Government policies and resourcing alongside private sector investments have been instrumental in narrowing these systemic gender gaps. Persistent investments in systems, legislation, and programmes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, reservation for women in panchayats, and the National Rural Health Mission have created frameworks for advancing women's health, education, and leadership opportunities.

However, significant challenges persist in closing stubborn gender gaps on women’s access to economic resources and asset building opportunities. As indicated by the 2024 Periodic Labour Force Survey Report, India's female labour force participation rate is still at 41.7%. Further, only 14% of Indian entrepreneurs are women and as compared to men, women-led businesses face significant challenges in accessing finance, markets, and technology solutions to sustain and grow. Women founders received a mere 0.3% of all venture capital investments in India during 2021 and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) owned by women face a credit gap of $ 158 billion.

Available evidence points to a number of systemic biases and barriers that impact Indian women’s access to resources and agency to make decisions. These include a lack of targeted, affordable, and accessible care and healthcare solutions, access to quality jobs, career growth, and leadership opportunities, and gender pay gaps in the workplace, and safety and security of women in homes, workplaces, and public spaces.

Applying a gender lens across all types of investments, whether private or public funding, presents a key opportunity to address these systematic biases embedded in markets, society, and institutions that limit women's access to opportunities, rights, resources, and assets.

Globally, there is clear evidence on the economic, investment, and social case for investing with a gender lens. For instance, if women and men participated equally as entrepreneurs, global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could increase by 3–6%, adding between $ 2.5 and $ 5 trillion to the world economy. Gender diverse businesses, that is businesses that balance men and women in their workforce and in leadership roles earn higher returns than their non-diverse peers. Investing in gender equality outcomes is also good for improving social cohesion as evidence suggests that it is an essential ingredient in preventing conflicts and creating more stable and peaceful societies.

Gender lens investing (GLI), or the intentional allocation of capital to gender outcomes, presents an enormous opportunity to both create value for investors and to close gender gaps that continue to persist in our systems.

For private investors, GLI is widely understood as an approach that considers gender factors in investment processes to improve gender equality outcomes. It enables investors to seek both financial returns and deliberate, positive gender impacts by focusing on gender inclusion & leadership within their organisations, their investment processes, their women customers’ specific needs, and by influencing the value chains they are part of.

In addition to their ability to shift markets and institutions through regulation and legislation, governments are often the large asset owners in countries. They hold significant power to close gender gaps through public investments over the long term through gender responsive budgeting. Gender budgeting involves a gender-based assessment of budgets and restructuring revenues and expenditures to achieve gender equality goals. India’s Union governments have considered gender-based budgeting since 2004-05 and in recent years, this approach has been adopted by several states as well. The pace of uptake of this approach has shown an upward trend but remains low--in FY 2025-26, the share of gender budget allocation in the Union budget, increased to 8.86% from 6.8% in the previous year. This is a key resource gap that needs to be addressed to achieve the targets set under the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030, including on gender equality.

Applying a gender lens to philanthropic funding is a key way of deepening positive social change. Philanthropic giving in India has grown steadily over the last 5 years and is estimated to be $ 300 billion or 8.3% of the GDP in 2024 financial year. As philanthropic funding has often been a catalytic source of capital to support leadership, innovative solutions, and access to entitlements and resources, applying gender lens to this resource pool represents an unprecedented opportunity to close gender gaps meaningfully and intentionally. At AVPN, we have seen the possibility and promise of philanthropy in tackling gender gaps first hand. For instance, in just one year, over 2022-23, members of our Asia Gender Network, composed of leading women philanthropists in India and the region, mobilised over $ 9 million to close gender gaps in their local contexts by adopting principles for giving with a gender lens.

In conclusion, as India grapples with increasing geopolitical, climate, and economic uncertainties, all investors will need to bring their wallets to the table with the gender lens. Ignoring the specific needs of one half of India’s population, at best risks leaving money and impact on the table and at worst, risks making investments ineffective in the long-term. It is never too late to step up with a gender lens and the right opportunity is always now.

This article is authored by Seema Bhatia Panthaki, director, Gender Equality Platform, AVPN.