Every time a woman walks into a job interview and is asked if she’s married, when she plans to be, or whether she intends to have children questions rarely, if ever, asked of men, we are reminded that gender inequality isn’t about capability. It’s about structure.
It’s not that women don’t negotiate, or that they lack ambition. It’s that workplaces, education systems, and even the public space itself have been built with a default male body and mind in mind. Women, on the other hand, are expected to shrink — their presence, their expectations, and even their biological rhythms. We often hear women are less confident, more “emotional,” or less self-promoting. These aren’t personal shortcomings. They are symptoms of a society that quietly teaches women, from puberty onward, to doubt themselves and then punishes them if they speak up.
We cannot solve this by simply asking women to “lean in.” What we need is law. We need policy. We need systemic scaffolding that holds up equality even when the culture around it does not.
1. End Discriminatory Hiring Practices
It is currently legal in India to ask a woman if she plans to marry or have children in a job interview. There is no explicit provision in Indian labour law — including the Equal Remuneration Act, Maternity Benefit Act, or even POSH, that bars this line of questioning. It should be. A clear provision under the Equal Opportunity Code must be introduced, making such questions illegal, with penalties for non-compliance.
Every job interview must come under a formal anti-discrimination clause, similar to the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) framework in the U.S. Companies above a certain size should be required to file anonymised interview data for third-party audit.
2. Mandate Pay Transparency and Negotiation Audits
Women, statistically, negotiate less often and less aggressively than men. But the larger issue is structural: most organisations don’t offer pay transparency. That creates space for gender-based wage gaps to go unnoticed or worse, justified. Governments must legally mandate pay bands for all roles in medium and large organisations, and require that HR departments conduct annual gender audits of salaries, promotions, and negotiation success rates.
This is already being done in countries like Iceland and the UK. There’s no reason India shouldn’t follow suit.
3. Enforce Equal Representation in Decision-Making Roles
India’s corporate boards are still overwhelmingly male. Even in 2025, women make up less than 18% of board members in the top 500 NSE-listed companies. A 33% reservation for women on boards, not as a token but as a compliance requirement should be enforced with clear penalties. This isn’t just a gender issue; companies with gender-diverse leadership tend to perform better financially and show higher ethical standards.
We also need the same enforcement in public offices, university senates, and workplace grievance committees. If women aren’t at the table when rules are made, those rules will continue to reflect male default assumptions.
4. Make Workplaces Hormone-Aware, Not Just Gender-Aware
Much of our current workplace model such as 9-to-5 routines, monthly reviews, linear productivity cycles, is built on male hormonal rhythms, which operate on a roughly 24-hour cycle. Women, whose bodies follow more complex hormonal patterns across a 28-day cycle, are held to a standard they didn’t help design.
This is not about special treatment; it’s about accommodation. Companies should be encouraged (and eventually required) to create flexible productivity models for menstruating and menopausal employees. These could include cycle-aware leave banks, hybrid work windows, and the right to opt out of non-critical meetings during certain phases.
This also applies to education. Girls going through puberty face both objectification and alienation in classroom settings. Teachers must be trained to recognise the psychosocial effects of adolescence on girls, not just discipline them for “distracted behaviour.”
5. Protect Women’s Right to Simply Exist in Public
The very act of a woman standing still in public space can invite suspicion. She cannot loiter. She cannot be idle. She must have a “purpose”, preferably work, errands, or care-giving. Otherwise, she is sexualised, policed, or pathologised. This is what sociologists call the “male default of public presence.”
Local governments must redesign public spaces through a gender-equity lens more seating, better lighting, community-driven vigilance committees (not surveillance), and strong anti-harassment enforcement. Cities like Vienna have implemented “gender mainstreaming” in urban design. It’s time Indian cities did the same.
6. Build Legal Protection for Unpaid and Invisible Labour
One of the most devastating contradictions today is that being a traditional wife or homemaker is no longer socially recognised, yet workplaces do not accommodate the unpaid labour women do at home. Care work, emotional labour, child-rearing, and household management continue to fall disproportionately on women, with zero legal recognition.
We need a legal framework that offers pensions, healthcare coverage, or time-banking for homemakers not just as welfare, but as a rights-based recognition of their contribution to the economy. Kerala’s new budget offering monthly pay to homemakers is a small but meaningful step in this direction.
7. Reimagine Masculinity Through Legal and Cultural Reform
Finally, none of this is good for men either. When women are punished for being too feminine, and men are punished for being too “soft,” both are trapped in rigid roles that crush mental health, empathy, and personal growth. Gender-sensitive school curricula and public awareness campaigns must target boys too — not to shame them, but to liberate them from hyper-masculine expectations.
Gender justice is not a “women’s issue.” It’s a societal reset.
The Bottom Line
A woman’s worth is not determined by how well she hides her pain, smiles through discrimination, or pretends to be either a man or a superwoman. The problem is not that women are weak. It’s that society, policy, and law still treat their strength as an exception, not the norm.
What we need is a complete rewiring of how workplaces, public spaces, and institutions perceive gender. Not as a box to be ticked, but as a foundational principle of fairness and dignity.
Until then, every policy that ignores the emotional, biological, and structural reality of being a woman in today’s world is simply unfinished work.
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