Anita Anand | Women have come a long way in India, but a long way to go for full equality

March 8, International Women’s Day, is a day to celebrate women. While one day is not enough for this, it is an opportunity to reflect on what can be celebrated and what continues to be a challenge.

As a development professional, I have had the unique opportunity to be part of national, regional and global processes of getting women into development in the 1970s and 1980s, which then came to be known as engendering or mainstreaming women into development.

My journey started in 1975 when the United Nations announced the World Conference on International Women’s Year in Mexico City, the first global conference to be held on women’s issues, attended by 133 governments.

This was followed by my attendance and witness to four follow-up global conferences, culminating in the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. The global gatherings were a forum for listening to women’s voices, designing mechanisms to address their concerns and hasten their advancement in a more concerted way.

After Beijing, the consensus was on engendering or mainstreaming gender into development.

Gender mainstreaming, according to the UN Economic and Social Council, is the process of assessing the implications of any legislation, policies, programmes, in all areas and at all levels for women and men and then developing strategies to ensure that concerns and experiences of women and men be an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in the political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally.

The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality. Simply put, it is asking at each step, how will this policy, programme or activity affect women? How will it affect men?

The focus was, for a start, on policies, which give authority to change. In India, policymaking, and development planning till 2015, was done through the Five-Year Plans. It became imperative that women’s voices and perspectives inform these policies. Hence, engendering the plans became critical. The challenges to engendering policy and planning were formidable as there were no systemic institutional mechanisms in place to encourage and allow efficient intervention. Where they existed, these were sporadic and one dimensional.

The first-of-its-kind coordinated effort to engender the Plans was done during the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1997-2002), spearheaded by UNIFEM, the UN agency for women, now known as UN Women. In 1996, fresh after Beijing, UNIFEM created a think tank which included the Government of India, the Planning Commission, the UN system and civil society organisations to engender the policy and planning process. A concerted effort was made to get women in different parts of India, from diverse levels of society, to come together to understand how their lives were affected by policy and how they could in turn, influence policy. I was privileged to be a part of this think tank.

As a result of this effort, in the 1997-2002 Five-Year Plan, for the first time in the history of planning in India, “gender” was mentioned in the preamble to the final Plan document, and a Component Plan for Women was included. Since then, while policy statements recognise the need for and mention gender mainstreaming, what is more difficult to accomplish is the implementation of these policies. The 2001 National Policy for the Empowerment of Women and an updated 2016 version are the working documents till now.

The principal activity of the Indian government for the empowerment of women continues in the creation of “schemes”. According to a government website, at present, the Central and state governments run about 509 major schemes for women of all age groups, in education, healthcare, self-employment, and others. The primary goals of these schemes is to “provide women protection, better health facilities, enough education to make them employable and financially strong”. Many women and their families have benefitted from these schemes.

India is a large and diverse country and implementation of any policy and programme is a challenge. People are not convinced that gender mainstreaming is a good thing. Gender equality is not a mechanical exercise of setting up policies and programmes but, more importantly, of changing hearts and minds. This has not been attempted. It is difficult for men to give way to women and for women to take the place created for them. Undoing years of socialisation of men and women to accept new and different ways of thinking and acting is a strategic task. While the women’s movements have empowered women, the ecosystem around them has not changed, and they cannot easily navigate their way through it, at home or in the workspace. The efforts to change the consciousness of men has been far too little.

In India, most of engendering development has been done by civil society organisations.

However, their impact is minimal, with little possibility of upscaling to the levels that are needed. It is the government, with its vast outreach through the media and governance structures, that can be effective.

We can celebrate that today Indian women have more agency and autonomy than before, increased opportunities in education and income generation, are more visible in the workplace and are likely to be financially independent. At the same time, we must decry the fact that women continue to be susceptible to violence and harassment.

The slow speed of engendering development and mainstreaming women still challenge us. This is why March 8 is still needed. And the rest of the 364 days are for all of us to make it happen.