History & Ideas
The Forgotten Superpower: How Ancient India Shaped the World — and Why We Were Made to Forget
The numbers we use to do every calculation on every computer in the world were invented in India. The religion practiced by over half of Asia spread from India. The greatest university of the ancient world stood in Bihar. Historian William Dalrymple‘s new book asks a pointed question: how did we forget all of this — and who decided we should?
“We have an “inferiority complex” and we seek validation from west in everything we do, that is precisely because we have been taught the wrong history for so long. These were politically correct history – but they are anything but history.”
There is a carved ivory figurine in the collections of the Museo Nazionale in Naples, Italy. It is small, exquisitely detailed, shows a woman in a classic Indian posture, and was found in the ruins of Pompeii — buried under volcanic ash since 79 CE. It is one of the clearest physical proofs that Rome and India were not merely aware of each other but traded with each other at scale, across thousands of miles of open ocean, centuries before the Christian era.
Rome was buying Indian luxuries — cotton, spices, ivory, gems — in such quantities that the Roman historian Pliny the Elder complained that India was draining the empire’s treasury. He estimated the outflow at 50 million sesterces a year. That, he wrote, was what India cost Rome. The money flowed east. So did something far more durable: ideas.
This is the world that historian William Dalrymple recovers in his 2024 book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World — a New York Times instant bestseller.
Dalrymple spent five years travelling through the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, tracing the routes along which Indian civilisation flowed outward for nearly fifteen centuries. Speaking to Fareed Zakaria, he described the book’s central argument simply: ancient India was “the cultural superpower of Asia,” and the world has largely forgotten it.
The forgetting, as it turns out, was not an accident.
I. The Golden Road — and the World It Built
Dalrymple’s central concept is what he calls the “Golden Road” — a network of maritime trade routes, cultural exchange, and intellectual transmission that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific for approximately fifteen centuries, from around 250 BCE to 1200 CE. This is not a metaphor for a single physical highway. It is a name for a phenomenon: the sustained, multidirectional flow of Indian goods, religions, philosophies, mathematics, art, architecture, and language across the known world.
The scale of India’s influence during this period is difficult to absorb. More than half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were shaped, in their foundational cultural identities, by ideas that originated in India.
Buddhism — which spread from India into Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China, Korea, and Japan — was not carried by armies. “India spread its ideas through culture and trade, not conquest,” Dalrymple told Zakaria. He calls it “an empire of the spirit.“
India’s Reach, in Objects and Evidence
- An ivory figurine of a courtesan in the Indian style, found in Pompeii, buried since 79 CE
- Grains of Indian pepper discovered in the mummified nostrils of Pharaoh Rameses II
- Indian diamonds believed to have been used in cutting the stones of the Egyptian pyramids
- A cuneiform tablet mentioning a whole village of Indians in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)
- The majority of Roman gold coins found anywhere in the world — found in India and Sri Lanka
- Angkor Wat — the largest religious monument ever built — a Hindu temple in Cambodia
- Borobudur in Java — the world’s largest Buddhist monument, built in 9th-century Indonesia
- Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda, named after the mount of the Hindu god Vishnu
- Scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata carved on temple walls in Thailand and Sumatra
Between 200 BCE and 1200 CE, Dalrymple argues, Sanskrit played the same unifying role across Asia that Latin played in medieval Europe. A scholar or ambassador in 10th-century Java or 7th-century Afghanistan would have written and spoken in Sanskrit. The great Indian epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — were retold across the continent.
The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who in 629 CE undertook a perilous six-year journey to India to reach the great university at Nalanda, crossing the Pamirs through bandits and civil war, returned home with 657 Sanskrit texts, statues, and relics. He knew, writes Dalrymple, that Nalanda was the greatest centre of learning in the world. The Harvard, Oxbridge, and NASA of its day, all in one campus in Bihar.
II. The Numbers That Run the World
The most consequential of all India’s exports to the world was not a religion, or a piece of art, or even a trade route. It was a mathematical idea so fundamental that it is now invisible — taken so completely for granted that its Indian origin has been forgotten even in the countries that depend on it most.
We call them Arabic numerals: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The Arabs gave them to Europe. But the Arabs received them from India — and have always called them Hindu numerals. Dalrymple made the point pointedly to Zakaria: “We call our numbers Arabic numbers because that’s where the West got them from. But the Arabs got them from the Indians.”
The origin story is specific. In the 5th century CE, the mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata — who studied and later headed the observatory at Nalanda University in Bihar — formalised the place-value positional number system that makes it possible to express any number, however large, with just ten symbols.
His 499 CE text, the Aryabhatiya, contained breakthroughs in algebra, trigonometry, and astronomy. Aryabhata calculated the value of pi to 3.1416 — correct to four decimal places — and appears to have understood that it was irrational, a fact that would not be formally proved in Europe until 1761.
A century later, in 628 CE, Brahmagupta wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta — the first mathematical text to treat zero as an independent number with its own arithmetic rules. Before Brahmagupta, zero was a placeholder — a blank space.
He made it a number: something you could add, subtract, multiply, and reason about. He established that 1 + 0 = 1, that 1 − 0 = 1, that 1 × 0 = 0. These seem trivially obvious now. They were not obvious before someone wrote them down for the first time.
How Zero Travelled from Bihar to Baghdad to Brussels
The Journey of the Most Important Number in History
In 773 CE, a delegation from the Raja of Sindh arrived in Baghdad bearing gifts for the Caliph. What caught the Caliph’s attention was not the jewels or the cotton — it was a single manuscript containing the mathematical theories of Brahmagupta. The Arabs called it “The Great Sindhind.” The scholar who translated and expanded on Brahmagupta’s work was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name, Latinised, became “algorithm.” His book on Indian arithmetic gave us the word “algebra” (from the Arabic al-jabr, a term in his title).
In the 12th century, al-Khwarizmi’s works were translated into Latin in Spain. Medieval European scholars encountered the Hindu-Arabic numerals for the first time and gradually adopted them, replacing the cumbersome Roman numeral system.
Every calculation done on every computer, smartphone, and calculator in the world today runs on a numbering system whose conceptual foundations were laid in Bihar in the 5th century CE.
Dalrymple puts the lineage plainly: “Thanks to Aryabhata, we have algebra, algorithms, and binary.” Even the words trace back to translations of Indian texts. And the chain runs unbroken to the present: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics,” he told Zakaria, “and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
III. The Trade That Fed Rome
One of the more surprising arguments in Dalrymple’s book is the claim that the ancient world’s primary trade spine was not the overland Silk Road connecting China to the Mediterranean, but a maritime route running through India — one that both preceded the Silk Road by centuries and operated at a far greater scale.
The evidence is physical. Roman gold coins have been found in concentrations in India and Sri Lanka that have no parallel elsewhere in the world. Pliny was not exaggerating when he complained about Roman wealth flowing eastward. Archaeological evidence from the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike shows habitation by Indian merchants — inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script, Indian pottery, Indian spices — suggesting a permanent community of Indian traders based there.
“Every year,” Dalrymple says, “fleets of hundreds of vessels were leaving the Egyptian coast, going down the Red Sea and arriving in India.” The Romans had no direct contact with China. But they knew India intimately, through the sailors, merchants, and scholars who traversed this maritime corridor.
Dalrymple challenges the “Silk Road” framing directly, arguing it is partly a product of Chinese historiographical ambition — a rebranding of trade history that places China at the centre of ancient globalisation. His counter-claim is that India was the actual hub: the point through which both western and eastern trade flowed, and whose cultural exports went with the goods in both directions.
IV. How the Forgetting Happened
If ancient India’s influence was this large, this documented, and this consequential, the obvious question is: why don’t we know about it? Why do students in Europe and America learn about Greece, Rome, and China as the pillars of ancient civilisation, while India appears in the narrative largely as a destination for British colonialism?
Dalrymple’s answer is layered and honest. He points first to colonialism. The early British orientalists — Sir William Jones, who in 1786 identified the kinship between Sanskrit and the European languages; James Prinsep, who deciphered the Brahmi script and unlocked millennia of Indian inscriptions — were genuinely fascinated by Indian antiquity and treated it with respect.
But the colonial establishment that followed them was not. Thomas Macaulay, the Victorian official who shaped India’s education policy, wrote famously that “a single shelf of good English books is worth more than the whole native library of India and Arabia.” The British, Dalrymple notes drily, could hardly celebrate India’s intellectual heritage while simultaneously claiming to be civilising it. So they didn’t.
The dismissal ran deep into how Indian mathematics was taught — or rather, not taught. Aryabhata and Brahmagupta did not appear in European mathematics curricula the way Pythagoras and Archimedes did, even though their contributions were of at least comparable significance. The decimal number system that Europe adopted in the 13th century, the zero that made calculus and computing possible — these arrived labelled as Arabic rather than Indian, obscuring their true origin one step further.
Post-colonial historiography added its own complications. Southeast Asian nations, emerging from colonial rule after World War II, were in no mood to accept that their foundational cultures had been shaped by what amounted to an earlier Indian cultural expansion.
The word “colonialism,” in their recent experience, meant oppression. They did not want to situate themselves as the legacy of an earlier Indian hegemony, however different its character. So evidence of deep Indian influence was minimised or framed away.
Back in India, Dalrymple argues, textbooks written in the early independence period tended to underplay Hindu and Buddhist historical achievements in the interest of secular, pluralist nation-building — a political choice with real historiographical consequences.
The result is a historical lacuna of extraordinary size: an empire of ideas that stretched from the Red Sea to Japan, sustained for fifteen centuries, and then written out of the story that most of the world tells about where it came from.
V. The Return
Dalrymple is not a nostalgist. He does not write The Golden Road as a lament for a lost golden age or as a brief for any political position. The book has been praised by Foreign Affairs as “a riposte to both right-wing and left-wing historiography in India: right-wing historians make fantastic claims that cloak India’s real and substantial achievements, while those on the left prioritise social history in a way that displaces intellectual achievement. Dalrymple finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.”
The India he recovers is not the India of any contemporary political faction. It is the India of Nalanda — an institution that at its peak housed over 10,000 students from across Asia, offered courses in every subject from mathematics and astronomy to medicine and philosophy, attracted scholars from China, Korea, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, and was, by any measure, the greatest university in the ancient world.
It is the India of Aryabhata, who in 499 CE calculated the Earth’s circumference to within 70 miles of its actual value. It is the India of the merchants who built permanent communities in Roman Egypt and left their pottery and their scripts and their pepper in the ruins.
On the question of India’s future, Dalrymple is direct. He told Zakaria that India will overtake both Japan and Germany within five years and will rank among the top three economies in the world by the century’s end.
The continuity he sees is real: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics, and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
The place-value number system that Aryabhata formalised in Bihar in the 5th century, the zero that Brahmagupta codified in the 7th, the algebra that Arab scholars built from Indian texts in the 9th and transmitted to Europe in the 12th — these are not footnotes to a story about someone else’s civilisation. They are the foundation of every calculation running on every device in the world today.
That foundation was built in India. Dalrymple simply went and found the evidence — and had the temerity, as he says, to give it a name.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.