Effective Measures to Achieve Wage Equality for Women

Despite decades of progress and pioneering legislation, women in India still earn significantly less than men for comparable work. According to the International Labour Organization, Indian women earn only 66% of what men earn, placing the country’s gender pay gap at around 34%. Closing this gap is not a single-policy fix; it requires a coordinated push across laws, workplaces, unions, and classrooms. This post breaks down the most effective measures to remove wage differentials between men and women, with a focus on what is working, what is failing, and what still needs urgent attention.

Why wage differentials persist 🔗

Wage gaps do not exist because women are less productive. They persist because of occupational segregation, undervaluation of “feminine” work, weak enforcement of equal-pay laws, low unionisation among women, and the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work. A 2024 study by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences found that women spend 301 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work compared to 98 minutes for men, leaving them with less time, energy, and bargaining power in the paid workforce.

Removing wage differentials therefore requires action on three connected fronts: law, voice, and skill. Each reinforces the others.

Strengthening equal remuneration laws 🔗

India was among the earliest countries to legislate equal pay. The Minimum Wages Act of 1948 was followed by the Equal Remuneration Act of 1976, and in 2019 these were consolidated into the Code on Wages. The constitutional commitment runs even deeper: Article 39(d) of the Directive Principles directs the State to secure equal pay for equal work.

Where the law still falls short 🔗

The legal framework is strong on paper but weak in practice. The Code on Wages, 2019, expanded the principle of equal pay beyond the male-female binary, but it left the crucial phrase “work of equal value” undefined, pushing interpretation to the courts on a case-by-case basis. This vagueness allows employers to justify wage gaps by claiming roles are not “identical”, even when they involve comparable skill, effort, and responsibility.

Implementation suffers further because most working women in India are in the informal sector, where labour inspectors rarely reach. A critical reading of the new labour codes points out that minimum-wage calculations still use a “standard working-class family” model with one earning member, an assumption rooted in outdated, male-breadwinner thinking.

What stricter implementation looks like 🔗

Concrete steps that can sharpen enforcement include:

• Pay transparency mandates: Requiring employers above a certain size to publish role-wise salary bands and report gender pay gaps annually, similar to UK-style mandatory reporting.
• A clear legal definition of “work of equal value”: Bringing Indian law in line with ILO Convention 100 so courts and inspectors have an objective yardstick.
• Salary-history bans: Stopping employers from anchoring new offers to past pay, which simply carries old inequalities forward.
• Regular pay audits: Independent audits in both public and private sectors, with penalties for unjustified gaps.

Landmark judgments have already pointed in this direction. In Mackinnon Mackenzie & Co. Ltd. v. Audrey D’Costa, the Supreme Court ruled that men and women employees must be paid equally for the same work, and in State of Punjab v. Jagjit Singh the Court extended equal pay to temporary employees performing equivalent duties.

Encouraging women’s participation in trade unions 🔗

Laws set the floor; collective bargaining lifts the ceiling. Where women are organised, they negotiate better. Where they are not, they remain wage takers.

The unionisation gap 🔗

Women’s participation in unions has historically been low. Research notes that less than 8 per cent of India’s workforce is unionised, and women account for only a small fraction of that. Several factors drive this: occupational segregation into informal jobs that unions struggle to organise, household responsibilities that make evening meetings impossible, deep-rooted patriarchy inside unions themselves, and outright employer hostility, especially in Special Economic Zones where employers often demand a “union-free environment”.

Encouragingly, the trend is shifting. Female membership of registered trade unions rose dramatically from 5.94 lakh in 1991 to 18.71 lakh in 2002, even as male membership fell, raising the women’s share from 9.7 per cent to 26.8 per cent. Organisations like the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Workers Union (TTCU) have shown that informal-sector women can organise effectively when unions adapt to their realities.

How to boost women’s bargaining power 🔗

Practical measures that strengthen women’s voice at the workplace include:

• Leadership quotas inside unions: Reserving executive committee seats for women so bargaining agendas actually reflect their concerns.
• Training in negotiation and labour law: The All India Trade Union Congress has argued that women leaders must be trained at premier labour institutes and seated at the negotiation table.
• Family-friendly union meetings: Childcare at meetings, daytime scheduling, and digital participation options.
• Issue agendas that matter to women: Maternity protection, workplace creches, safe transport, and protection from sexual harassment alongside wages.

Recognising organisations like SEWA, which has organised informal women workers around cooperatives, self-help groups, and collective bargaining, also matters because traditional industrial-union models simply do not fit the majority of working women in India.

Promoting skill development and education 🔗

A large part of the wage gap comes from the kind of work women do, not just unequal pay for the same work. Women are concentrated in low-paid sectors like garments, beauty, domestic work, and agriculture, while higher-paying sectors like engineering, IT leadership, and skilled manufacturing remain male-dominated. Targeted skilling can move women into better-paid roles.

Government and flagship programmes 🔗

The Skill India Mission, launched in 2015 by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, has been the biggest push so far. According to official figures, the mission has transformed the lives of over 35.36 lakh women by enabling them to access better and more secure livelihoods through skill training. Schemes under it include the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women (STEP), and Mahila Coir Yojana.

Specialised efforts are also targeting STEM. The All India Council for Technical Education runs the Pragati Scholarship for girls in technical education, while UN Women’s WeSTEM programme aims to upskill 2,000 young women from tribal areas in Madhya Pradesh for high-growth STEM careers.

Why skilling alone is not enough 🔗

Skilling programmes have a placement problem. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship has itself noted that while Skill India provides specialised training for women, there is still a lack of focus on industry placement and sustained employment. Many CSR-backed skilling efforts also reinforce informal-sector clustering by teaching tailoring, papad-making, and beauty work to women, while male trainees get technical instruction in irrigation or machinery.

To make skilling actually narrow wage gaps, programmes need to:

• Move women into formal, higher-paying sectors: Electronics, hardware, logistics, renewable energy, and digital services pay more and offer benefits.
• Bundle training with placement and apprenticeships: A certificate alone does not raise wages; a job does.
• Address mobility and safety: Secure transport, residential facilities, and flexible scheduling so women can attend and complete courses.
• Add childcare and family support: Without these, women drop out of training and out of the workforce.
• Promote re-entry pathways: Returnship programmes for women resuming careers after maternity breaks.

Reinforcing measures that tie it all together 🔗

Three additional levers amplify the impact of laws, unions, and skilling.

Recognising and redistributing unpaid care work: Public investment in childcare, eldercare, and paid parental leave for both parents reduces the “motherhood penalty” that drives much of the lifetime earnings gap.

Using public employment schemes as wage equalisers: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has been a quiet success here. The ILO notes that MGNREGA benefited rural women workers and helped reduce the gender pay gap, both directly by raising their pay and indirectly by lifting overall rural wages.

Workplace anti-discrimination architecture: Effective Internal Complaints Committees under the PoSH Act, gender-neutral hiring policies, transparent promotion criteria, and leadership accountability for closing internal pay gaps all create an environment where equal pay is the norm rather than the exception.

The wage gap has narrowed over time, from around 48 per cent in 1993-94 to 28 per cent in 2018-19 according to NSSO data, but progress is too slow and uneven. Stronger laws without enforcement, unions without women leaders, and skilling without placement all underperform. The measures work best when they reinforce each other.

What do you think? If you had to pick one measure – stricter enforcement of equal pay laws, greater union participation, or targeted skill development – which do you believe would shift the wage gap fastest in your own state or city, and why? And what role can young professionals entering the workforce today play in normalising pay transparency at their workplaces?

References

1. https://www.changeincontent.com/international-equal-pay-day/
2. https://www.ibanet.org/rethinking-Indian-law-on-equal-pay-towards-gender-pay-equality-in-workplace
3. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/stories/op-ed/2022/09/the-gender-pay-gap-hard-truths-and-actions-needed
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2025/12/15/what-have-women-gained-in-the-new-labour-codes/
5. https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/the-principle-of-equality-and-the-gender-wage-gap-in-india-59945
6. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/women-trade-unions-india/docview/231896080/se-2
7. https://www.ilo.org/newdelhi/info/public/fs/WCMS_649893/lang–en/index.htm
8. https://www.labourfile.org/rights-of-women.aspx/
9. https://www.csrindia.org/women-skill-development/
10. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/women-in-stem/
11. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/stories/press-release/2024/07/promoting-young-women-participation-in-stem-in-india
12. https://nusocia.com/skilling-for-women-beyond-informal-sector/
13. https://www.ilo.org/resource/article/oped-gender-pay-gap-hard-truths-and-actions-needed