Addressing Gender Concerns in Social Protection Policies: Why It Matters

Social protection policies are designed to cushion people from life’s risks – illness, unemployment, old age, childbirth, and poverty. But here’s the catch: these risks are not gender-neutral. A woman in rural Bihar faces a very different set of vulnerabilities than her brother, even if they share the same household. When social protection systems ignore this, they don’t just fail women – they often deepen the inequalities they were meant to fix. Understanding why gender matters in social protection is essential to building welfare systems that actually work for everyone.

Why gender must be a differentiating lens 🔗

Social protection refers to the set of policies and programmes that protect people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion. This includes cash transfers, health insurance, pensions, maternity benefits, and employment guarantees. For decades, these schemes were designed with the assumption that households are uniform units and that benefits reaching a family automatically reach all members equally. This assumption is flawed.

Women face risks that men typically do not – childbirth, unpaid care work, gender-based violence, widowhood discrimination, and exclusion from inheritance. They also experience common risks like poverty or job loss differently because of unequal access to assets, mobility constraints, and social norms. As one analysis on reshaping India’s social protection system notes, factors like early marriage, childbearing, intra-household power dynamics, and safety constraints fundamentally shape women’s needs across their lifecycle.

A gender-neutral approach to social protection, therefore, is often gender-blind. It treats unequal people as equal and reproduces the very inequities it claims to address. Recognising gender as a differentiating lens means acknowledging that men and women enter the welfare system from different starting points, and that policy must compensate for this gap rather than ignore it.

Lifecycle risks for women 🔗

Gender-specific risks shift across a woman’s lifecycle. Girls face nutritional deprivation, school dropout, and child marriage. Working-age women carry the double burden of paid and unpaid labour, along with maternal health risks. Older women contend with widowhood, lack of pensions, and poor health access. Social protection must respond to each of these stages with appropriate instruments – conditional cash transfers for girls, employment guarantees and childcare for working women, and social pensions for the elderly.

Gender-based constraints in accessing protection 🔗

Even when schemes exist on paper, women often cannot access them. Researchers studying gender-responsive social protection in India classify these barriers into three categories: gender-specific, intensified, and imposed constraints.

Gender-specific constraints 🔗

These are inequalities women face purely because of their gender. Lower literacy rates make it harder to navigate scheme paperwork. Restricted mobility prevents women from reaching banks or government offices. The absence of independent identity documents – many women lack land titles or even individual bank accounts – locks them out of asset-based benefits. The burden of unpaid care work also limits the time they can spend on income-generating activities or queueing at welfare offices.

Intensified constraints 🔗

Some constraints affect both men and women but hit women harder. Poverty is a common example – poor women are usually poorer than poor men because they own fewer assets and earn less. Similarly, the informal economy traps women disproportionately, since gender discrimination, family restrictions, and lower qualifications push them into informal work where social security protections rarely apply.

Imposed constraints 🔗

These are barriers created or worsened by policy design itself. A scheme requiring a male head-of-household signature, conditional cash transfers tied to behaviours women cannot independently choose, or digital-only registration that excludes women without smartphones – all of these are imposed constraints. A telling example: studies on gender and health insurance enrolment in India show that even universal household-based health insurance schemes often assume coverage is gender-neutral, but in practice women’s enrolment and utilisation lag behind men’s.

Gender mainstreaming and gender-specific actions 🔗

Two complementary strategies have emerged to fix this gap: gender mainstreaming and gender-specific interventions.

Gender mainstreaming is the process of integrating women’s and men’s concerns into every stage of policy – design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation – across all sectors, not just “women’s schemes”. The idea was formalised by UN Women’s gender mainstreaming framework and has since shaped global welfare design. Mainstreaming means asking, at every step: how does this scheme affect women versus men? Who is excluded? Who decides?

Gender-specific actions, on the other hand, are targeted interventions designed exclusively for women or girls to correct historical disadvantages. Maternity benefits, scholarships for girls, women-only credit programmes, and self-help groups are examples. Both strategies are needed – mainstreaming ensures every scheme is gender-sensitive, while specific actions address gaps that mainstreaming alone cannot close.

What good design looks like 🔗

A well-designed gender-responsive scheme considers four things: access (can women actually reach it?), agency (do women have a say in how benefits are used?), adequacy (is the benefit enough to make a real difference?), and accountability (can women hold the system responsible when it fails?). For example, paying maternity benefits directly into a woman’s own bank account rather than the household head’s account is a small design choice with large consequences for agency.

Targeted gendered interventions: lessons from India 🔗

India has developed a wide range of gendered social protection schemes over the past two decades. Examining them reveals what works and what still needs improvement.

Maternal healthcare: Janani Suraksha Yojana 🔗

Launched in 2005, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is a conditional cash transfer scheme that pays women to deliver their babies at health facilities rather than at home. The programme also created the cadre of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), who serve as community health workers connecting women to maternal services. JSY has significantly increased institutional deliveries and contributed to a decline in maternal mortality. India’s maternal mortality ratio has fallen substantially over the past two decades, partly because of these targeted interventions. The Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) extends similar support, providing cash incentives to pregnant and lactating mothers to compensate for wage loss and ensure better nutrition.

Childcare and the care economy 🔗

The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme operates anganwadi centres that provide childcare, nutrition, and early education. These centres do double duty – they support child development while freeing mothers for paid work. Recognising the care economy is central to gender-responsive policy. When the state does not provide childcare, women provide it for free, and this invisible labour blocks them from the workforce.

Employment and the MGNREGS experience 🔗

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is one of the world’s largest employment programmes. It mandates that at least one-third of beneficiaries be women, offers equal wages to men and women, and provides worksite crèches. Research on gendered impacts in India has shown that MGNREGS has improved women’s bargaining power within households and their access to independent income. Yet the gap between design and implementation remains – many states fail to provide crèches, and women’s participation is uneven across regions.

Education incentives for girls 🔗

The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme, launched in 2015, combines awareness campaigns with financial incentives like the Sukanya Samriddhi Account to encourage families to invest in their daughters’ education and future. The scheme has been credited with improvements in the sex ratio at birth in several focus districts. State-level cash transfer programmes such as West Bengal’s Kanyashree Prakalpa pay scholarships to adolescent girls conditional on staying unmarried and in school – a direct attack on the twin problems of child marriage and school dropout. UNICEF India’s analysis highlights how such gender-responsive cash transfers have shifted norms and outcomes in measurable ways.

Persistent gaps and the road ahead 🔗

Despite these advances, significant blind spots remain. Women in the informal economy – domestic workers, street vendors, home-based producers – still have weak access to social security. The Social Security Code 2020 attempts to extend coverage to unorganised workers, but implementation has been slow and gender-disaggregated data is scarce.

Pandemic experiences exposed how fragile gendered protection can be. During COVID-19, women lost jobs faster than men, faced higher domestic violence, and benefited less from relief measures designed without a gender lens. Climate change presents a similar challenge – women are more vulnerable to climate shocks because of their dependence on natural resources and unequal access to adaptive resources, and yet climate-linked social protection is rarely gender-aware.

The road ahead requires three shifts. First, treating gender-disaggregated data collection as non-negotiable. Second, designing schemes that put women’s agency at the centre – direct cash transfers to women’s accounts, women-led monitoring committees, and grievance redressal that women can actually use. Third, accepting that addressing single deprivations is not enough; poor women face overlapping disadvantages of caste, class, disability, and location, and responsive social protection must work along all these axes at once.

What do you think? If you had to redesign one existing welfare scheme in your state to be more gender-responsive, which one would you pick and what is the first change you would make? And how should social protection systems balance gender-specific schemes against mainstreaming gender into every programme – is one approach more urgent than the other right now?

References

1. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/governance/reshaping-social-protection-in-india
2. https://socialprotection.org/discover/blog/making-india%E2%80%99s-social-protection-gender-responsive-opportunities-post-covid-19-world
3. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-00571-7_9
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10821565/
5. https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/un-system-coordination/gender-mainstreaming
6. https://www.theigc.org/blogs/gender-equality/women-and-health-india
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8475308/
8. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2094929&reg=3&lang=2
9. https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/gender-equality