The Concept and Importance of Gender Budgeting in Government Policies

Every rupee a government spends tells a story about whose needs matter. For decades, public budgets were drafted as if citizens were a single, undifferentiated group – but that assumption quietly disadvantaged half the population. Gender budgeting is the fiscal correction to that blind spot, a process that asks a simple yet powerful question of every allocation: does this spending benefit women and men equally, and if not, what must change?

What is gender budgeting? 🔗

Gender budgeting is not a separate budget for women. It is a strategy that embeds a gender lens across the entire fiscal cycle – from planning and allocation to implementation and evaluation. It examines government revenues and expenditures to determine whether they reinforce existing gender gaps or help close them.

According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, gender budgeting is a continuous process of integrating a gender perspective in policy formulation, implementation and review, built around budget analysis, commitment to equality, and resource allocation that reflects that commitment. The goal is a budget that works for everyone – women, men, girls and boys – by ensuring equitable distribution of public resources.

UN Women frames it even more sharply: current economic models can produce fiscal policies that are unintentionally biased by ignoring women’s specific needs, producing budgets that appear neutral but in practice deliver unequal outcomes. A striking example cited by UN Women is the global value of unpaid care and domestic work by women aged 15 and over, estimated at roughly USD 10.8 trillion annually – three times the size of the world’s tech industry – yet largely invisible in conventional fiscal accounting.

Why gender-neutral budgets are rarely neutral 🔗

The central insight of gender budgeting is that fiscal policy is never truly gender-blind. A highway project, an agricultural subsidy, or a tax reform all land differently on men and women because they begin their day with different resources, responsibilities and constraints. Brookings researchers note that policies once considered gender neutral were, on closer inspection, not neutral at all.

Consider a rural road-building programme. On paper, it benefits everyone in the village. In practice, if design choices ignore safety concerns at night, or fail to connect to health centres that women use more frequently, the scheme delivers lopsided benefits. Gender budgeting surfaces these distributional effects before funds are committed, not after outcomes have diverged.

From rhetoric to resources 🔗

Governments routinely commit to gender equality in policy documents. Gender budgeting asks whether money follows the promise. As the Centre for Public Policy Research observes, budget documents ultimately reveal a government’s priorities more honestly than any speech. By tracking where funds come from and where they go, gender budgeting converts declarations into measurable, auditable spending decisions.

How gender budgeting is practised in India 🔗

India institutionalised gender budgeting in the Union Budget of 2005-06, making it one of the earlier adopters in the developing world. The framework was anchored in the National Policy for Empowerment of Women (2001) and operationalised through a dedicated Gender Budget Statement (GBS) published annually with the Union Budget.

The Press Information Bureau notes that the share of the Gender Budget in the total Union Budget rose to 8.86% in FY 2025-26 from 5.46% in 2014-15, with an outlay of ₹4.49 lakh crore – the largest gender budget allocation in the country’s history. Forty-nine ministries and departments plus five Union Territories reported gender-specific allocations that year, the highest since the GBS began.

The three-part structure of the Gender Budget Statement 🔗

The GBS organises spending into three parts to reflect how directly a scheme benefits women and girls. As summarised by the Expenditure Profile of the Union Budget, Part A covers schemes with 100% provision for women and girls, Part B covers schemes with 30-99% allocation, and Part C covers schemes with less than 30%. Part C was introduced in 2024-25 to capture schemes where women benefit indirectly, giving a fuller picture of pro-women spending.

Major schemes routed through the GBS include Mission Shakti (covering women’s safety under Sambal and empowerment under Samarthya), Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, Samagra Shiksha, and the MGNREGS, among others.

Gender Budgeting Cells 🔗

Institutional machinery matters as much as allocations. The Ministry of Finance mandated the setting up of Gender Budgeting Cells (GBCs) across central ministries and departments to coordinate gender analysis, propose allocations, and monitor outcomes. States such as Kerala have set up their own cells as crucial oversight mechanisms that promote gender equality in healthcare policies and resource allocations. A Gender Budgeting Knowledge Hub was also launched by the MWCD to serve as a centralised repository for policies, data and training material.

The importance of gender budgeting 🔗

The case for gender budgeting rests on four interlocking arguments – constitutional, economic, developmental and democratic.

Upholding constitutional equality 🔗

The Constitution guarantees equality and empowers the State to take affirmative action in favour of women through Articles 14, 15 and 16. Gender budgeting operationalises these commitments in the most tangible form available to any government – its chequebook. Without gender-responsive allocations, constitutional guarantees risk remaining abstract principles rather than lived realities.

Closing gender gaps in outcomes 🔗

Gender gaps in employment, health, education, nutrition and digital access persist despite decades of policy effort. The Observer Research Foundation notes that although women make up over 40% of STEM graduates, only around 14% are employed in STEM roles, highlighting a persistent “leaky pipeline” that targeted budgeting can help fix. By directing resources to the points where women face the steepest disadvantages – safety, childcare, skilling, credit access – gender budgeting converts diagnosis into redress.

Economic efficiency, not just equity 🔗

Gender budgeting is increasingly framed as smart macroeconomics, not charity. Brookings argues that investing in care infrastructure – childcare centres, eldercare facilities – should be treated as macroeconomic policy that boosts aggregate demand and labour supply, not as welfare spending. When women enter the workforce in larger numbers, GDP expands, tax bases deepen, and household incomes rise.

Transparency and accountability 🔗

A published GBS allows legislators, civil society and journalists to “follow the money.” UN Women highlights that annual gender budget statements let stakeholders assess whether budgets actually deliver on policy commitments. This transparency is itself a democratic gain: citizens get a clearer picture of what their government truly prioritises.

How gender budgeting works in practice 🔗

Behind the statements and allocations lies a structured analytical process. It typically unfolds in four stages.

Step 1: Diagnose gender gaps 🔗

The first step is identifying where women and girls face the largest disadvantages – whether in literacy, maternal health, labour force participation, or access to credit. Reliable sex-disaggregated data, drawn from sources like the National Family Health Survey and the Periodic Labour Force Survey, is indispensable. Without it, budgeting proceeds in the dark.

Step 2: Align policies and allocations 🔗

Once gaps are mapped, ministries redesign schemes or create new ones to address them, and the Ministry of Finance ensures sufficient resources are earmarked. This is where the Gender Budget Statement becomes a coordination tool, forcing every reporting ministry to articulate how its spending touches women’s lives.

Step 3: Implement with a gender lens 🔗

Allocation alone is not enough. Implementation must ensure that women can actually access entitlements – for instance, by designing banking correspondents who can reach women in purdah, or by issuing housing titles jointly in the names of husband and wife. PMAY-G’s design, which prioritises women’s ownership of homes, illustrates this intent, though only about 23% of houses have actually been allotted in women’s names despite being classified under Part A, showing the gap between design and delivery.

Step 4: Monitor and evaluate outcomes 🔗

Good gender budgeting measures impact, not just expenditure. This means moving from input-based tracking (how much was spent) to outcome-based assessment (how much changed). Strengthening this monitoring layer is a continuing priority for India’s Gender Budgeting Cells.

Challenges that remain 🔗

For all its progress, gender budgeting in India faces real limitations. Analysts have pointed to over-reporting by some schemes and under-reporting by others, including MGNREGA, where women contribute roughly 59% of person-days but only a third of the scheme’s budget is captured in the GBS. Concentration of gender allocations in a handful of large schemes, weak outcome metrics, and uneven adoption at the state level further limit effectiveness.

The way forward, as suggested by multiple policy researchers, lies in strengthening Gender Budgeting Cells with trained personnel, mandating outcome assessments, expanding Part C coverage, and embedding gender budgeting in legal frameworks so that it survives changes in political priorities.

A global movement 🔗

Gender budgeting is not an Indian innovation alone. Australia introduced the world’s first Women’s Budget Statement in the 1980s, and today more than 80 countries have received UN Women support in designing and implementing gender-responsive budgets. The Sustainable Development Goals include a specific indicator under Goal 5 that measures whether governments have systems to track public allocations for gender equality, making gender budgeting a globally recognised yardstick of fiscal good governance.

What do you think? If a government’s budget is the clearest statement of its values, what do you think the size and design of the current gender budget reveals about the priorities of the state – and which single reform would make that spending most meaningful for women on the ground?

References

1. https://missionshakti.wcd.gov.in/gender-budgeting/about
2. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/what-is-gender-responsive-budgeting
3. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/embedding-gender-equality-in-indias-fiscal-framework-the-role-of-gender-budgeting/
4. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/women-poverty-economics/gender-responsive-budgeting
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2098912
6. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/doc/eb/stat13.pdf
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11504825/
8. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/budget-2025-26-and-women-s-empowerment-is-india-meeting-its-gender-goals
9. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/gender-budget-2025-26
10. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/gender-budget-statement-2024-2025/