Throughout this week, I4I has been sharing some of the latest evidence and ideas around women’s empowerment to mark International Women’s Day 2025. Discover the five-part series, and more about I4I’s gender-focused research, in this post.

The theme of International Women’s Day 2025 calls for action for all girls and women - focusing on advancements in gender equality through encouraging women’s progress in education and employment. 

Promoting women’s social and economic progress - particularly in a developing-country context such as India - comes with significant challenges. A previous I4I synthesis blog (Mujumdar 2024) outlines the social norms that hold women back, including women’s household responsibilities, concerns around mobility and safety, and labour market structures which prefer the hiring of men (see Buchmann et al. 2024) for one such case in Bangladesh).

Nevertheless, recent research has shown that steps taken in the right direction can make a positive difference - for example, Nandwani and Roychowdhury (2024) find that improved road connectivity to market towns increases female enrolment in education institutes, and Bhukta et al. (2024) demonstrate that community electrification can contribute to reducing violence against women, and increase women's mobility and participation in household decision-making. Ho, Jalota and Karandikar (2024) highlight how flexible work arrangements can raise women’s take-up of jobs; while research by Sahay et al. (2024) also suggests that higher shares of women in corporate leadership can lead to better economic performance for firms. Such evidence can be used to inform policy decisions that aim to increase women’s empowerment and change gender norms, leading to broader social impacts and narrowing of gender gaps.

Throughout the week, I4I has been sharing Articles, Perspectives, and Notes from the Field, bringing together some of the latest evidence and ideas around women’s empowerment to mark International Women’s Day.

The first article, by Aakash Dev and Ratna Sahay, looks at how policy measures around formalising part-time employment, paid parental leave and public investment in childcare infrastructure to ensure gender equality in caregiving, could enable women’s economic participation.

The next, by Nishant and Archana Singh, brought together insights from a survey of female passengers utilising the fare-free bus travel scheme in Delhi, and highlights how such a scheme could have benefits ranging from increase confidence to greater savings for women, while also underscoring the need for further efforts to make transport more gender-sensitive. 

In the context of rural Bangladesh, Tanu Gupta, Md. Tajuddin Khan and Digvijay Singh Negi reveal how reliable electricity access - if complemented by policies that address structural barriers and promote inclusivity - can increase women’s access to time-saving technologies, thereby reducing the burden of domestic work and boosting their potential for labour force participation.

Sugat Chaturvedi, Kanika Mahajan and Zahra Siddique investigate how the wording of job advertisements contributes to gender disparities in the labour market. Their findings reveal how implicit gender associations in job descriptions, together with explicit preferences, may discourage women from applying for higher-paying jobs, leading to lower earnings than men with the same qualifications.

Finally, Nishith Prakash and co-authors built on the findings of a previous study (Muralidharan and Prakash 2013) to discuss the immediate and long-term impacts of programmes in Bihar and Zambia, which aimed to reduce gender gaps in education by providing girls with bicycles to commute to school. Their findings underlined the complexity of female interventions, and the need to tailor responses to different socio-cultural contexts to break systemic barriers to education and empowerment.