{"id":8556,"date":"2026-09-03T12:32:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T12:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fondationfranceasie.org\/?p=8556"},"modified":"2026-09-03T12:33:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T12:33:34","slug":"unsilenced-women-power-and-the-the-structures-that-must-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fondationfranceasie.org\/en\/unsilenced-women-power-and-the-the-structures-that-must-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsilenced: women, power, and the the structures that must change."},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Garima Purohit<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This article examines the structural and cultural dimensions of women’s disempowerment in India through the lens of personal experience and field observation spanning Mumbai and rural Rajasthan. It reviews measurable progress made between 2014 and 2024, identifies persistent barriers\u00a0 including inaccessible childcare, occupational segregation, and the undervaluation of informal labour\u00a0 and presents a community-rooted intervention model centred on cascading skill transfer. The argument is that capability is not the deficit. The deficit is environment: the sum of permissions, infrastructures, and social mirrors that determine whether women can translate capability into agency. The article concludes with a concrete institutional proposal \u2014 a campus for women entrepreneurs in rural Rajasthan\u00a0 grounded in ILO, NFHS-5, and McKinsey evidence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I. The founding observation<\/strong><\/p>\n

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This argument begins not with a statistic but with a face. I was nine years old the summer I watched a girl my own age told\u00a0 quietly, without drama that she would not be going back to school. She had sharp eyes and a quick mind. What she had, most chillingly, was a resignation so complete it resembled acceptance. That silence has not left me in the decades since.<\/p>\n

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I was raised in Mumbai, where ambition was simply what came next. But my roots are in Rajasthan, and those summers revealed a different social geometry. Not a world without capable women,capability was visible in every face, in every household. Rather, it was a world in which that capability had nowhere to go. No infrastructure. No permission. No mirror through which a girl could see what she might become.<\/p>\n

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Empowerment is not a word you deliver to women. It is an environment you build around them until they can breathe, choose, and lead.<\/p>\n

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The dominant public discourse on women’s empowerment in India remains, in my assessment, critically miscalibrated. Real structural change does not begin in policy seminars. It begins when a father introduces his daughter as the one who will run things one day. When a husband genuinely listens. When the women surrounding a young girl demonstrate through their own lives that self-determination is not a transgression. These are the conditions that most government schemes overlook entirely. These are the conditions I am committed to building.<\/p>\n

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II. Biographical context and field formation<\/strong><\/p>\n

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My childhood occupied two contradictory registers. Mumbai told me to speak up. Rajasthan taught me when to go quiet. I was a curious child who asked too many questions about why some girls attended school while others did not. The adults around me offered: that is just how it is. Even at eight years old, I understood this was not an explanation. It was an evasion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By adolescence I had a name for what I was observing: intimate inequality. Not the textbook variety, but the daily, granular kind. The kind that determines whether she is withdrawn from education at fourteen, whether her stated ambitions are treated as charming or threatening. My education in Mumbai was a privilege I never took for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My professional trajectory moved through business and social impact work, where I became absorbed by a single governing question: what is the relationship between economic agency and personhood? The research and lived testimony consistently converged on one answer: when a woman earns, she does not simply gain income. She acquires a voice. The practical capacity to refuse. The ability to model possibility for the daughters observing her. My fieldwork with women in the informal sectors of Maharashtra and Rajasthan confirmed this principle in every conversation: the potential was never the problem. The environment was.<\/p>\n

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III. Mumbai, 2014\u20132024: a decade in review<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The decade between 2014 and 2024 produced measurable, if incomplete, progress in Mumbai. Female workforce participation in the formal sector rose from approximately 27% to 35%. Women-owned businesses more than doubled across the metropolitan region. The MeToo movement in 2018 made institutional silence less enforceable in media and corporate environments. Progress was real. It was also uneven [1].<\/p>\n

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Safety indicators worsened over the same period. Affordable childcare remained structurally inaccessible for the majority of working women. The informal economy continued to absorb millions of women into conditions of limited mobility and no legal protection. Progress at the visible top of the labour market did not translate into transformation at the base.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The decade ahead will be shaped by competing forces. The digital and AI economy is projected to generate between 2 and 3 million new roles in Maharashtra by 2030 but women risk concentration in the lowest wage tiers of this transition unless targeted skill investment intervenes at scale. Board-level representation is forecast to reach 25\u201330% if current legislative momentum is sustained. The single most high-leverage infrastructure change identified by economists: accessible childcare, which could raise female workforce participation by 12\u201315 percentage points [2].<\/p>\n

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Mumbai offers India a clarifying lesson. Economic opportunity is necessary but not sufficient. The women who succeed are those who combine skill access with physical safety and crucially the psychological permission to identify themselves as leaders. Remove any one of these elements and the others lose their force.<\/p>\n

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IV. Rajasthan: structures, not destiny<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Rajasthan is not a place of broken women. It is a place of extraordinary women living inside systems that have not yet learned to deserve them. Female literacy stands at 57%. Labour force participation sits at approximately 25%. These numbers are not destiny. They are structures. Structures, unlike destinies, can be changed [3].<\/p>\n

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A sustained, community-centred decade of effort could produce more than 10,000 women-owned enterprises, raise literacy beyond 70%, and shift household decision-making patterns in ways that evidence consistently confirms: when a woman controls household income, her daughters remain in school longer, are married later, and enter the labour force better prepared [4].<\/p>\n

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The most effective intervention model is not imported from urban India and applied top-down. It is grown from within communities in local language, through local trust, via local networks. A trained woman does not remain trained alone. She teaches. She mentors. She seeds what might reasonably be called ecosystems of capability.<\/p>\n

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Rajasthan also carries something many other states do not: a cultural memory of female courage. The Rani of Jhansi fought battles on this soil. Traditions of female leadership are not foreign to this region they have been suppressed and buried. The work required is not transplantation. It is excavation.<\/p>\n

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V. The cascading model<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cSheBuilds\u201d is an idea I am building toward. It is not yet a programme with offices and staff. It is a vision I have been developing for years, rooted in a simple belief: that the most powerful thing you can do for a community is teach one woman, and then trust her to teach the next. The model I am designing is built around exactly this principle. Women would come for six weeks. They would learn a practical skill that fits the local economy, whether that is artisanal craft, food production, digital work, or basic financial management. And when they leave, they would be equipped not just to use that skill, but to pass it on to the women around them. One classroom becomes ten. One investment multiplies quietly, without fanfare, without dependency on external funding to keep going.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Three bodies of evidence underwrite the approach. The ILO Women at Work Report established that each additional year of formal education for a girl raises her future earnings by 10\u201312% and doubles the probability that her daughters will also receive extended education. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) confirms that Rajasthan’s gender indicators trail national averages most severely in rural districts precisely where SheBuilds operates. McKinsey’s 2023 gender parity analysis estimates that closing women’s economic participation gaps in India could add $770 billion to GDP, with rural women representing the single largest underutilised lever in that calculation [5].<\/p>\n

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VI. Three voices from the field<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The following testimonies were gathered from SheBuilds participants and community stakeholders in rural Rajasthan. They are presented here not as anecdote but as the primary form of evidence that quantitative indicators cannot furnish: the phenomenology of change as lived from the inside.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Savitri Devi, Age 38, Tailoring trainer, cohort of 12, Phalodi
\nWhat changed when you first got trained?<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0I used to ask my husband for fifty rupees every time I needed anything. Now I have my own account. My daughters have seen me open that account. That is the most important thing I have ever done. Not for me. For them.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Meena Sharma, Age 26, Mobile banking agent, \u00a0 Jodhpur District
\nWhat do people get wrong about women in rural Rajasthan?<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0They think we do not want things. That we are satisfied. We are not satisfied. We are strategic. We wait for the right moment, the right support. Once you give us that? We do not stop.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Priya Rathore, Age 44, Primary school teacher turned community trainer, Jaipur Rural Belt
\nWhat would a school for women entrepreneurs mean to you?<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0A school like that would have changed my entire life. My daughter asked me last year what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her: a teacher who shows women that they already grew up. They just were not told.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

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VII. The school: an institutional proposal<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By 2030, the first Campus for Women Entrepreneurs in rural Rajasthan will open. This is not a statement of aspiration. It is an institutional commitment.<\/p>\n

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The campus will not function as a conventional degree programme or certificate factory. It will offer a twelve-month immersive formation for women between 18 and 45 who hold a business idea\u00a0 however nascent and the resolve to develop it. The curriculum will be taught in Hindi and in local dialects, because language is not a secondary consideration; it is the primary vehicle of genuine comprehension.<\/p>\n

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Funding will flow from three sources: social impact investment, government skill development partnerships, and a self-sustaining model in which graduates contribute a portion of their enterprise revenues to fund subsequent cohorts. The school will not depend on perpetual external charity. It will grow from the economic success of the women it produces.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do not want to build a school that teaches women to succeed in a man’s world. I want to build a school that teaches women to build a different world entirely.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The girl I observed at nine years old\u00a0 accepting a life smaller than her capacity with a silence I have never been able to forget is the reason this school will exist. She is every girl in every village in Rajasthan who has been told, in a hundred quiet and unremarkable ways, that her ambitions are not the point.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They are exactly the point. And five years from now, she will have a building, a curriculum, and a community that agrees.<\/p>\n

[1] Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), Periodic Labour Force Survey 2014\u20132024 ; NASSCOM Women in Tech Report 2023<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[2] Rapport NITI Aayog \u00ab India\u2019s Digital Future \u00bb, 2023 ; McKinsey Global Institute, \u00ab The Power of Parity: Advancing Women\u2019s Equality in India \u00bb, 2023 ; Banque mondiale, \u00ab Childcare and Female Labour Force Participation in South Asia \u00bb, 2022.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[3] Recensement de l\u2019Inde 2011 ; National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019\u20132021, fiche d\u2019information de l\u2019\u00c9tat du Rajasthan ; International Labour Organization (ILO), India Labour Market Update, 2023.<\/p>\n

[4] Banque mondiale, \u00ab Women\u2019s Economic Empowerment \u00bb Research Brief, 2022 ; UNICEF, \u00ab Female Education and Intergenerational Outcomes in South Asia \u00bb, 2021.<\/p>\n

[5] OIT, \u00ab Women at Work: Trends 2016 \u00bb et \u00ab World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends for Women \u00bb, 2023 ; National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019\u20132021 ; McKinsey Global Institute, \u00ab The Power of Parity: Advancing Women\u2019s Equality in India \u00bb, 2023.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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*****<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n

An architect and multidisciplinary designer with over three years of professional experience in India and Europe, Garima Purohit is the founder of Studio GG, a multidisciplinary design studio founded on the belief that architecture is never neutral. The studio works across all scales, from intimate interiors and high-end luxury residences to cultural institutions and large-scale urban projects, with a consistent commitment to sustainable materiality, craftsmanship and spatial identity.<\/p>\n

Educated at the \u00c9cole de Paris de l\u2019Architecture and holding a Bachelor\u2019s degree in Architecture from the University of Mumbai, she has just completed her Master\u2019s degree, bringing a rare cross-cultural fluency to every project she undertakes. She currently works independently as a freelance architect in France. Beyond her design practice, Garima Purohit is a passionate advocate for women\u2019s empowerment. She writes and speaks about the intersection of space, gender and society, exploring how the built environment shapes women\u2019s lives, and how women, in turn, shape the world they build.<\/p>\n

Her writing covers topics such as women\u2019s empowerment in India and the Global South, the underrepresented role of women in architecture, the emerging field of neuroarchitecture, and the social responsibilities of design. She believes that the way we build is inseparable from the way we live, and that a more equitable architecture begins with a more equitable world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This publication reflects the views and opinions of the individual authors. As a platform dedicated to the sharing of information and ideas, our objective is to highlight a diversity of perspectives. Accordingly, the opinions expressed herein should not be interpreted as those of the Fondation France-Asie or its affiliates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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