The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, fieldwork 2019-21) interviewed women and men aged 15-49 across every state and union territory. It is the most used source for gender indicators in India because it asks the same questions of women and men and repeats them in each round. Each number above opens a section of this course: sex ratios, education, work and violence. A population that has more women than men in its households can still be one where girls are missing at birth, which is why the survey also tracks the sex ratio among young children (928 for ages 0-6 in NFHS-5).

Change at one level can be blocked at another. A scholarship raises a girl's aspiration, but a household that needs her labour or fears for her safety on the road to college can still keep her at home. Good gender analysis traces a programme through all four levels.

The two are complementary. Equal treatment of unequal people preserves the gap, and special measures without a goal of equal outcomes can become permanent tokenism. The Code on Wages, 2019 (section 3) carries the equal-pay principle into labour law: no discrimination on the ground of gender in wages for the same work or work of a similar nature, and none in recruitment.

Gender budgeting and mainstreaming are covered in depth in Gender Mainstreaming 101, women's economic empowerment in WEE 101 and the care economy in Care Economy 101. This course introduces each and links to those decks at the end.

WAD's weakness was that it tended to fold gender into class. It said less about inequality between a poor woman and a poor man in the same household, which is where Gender and Development began.

Moser argued that women carry all three roles at once while men's community work tends to be paid or carry status (community politics). A project that adds a fourth demand on women's time without removing another can fail, or succeed at the cost of women's rest and health. Her framework also classifies policy approaches to women: welfare, equity, anti-poverty, efficiency and empowerment.

Source: NFHS-5 India Report, IIPS and ICF, 2022, Chapter 14. Bank account use rose from 53% in NFHS-4 (2015-16) to 79%, largely after the expansion of no-frills accounts. Decision-making changed much less. That gap between a resource and its use is exactly what Kabeer's framework asks a practitioner to check before reporting success.

Rejecting pooling has direct consequences for design: whose name goes on the account, the ration card, the house title under a housing scheme, the land record and the insurance policy.

Each method has blind spots. Reported decision-making depends on who answers and on what 'participate' means to her. Combining a survey measure with qualitative work is often the most informative design for a programme evaluation. Mixed Methods 101 and Feminist Research 101 cover how.

Track both resources and agency: a joint title is a resource, and who decides on sale or mortgage is agency. Section 11 turns these into a checklist a project team can use.

The overall sex ratio mixes births, deaths and migration across every age group, so it moves slowly. The child sex ratio reflects both sex selection before birth and excess mortality of girls after birth. The sex ratio at birth isolates selection: slightly more boys than girls are born everywhere, so even without selection it sits a little below 1,000. Surveys of households such as NFHS give different values from the census because they cover the usual resident household population, which excludes people living in institutions and differs in migration.

The decline accelerated after 1981, the period when ultrasound became cheap and widely available. The same PIB explainer records that the child sex ratio fell in 429 of 640 districts between 2001 and 2011. A falling ratio while the overall sex ratio rose (933 in 2001 to 943 in 2011) shows that the problem had concentrated at birth.

Source: World Bank WDI, indicator SP.POP.BRTH.MF (UN population estimates), accessed October 2026. The last column is our conversion of the first. India stands out in the region. Note that this modelled estimate for India (934) differs from the SRS figure (913 in 2021): the UN series is modelled from several sources, while SRS is a direct sample count. Quote SRS for India and the UN series only for cross-country comparison.

Restricting safe abortion to stop sex selection pushes women to unsafe providers and does not reduce son preference. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act and the PCPNDT Act serve different purposes and should not be conflated in communication. Sexual Health 101 covers reproductive rights.

Source: PLFS press note, Annual Report July 2023-June 2024, NSO, 23 September 2024. The choice of reference period is a gender decision: short windows undercount women's intermittent work.

Female LFPR rose from 23.3% to 41.7% between 2017-18 and 2023-24, while male LFPR moved from 75.8% to 78.8%. PLFS switched to calendar-year reporting from 2025, when female LFPR was 40.0% and male 79.1%, so the last bar is not strictly comparable with the July-June years.

Source: PLFS press note, Annual Report 2023-24, Table 1. The rise was concentrated in rural areas. The headline rate cannot tell how much reflects new paid jobs and how much reflects women in farm households being recorded as working in family enterprises. In 2025, 64.2% of women workers were self-employed against 52.0% of men, and 18.2% of women workers were in regular wage or salaried jobs (PLFS 2025 press note).

Source: PLFS Annual Report 2025, NSO, MoSPI, March 2026. Women's earnings grew faster than men's between 2024 and 2025 in all three categories, but the levels remain far apart. The largest gap is in self-employment, where most women workers are. Part of it reflects hours: PLFS 2025 reports that urban self-employed men worked about 17.5 hours a week more than women, and rural self-employed men about 12.3 hours more.

The ILO modelled estimate for India in 2025 is 32.4%, against 40.0% in PLFS 2025. Modelled series harmonise definitions across countries and fill gaps with models, while PLFS usual status includes subsidiary work of 30 days or more. Use the national survey for India and the modelled series for cross-country comparison, and never mix them in one chart.

A second line of work studies safety and mobility. Where travel to work is unsafe or socially restricted, the effective labour market for women is the distance they can travel. Transport, lighting and safe workplaces are labour market policies for women.

Survey Design 101 covers questionnaire construction. For women's work, the practical rule is to ask about activities before asking about status, and to ask the woman herself.

These are minutes among people who did the activity. Participation also differs: 81.5% of women aged 6+ did unpaid domestic work on the reference day against 27.1% of men, and 34.0% of women did unpaid caregiving against 17.9% of men (TUS 2024, Table 1).

A programme that adds meetings, training or enterprise work for women should state whose time it uses and what it removes. Care Economy 101 covers the 3R framework, valuation of unpaid work and care policy in detail.

A short time-use module (a 24-hour recall of main activities) can be added to a baseline and endline survey. It shows whether the programme added to women's total work, which attendance figures cannot.

Child marriage is the barrier with the clearest legal answer. NFHS-5 finds that 23% of women aged 20-24 married before 18, the legal minimum for women, compared with 47% of women aged 45-49. The decline is large but leaves nearly one in four young women married as children.

Health programmes respond by bringing services closer (ASHA workers, health and wellness centres), by insuring women in their own name, and by counting care-seeking separately for girls and boys in routine data. A district that reports child treatment rates without disaggregating by sex cannot see the problem.

Recognising men's health needs is part of gender analysis. It also helps programmes enlist men as allies in changing norms that hurt women. Mental Health 101 covers suicide prevention and care.

Source: NFHS-5 India Report, IIPS and ICF, 2022, Chapters 3 and 10. Gaps are calculated from the rounded figures in the report. The largest gap is in employment, which connects the two sections before this one: schooling has risen faster than paid work, and unpaid care absorbs the difference.

Violence is reported across all groups, and it is higher among women from Scheduled Caste households and poorer households. Caste and wealth overlap, so this chart cannot separate their effects. Section 10 returns to this overlap.

Sources: The Financial Express (Dhaka), 23 December 2020, on an ActionAid Bangladesh study; Polity (Colombo), 14 October 2025; Pakistan Act text with amendments, Sindh Judicial Academy. A law that nobody uses is a signal of weak awareness, distant courts or fear of the consequences at home.

Because reservation was assigned by rotation that was close to random, these studies give unusually credible causal evidence on women's leadership. The Beaman study found that attitudes changed only after a second round of exposure to a woman leader.

Nepal's Constitution of 2015 (Article 84(8)) requires that women account for at least one-third of each party's members elected to the Federal Parliament. India elected 74 women to the 18th Lok Sabha in 2024, 13.6% of members, down from 78 in 2019 (WION, June 2024).

Sources: LiveLaw, 17 April 2026, on the notification of 16 April and the vote (298 of 528 members present and voting); SCC Online, 17 April 2026, on the Bill's content. Watch for the census publication date and the delimitation commission's terms.

These are positions taken in public and parliamentary debate. The constitutional text includes Scheduled Caste and Tribe women within the one-third, and has no OBC sub-quota because the Constitution has no OBC reservation in legislatures. Present both sides fairly when you teach or advocate on this question.

Many schemes require women's membership in user committees. Check whether they hold office, attend, and influence decisions. A committee with women members that never meets is a paper reform. Governance & Accountability 101 covers these institutions.

Good practice keeps accountability to women: women's organisations help set the agenda, and outcomes are measured in women's lives, such as less violence and more say, as well as in men's attitudes. School programmes with adolescent boys and girls together are a common South Asian entry point.

Source: NFHS-5 India Report, IIPS and ICF, 2022, Table 15.11. A paradox worth teaching: in some upper-caste households women's paid work outside the home has been restricted as a status marker, so higher caste can mean lower participation.

NFHS-5 reports ever-experienced spousal physical or sexual violence at 29.9% among Hindu and 27.5% among Muslim ever-married women (Table 15.11), a smaller difference than the gap between the poorest (38.4%) and richest (16.9%) wealth quintiles. Check region, wealth and education before attributing a gap to religion.

Data Feminism 101 asks who collects data and who is counted. Social Margins 101 covers the groups most often left out of surveys altogether, such as the homeless and nomadic communities.

Source: March, Smyth and Mukhopadhyay, A Guide to Gender-Analysis Frameworks (Oxfam, 1999). Frameworks are aids to thinking. Choose the one that answers your question and adapt its categories to the local setting.

This is an Illustrative profile of the kind a team fills in with women and men separately in a village meeting. It shows quickly that a programme raising milk yields would add to women's work while the income and decisions sit with men. The design response is to enrol women as cooperative members in their own right and pay milk money into their own accounts.

Use the checklist at design, at mid-term review and before scale-up. Each item corresponds to a section of this course, so a 'no' points to the section to revisit. Programme Design 101 and Theory of Change 101 show where these items sit in a full design.

Report each indicator for women and men where it applies, at baseline and endline. Using NFHS wording lets you compare your programme area with the district or state figure. MEL Basics 101 and Logframe 101 show how to set targets and means of verification.

Most programmes sit in the middle. Be accurate in proposals and reports: claiming transformation for a programme that adjusts meeting times undermines credibility with funders and with the women involved. A modest, well-delivered gender-responsive programme is a good programme. Gender Mainstreaming 101 covers the continuum in organisational practice.

Each mistake corresponds to a concept from this course. Return to the relevant section when a programme review raises one of them.

Behind each idea is a source you can open: NFHS-5, PLFS, the Time Use Survey, the Constitution and the statutes cited. Check the latest round before you use a figure, since PLFS, SRS and NFHS all publish new rounds and the women's reservation timeline is still moving.