Key Concepts of the Feminist Approach in Governance

Governance has long been dominated by structures, norms, and institutions designed with a particular kind of person in mind – typically male, from a position of social privilege. The feminist approach to public administration challenges this status quo. It asks a fundamental question: whose experiences and perspectives are shaping the policies that govern everyone? Built on concepts like gender equality, empowerment, intersectionality, and inclusivity, the feminist approach does not simply seek to add women into existing systems. It aims to transform those systems from the inside out, making governance more just, representative, and effective for all.

Gender equality: the foundation of feminist governance 🔗

Gender equality is not merely about equal numbers of men and women in government offices. It is about dismantling the systemic barriers – legal, cultural, economic – that prevent individuals from accessing opportunities, resources, and decision-making power based on their gender.

In the context of public administration, the feminist approach revolves around three key pillars: including women-friendly policies in governance, ensuring women’s participation in administrative roles, and changing the perception of gender issues within administration itself. Of these, transforming institutional perception is arguably the most challenging – and the most important.

The UNDP’s 2021 Global Report on Gender Equality in Public Administration offers a revealing picture: women’s participation in public administration worldwide averages around 46 percent. Yet this number masks deep inequalities. Women are unevenly distributed across government sectors, and are significantly underrepresented in traditionally male-dominated policy areas such as defence, foreign affairs, and finance. Achieving numerical parity is only a starting point – the real task is ensuring that women’s voices carry genuine authority once they are in the room.

Gender equality in governance also has direct economic implications. Research consistently shows that closing gender gaps in labour participation, education, and entrepreneurship boosts productivity and national income. This is why feminist scholars argue that gender equality is not just a social justice goal, but a fundamental precondition for effective governance.

Empowerment: moving beyond representation 🔗

Empowerment is a term often used loosely, but within the feminist approach to governance, it has a precise meaning. Empowerment refers to the process by which individuals – and particularly women – gain the ability to control their own lives, make decisions, and participate fully in civic, economic, and political life.

Empowerment in governance operates at two levels. At the individual level, it means equipping women with education, skills, legal rights, and economic resources. At the structural level, it means reforming the institutions themselves so that they no longer reproduce the conditions of exclusion.

Public leadership research underscores that empowerment goes well beyond equal representation. It must embrace the potential of all leaders, across genders, to become agents of change who challenge gender injustices and institutionalise gender-transformative policies and programmes. In other words, empowerment is not just about who holds a position, but about what they do with it.

Governance mechanisms that support empowerment include legal reforms, awareness campaigns, and dedicated programmes. In India, the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme, launched in 2015, is one such effort – a tri-ministerial initiative designed to address the declining child sex ratio and promote the education and empowerment of girls across the country. The scheme has prompted a shift in social attitudes in several states, though critics have also noted that fund utilisation and on-ground implementation need strengthening for it to achieve its full potential.

Beyond government schemes, empowerment also requires changing societal attitudes – reducing gender-based violence, reforming laws that discriminate against women, and building community awareness programmes that shift entrenched cultural norms.

Intersectionality: understanding layered identities 🔗

One of the most intellectually significant contributions of the feminist approach to governance is the concept of intersectionality. The term was formally introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, as a framework to understand how different systems of power – related to race, gender, class, and other identities – collide and compound each other to produce unique forms of discrimination and privilege.

As Crenshaw herself explained, intersectionality is not simply the observation that there are separate problems of race, gender, and class. It is the recognition that these forces interlock, and that any framework addressing only one of them will erase the experiences of people who are subject to all of them simultaneously.

Encyclopædia Britannica describes intersectionality as an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ social and political identities produce unique combinations of discrimination and privilege – covering dimensions such as gender, caste, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, and age.

Intersectionality in the Indian context 🔗

In India, the intersection of caste and gender creates some of the most acute forms of social marginalization experienced anywhere in the world. As scholars of Indian feminism note, a Dalit woman does not experience gender discrimination and caste discrimination as two separate problems. She experiences them as a single, fused reality – a reality that mainstream feminist or Dalit movements, when operating in silos, have often failed to adequately address.

This insight has deep historical roots. Savitribai Phule, often recognised as India’s first female teacher, was practising the spirit of intersectionality in 19th-century Maharashtra long before the term existed. By fighting simultaneously against caste oppression and gender exclusion, she demonstrated that these struggles could not be separated.

Scholar Gopal Guru’s landmark 1995 essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” published in the Economic and Political Weekly, brought this argument into academic discourse explicitly – arguing that Dalit women, because of their position at the intersection of caste and gender oppression, possess unique voices that are essential to understanding social reality.

For governance, the implications of intersectionality are practical and far-reaching. The Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability argues that the adoption of an intersectional approach, particularly in formulating laws and policies, addresses structural gaps and paves the path to achieving substantive equality and redistributive justice. Affirmative action programmes that consider both gender and caste, for instance, can more effectively reach those who are most marginalised, rather than benefiting only those at the top of the social hierarchy within each category.

The UNDP’s gender equality report also highlights intersectionality as a critical lens for governance, covering the experiences of women with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and those facing discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or age. However, it notes that intersectional data in public administration remains particularly scarce globally – a gap that itself reflects how marginalized these groups remain within policy thinking.

Inclusivity: designing governance for everyone 🔗

Inclusivity is the operational expression of the feminist approach. If gender equality is the goal and empowerment is the process, inclusivity is the design principle that ensures governance structures and processes actually work for people with diverse and intersecting identities.

An inclusive approach to governance means more than opening the doors of public institutions to women. It means actively examining how administrative structures, policy assumptions, and bureaucratic cultures might exclude or disadvantage certain groups – and then reforming them. The feminist approach examines how administrative policies reinforce gender disparities and treat women and men differently and unequally – what scholars call the “governance of gender” – and then works to dismantle those mechanisms.

Gender-responsive budgeting as a tool for inclusivity 🔗

One of the most concrete tools for achieving inclusivity in governance is gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). This is a public financial management approach that integrates gender perspectives into budgetary processes – not by creating a separate budget for women, but by ensuring that all public expenditure is planned and monitored with gender equality in mind.

India introduced its first gender budget in 2005-06, responding to long-standing demands from feminist economists and women’s groups. By the 2025-26 Union Budget, the Gender Budget accounted for 8.8 percent of total expenditure – the highest allocation in two decades, representing a significant increase from 6.8 percent the previous year.

Gender Budget Cells (GBCs) have been established across ministries and departments to institutionalise gender-responsive planning. This shift represents the feminist principle in action: using the machinery of the state not just to deliver services, but to actively address the structural causes of inequality through financial accountability.

Inclusive leadership and institutional culture 🔗

Inclusivity also requires changing the culture within public institutions. Training programmes for public administrators that focus on unconscious bias, intersectionality, and participatory governance can equip leaders with the skills needed to create more equitable systems. Research on feminist leadership in public health demonstrates that effective gender-transformative governance requires leaders who see themselves as agents of social change – not just administrators of existing rules.

This is a significant shift from the traditional Weberian model of bureaucracy, which emphasised hierarchy, neutrality, and standardised procedures. The feminist critique of bureaucracy argues that such structures are not neutral at all – they embed particular assumptions about authority, rationality, and decision-making that have historically reflected the perspectives of a narrow social group. Inclusive governance, by contrast, values diverse leadership styles, participatory decision-making, and the integration of lived experience into policy design.

Making women’s experiences visible in the public sphere 🔗

A recurring theme across all the key concepts of the feminist approach is the demand to make women’s experiences visible. This is not simply a call for representation, but for a fundamental reorientation of what counts as knowledge, whose concerns are treated as public concerns, and which issues are placed on the policy agenda.

For much of the history of public administration, issues that predominantly affected women – domestic violence, reproductive rights, unpaid care work, gender-based discrimination in employment – were treated as private matters outside the scope of governance. The feminist approach insists that these are deeply public issues, with significant implications for social justice and economic development.

The Handbook of Feminist Governance, which brings together leading feminist scholars working at national, regional, and international levels, documents how feminist governance initiatives across diverse institutional contexts have worked to shift this understanding. From specialised parliamentary bodies on gender equality to women’s commissions with investigative powers, these mechanisms attempt to institutionalise the feminist commitment to making women’s experiences central to governance – rather than an afterthought.

The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action gave international momentum to this effort, urging governments to establish dedicated administrations charged with advancing women’s rights. While implementation has been uneven – with some entities becoming underfunded and under-powered – the principle of institutionalising feminist concerns within the state has become an important part of global governance discourse.

Transforming public administration: from principles to practice 🔗

The four concepts – gender equality, empowerment, intersectionality, and inclusivity – are not independent silos. They are deeply interconnected, and effective feminist governance requires addressing all of them together. A policy that promotes gender equality without an intersectional lens may end up serving only the most socially advantaged women. A programme that empowers women without reforming institutional culture may simply add women to systems that continue to disadvantage them.

True transformation, as the feminist approach envisions it, means dismantling the patriarchal structures embedded in administrative systems and replacing them with frameworks that are genuinely responsive to the diversity of human experience. This involves policy reforms that institutionalise feminist principles, accountability mechanisms to ensure compliance, and a sustained shift in the culture of governance itself.

The journey is far from complete – in India and globally. Women remain underrepresented in senior administrative roles, gender-based violence continues to be under-addressed, and intersectional data to inform policy remains insufficient. But the feminist approach gives governance a clear direction: towards systems that do not simply tolerate diversity, but are actively designed to serve it.

What do you think? If intersectionality requires governance systems to recognise and address the compounded disadvantages faced by groups like Dalit women or women with disabilities, what institutional changes would be most essential – and which of these do you think current policy frameworks are best equipped to deliver? Are there other social identities, beyond gender and caste, that you feel are consistently overlooked in how public policy is designed?

References

1. https://www.studyshipwithkrati.com/post/unit-4-gender-perspectives-on-public-administration-notes-ppa
2. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2021-12/UNDP-UPitt-2021-Gender-Equality-in-Public-Administration-EN3.pdf
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9803695/
4. https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/government_tr_rec/beti-bachao-beti-padhao-caring-for-the-girl-child/
5. https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later
6. https://www.britannica.com/topic/intersectionality
7. https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-gender/intersectionality-caste-class-gender-india/
8. https://www.cbgaindia.org/blog/deconstructing-gender-intersectional-identities/
9. https://inclusiveias.com/gender-budgeting-upsc/
10. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/handbook-of-feminist-governance-9781800374805.html