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On paper, the BRICS Women’s Ministerial Declaration identifies the right priorities: women’s inclusion in leadership roles, higher economic participation and outcomes, entrepreneurship, STEM, digital and financial inclusion, etc. In fact, the two deliverables in the 4th BRICS Women Ministerial Meeting have been laid out as:

BRICS Women Digital Repository of Best Practices, a shared knowledge platform documenting best practices and experiences from BRICS Countries; and

BRICS Women Digital Capacity Building Guidelines, a roadmap for expanding institutional partnerships, digital learning and capacity-building across the BRICS community. 

Digital inclusion, entrepreneurship, leadership, capacity building, and knowledge sharing are surely worthy ambitions. Yet, some of the most urgent questions around women’s empowerment, the very questions that determine women’s position and ability to participate in the economy with dignity and agency, were strikingly missing from both the discussion and the discourse of the BRICS Women’s Ministerial Meeting.

Where were the discussions on women’s actual participation in the labour force? Where was the discussion on the unpaid and underpaid care and domestic work that continues to define women’s relationship with the economy? The discourse on disproportionate child and elder care burden, lack of social and economic infrastructure, including public services and social protections paradigms to protect women? Missing.

In her recent article following this meeting, the minister of women and child development, Annpurna Devi writes, “Numbers track the shift. India’s female labour force participation has risen from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24.” India’s female labour force participation has improved in recent years, but it continues to lag behind several countries, including BRICS members China, Brazil and Russia. If one is to consider female labour force participation a marker of women’s improved........

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