined with worksite facilities like crèches and equal wages has drawn rural women into paid work.

Other targeted policies include skill-development programmes under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana with women-focused tracks, the Stand-Up India scheme that mandates loans to women and SC/ST entrepreneurs, and the recognition of women-led producer collectives in agriculture. Maternity benefits, the Code on Wages, and the law on sexual harassment at the workplace also form part of the broader scaffolding that makes paid work safer and more sustainable for women.

Global and local efforts

Gender-inclusive globalisation requires action at multiple scales. International bodies set norms and finance national programmes; grassroots organisations translate those norms into context-specific change.

The role of international organisations

UN Women, the United Nations entity for gender equality, plays a particularly significant role. Its flagship initiative ‘Making Every Woman and Girl Count’ responds to data gaps by improving the institutional environment for monitoring all gender-related SDGs, increasing the production of gender-sensitive data, and ensuring those data inform policies. Reliable, disaggregated data is the foundation on which evidence-based gender policy is built.

The Sustainable Development Goals themselves embed gender mainstreaming. Goal 5 focuses specifically on gender equality, but gender targets cut across all 17 goals, from poverty and hunger to decent work and reduced inequalities. The International Labour Organisation, the World Bank, and the UNDP have all developed gender strategies for their lending and technical assistance. In India, UNDP has worked with the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports on engendering the National Youth Policy, identifying targets to address root causes of gender inequality and increase young people’s awareness of these issues.

Grassroots movements and community action

National policies succeed or fail at the village and neighbourhood level, where grassroots organisations do the unglamorous work of awareness, organising, and service delivery. SEWA’s Aagewans – local women leaders who run campaigns on health, water conservation, and livelihoods – are a powerful example. As described in one account of the organisation’s grassroots model, these leaders are not just participants but the driving force behind SEWA’s success, understanding the local context better than anyone else.

Mahila mandals, women’s federations linked to SHGs, and panchayat-level women’s committees have similarly shaped how schemes get implemented. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment, which reserved one-third (now raised to half in many states) of panchayat seats for women, has brought lakhs of women into local governance. While tokenism and proxy representation remain real concerns, the cumulative effect on women’s political confidence and visibility has been substantial.

The unfinished agenda

Despite progress, gaps remain wide. The Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office of NITI Aayog has noted that several Centrally Sponsored Schemes still need stronger integration of gender concerns in their design and monitoring frameworks. Wage gaps persist across formal and informal sectors. The care economy – unpaid work in households and communities – remains largely invisible in national accounts. Climate change is adding new layers of vulnerability, as women farmers face crop failures, water scarcity, and displacement.

Effective gender-inclusive globalisation will require sustained investment in four areas: institutional capacity within ministries to actually use gender analysis, better gender-disaggregated data, accountability mechanisms that go beyond budget statements, and continued support for women’s collective organising. The shift from women-specific schemes to genuine mainstreaming across all sectors is the harder, slower, and more consequential transformation.

What do you think? If gender mainstreaming has been official policy in India for two decades, why do women’s labour force participation and wage gaps remain so stubborn? And which strategy – fiscal tools like gender budgeting, market-based tools like microfinance, or grassroots organising – do you think has the deepest long-term impact on women’s lives?

References

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Promoting Gender-Inclusive Globalisation: Strategies for Equity

Table of Contents

Why gender mainstreaming matters in a globalised economy 🔗

From welfare to mainstreaming 🔗

Strategies for gender-inclusive policies 🔗

Gender budgeting 🔗

Microfinance and self-help groups 🔗

Sector-specific employment policies 🔗

Global and local efforts 🔗

The role of international organisations 🔗

Grassroots movements and community action 🔗

The unfinished agenda 🔗