Are We Empowering Women, or Just Saying That We Are?

Women’s empowerment remains symbolic without structural reform, equitable workplaces, and redistribution of care responsibilities.

Each year, as March comes around the corner, we pat our backs on how far women have come. Conferences celebrate women founders and leaders while organizations present picture perfect reports on diversity. Social media is filled with “breaking the glass ceiling”. Despite all this applause, the power structure is stubbornly unchanged.

As per the Global Gender Gap report by the World Economic Forum (2023), it will still take us over 130 years to close the existent global gender gap. In India, women make up about one-quarter of the working age population, where they take up only a small fraction of senior leadership positions in corporate and political institutions (World Economic Forum, 2023). Even when they enter workforce positions, they are far less likely to rise to decision-making roles.

Yet, public narratives revolve disproportionately around exceptional success stories such as the first women CEO in a sector, the youngest female minister, the only woman on an executive board panel and so on. While these individual achievements are important, they are frequently presented as the sole evidence of systemic transformation. They are a handful of exceptions who have managed to navigate institutions that were never designed keeping them in mind.

When organizations celebrate women at the top with persisting pay gaps, biased performance evaluations and treating childcare infrastructure as a private burden, women empowerment remains a mere cosmetic. Rare instances of visibility are mistaken for victory.

Here lies the contradiction of modern day empowerment. Women may be more visible but systems are not any more equitable. Until leadership pathways are rewritten, compensation re-evaluated and caregiving recognized as an economic issue instead of a personal one, our celebrations remain premature. Representation without structural reform cannot be called empowerment. It is simply branding.

Symbolic Effort Impersonating Empowerment

The present understanding of empowerment may have opened up more opportunities for women, it has however not redistributed their traditional responsibilities. While women may be economically far more active today than ever, the burden of managing everyday lives still rests on their shoulders singularly. Unpaid care and domestic work is disproportionately feminized. The International Labour Organization (2018) highlights that women are responsible for a majority of unpaid care globally. This pattern directly reduces their labour force participation and future career advancement.

This is not an incidental occurrence but a systemic one. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has famously described this phenomenon as the “second shift”, which documents how employed women often come home to a disproportionate share of domestic chores (Huang et al., 2023). This is still true decades later. Research by UN Women (2019) showed that unpaid care responsibilities reduce economic opportunities for women, increase time poverty, and add to financial dependency.

Beyond physical labour is the invisible emotional burden. Research in Organizational Psychology shows that women are more likely to be expected to manage interpersonal relations along with caregiving roles at both home as well as the workplace (Mohseni & Fatemeh Bibak, 2023).

Popular narratives reframe this imbalance as equality. The “superwoman” narrative applauds women for excelling professionally while also managing household chores, which brushes the structural inequality under a carpet. Such an empowerment is incomplete. Without institutional efforts towards childcare, eldercare and workplace flexibility, empowerment runs the risk of becoming an expanded expectation instead of an evolution of power.

Empowerment Without Societal Change

Economic empowerment is frequently seen as a definite marker of women’s progress in society. Governments and development agencies endlessly list out finance programmes, self-help groups, entrepreneurship schemes and skills development courses as proof of transformative evolution. These measures may expand overall access to income, however, they do not automatically represent autonomy.

A study by MIT found that while micro financing initiatives helped increase business activity, it created limited impact on the broader decision making power of women. (Banerjee et al., 2015). Access to earnings does not guarantee a role in financial decision making. This is particularly noticed in the context of patriarchal norms which often restrict the bargaining power of women within the household (World Bank, 2012).

Education too is similarly celebrated globally. However, schooling does not automatically break down social constraints. Literacy rates amongst girls have significantly improved globally. Despite that, social norms surrounding early marriages, caregiving burdens and unsafe public areas often act as a hindrance for women to convert their degrees into sustainable career pathways (UNESCO, 2020).

Research on gender norms has further revelaed that societies are more accepting of patience and self-sacrifice as feminine traits while penalizing assertiveness and ambition (Rudman et al., 2012). Such societal expectations internalize limits on leadership pathways for women.

Empowerment, thus, is not limited to financial resources or mandatory formal education. Without legal protection, cultural change and genuine decision making authority, economic and educational gains remain merely symbolic. True empowerment is not just opportunity but also power, safety and structural modification.

Symbolic Action to Structural Change

We cannot hope to achieve true empowerment without acknowledging the inequalities women face in the first place. The intersection of gender with class, caste, religion, sexuality and geography present a layered form of disadvantage. Intersectionality refers to how various power systems like racism, sexism and class inequality may overlap to shape lived experiences of people (Crenshaw, 1989). For several women, this overlap means that empowerment cannot be left at education or employment opportunities alone.

Programs promoting leadership training or corporate diversity are centred towards benefitting women in the urban, corporate sector. While on the other hand, rural and marginalized women still continue to struggle for basic rights such as safety, land ownership and access to public services. Structural inequalities rooted in poverty, caste and geography have a significant impact on women’s access to resources and economic activities. It is thus vital to ask, do all women feel equally empowered?

Deep rooted structural reform is crucial to move from symbolic recognition to genuine empowerment. Scholars and policy institutions are increasingly emphasising on the need to redistribute unpaid care work, ensuring safe and equitable workplaces, strengthening protections against gender-based violence and creating attainable pathways to leadership rather than token inclusion. There is dire need for public investment in childcare, eldercare and social protection systems as a measure to reduce the societal burden of care on women (ILO, 2018).

Empowerment cannot be assured through slogan chants or singular policy initiatives. It requires a transformation of structures that shape women’s life across social, cultural and economic spheres.

The Way Forward
We are now confronted with a simple yet uncomfortable question- Are women truly being empowered or are we mistaking incremental visibility for transformative change? There is undeniable progress. More and more women reach universities every year, workplaces and political spaces than ever before. However, participation alone does not mean equal power. As scholars have repeatedly emphasised over the years, empowerment is not about access to opportunities alone but also the ability to exercise will, make decisions and live with dignity.

Very often, the notion of empowerment celebrates symbolic milestones while forgetting the deeper inequalities that continue to exist. Women in leadership roles, successful women entrepreneurs or corporate diversity may be a sign of progress, but they alone are not enough to dismantle the structural barriers that hold women back today. When empowerment is limited to just participation within the existing systems, it risks becoming token inclusion which lacks transformative power.

True empowerment is far more ambitious. It seeks a redesign of existing systems that play a role in women’s lives. This means re-evaluating how societies distribute care responsibilities, ensuring workplaces are more equitable, and challenging long standing cultural narratives that discourage female autonomy and ambition. It is also crucial that women be heard across socio-economic backgrounds in order to recognize empowerment in the context of their diverse realities.

As long as these deeper inequalities remain unaddressed, empowerment celebrations remain a facade. Real change will require acceptance of current progress and challenging existing norms along with a strong commitment to structural reform. It is only then that empowerment can move beyond a mere rhetoric and evolve into a genuine expression of women’s freedom, choices and strength.

Authors: Prisha Khanna, Undergraduate Student, FLAME University; Nivedeeta Thombare, Independent Researcher; and Prof. Moitrayee Das, Faculty of Psychology, FLAME University.