What does Gender Empowerment Focus Upon?

1. Gender empowerment aims to achieve equality in economic and political opportunities and participations in decision making process. The gender empowerment also takes into consideration the percentage of women in the parliament, state legislatures, senior officers and managers and among professional and technical workers.

(a) Women are the focus of all development. Any sustainable change towards progress needs involvement of women. There is great variation across the world in empowering women even in developed industrial countries.

(b) In India women have been recognised as a separate target group since 1980s in our developmental planning for raising their status at par with that of men.

(c) The National Commission for Women was set up in January 1992. Besides constitutional safeguards initiatives in the areas of capacity building, employment and income generation, welfare and support services and gender sensitisation have national policy for empowerment of women 2001.

(d) Initiative effort to introduce a bill in the Parliament for reservation of 33% seats for women in the Lok Sabha.