India-EU FTA: Why Gender Still Remains Missing from India’s Trade Policy

The conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) on the 27th of January 2026 has been hailed as a landmark moment in India’s trade diplomacy.

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the agreement as the “Mother of all deals”, underscoring its strategic and economic significance.

Yet, beneath the optimism surrounding tariff reductions, market access, and investment flows, a critical question remains largely unaddressed: do Indian women meaningfully feature in these trade agreements?

For decades, trade, globalisation, and FTAs have been framed as gender-neutral economic instruments, despite operating within labour markets and production systems that are deeply gendered—particularly in developing economies like India. As India rapidly expands its FTA footprint, reassessing the gender–trade nexus has become both timely and necessary.

Why Gender Matters in Trade Policy

Trade Liberalisation and the Illusion of Neutrality

Since the late twentieth century, trade liberalisation has been a central pillar of India’s development strategy and that of much of the Global South. In mainstream policy discourse, trade has often been treated as a technical exercise—focused on tariffs, competitiveness, and market access—while its social outcomes were expected to follow indirectly through economic growth.

This approach, however, overlooks one of the defining features of developing economies: their deeply gendered economic structures. Women and men do not participate in markets from equal starting points.

Women face systematic disadvantages in access to land, finance, skills, technology, time, mobility, and market information. They are disproportionately concentrated in informal employment, unpaid family work, and low-productivity activities, while remaining underrepresented in firm ownership, exporting, and senior decision-making roles.

These disparities are especially stark in India, where female labour-force participation remains low, despite decades of integration into global markets.

How Trade Policies Interact with Gender Inequality

Trade Measures Are Not Gender-Neutral

Trade interventions—whether tariff reforms, regulatory changes, or trade facilitation measures—do not operate on abstract economic agents. Instead, they interact with existing gender norms, labour-market segmentation, and institutional biases.

As a result, the distributional impact of trade depends not only on sectoral performance, but also on who can enter, remain, and progress within tradable sectors. Ignoring this reality risks reinforcing inequalities rather than reducing them.

The Gendered Nature of Tariffs

Higher Tariffs on Women-Intensive Sectors

One of the clearest ways trade policy affects women differently is through tariff structures. In many developing countries, historical protection patterns have inadvertently penalised sectors that employ a high share of women.

In India, sectors such as agriculture, textiles, apparel, leather, and food processing employ large numbers of women, particularly in informal and small-scale units. These sectors often face higher tariffs in export markets and higher duties on imported inputs.

For instance, India’s textile and apparel sector, one of the largest employers of women, faces higher tariffs in key export destinations compared to capital-intensive manufacturing sectors. Tariff escalation in textiles and apparel discourages value addition in developing countries, limiting income gains for female workers.

Non-Tariff Measures and Hidden Barriers

Non-tariff measures (NTMs) pose even greater challenges. Compliance with standards, certification requirements, and customs procedures involves fixed costs that disproportionately burden women-led MSMEs.

In India, where women own only a small share of registered enterprises, these barriers significantly restrict female participation in export markets, further entrenching gender gaps in trade.

Women in Trade: Agriculture and Industry

Agriculture: Invisible Labour, Rising Vulnerability

In labour-intensive agricultural systems across the Global South, women form the backbone of production. Yet their labour often remains unpaid, informal, and invisible, limiting mobility and income growth.

Trade exposure intensifies these challenges. Subsistence female farmers face competition from capital-intensive global agrarian systems, increasing vulnerability rather than opportunity. While trade expansion affects all workers, women—who dominate precarious employment—tend to gain less from agricultural trade liberalisation.

Industry and Export-Oriented Sectors

In export-oriented industrial sectors, increased competition following trade liberalisation has often translated into wage pressure and job insecurity, disproportionately affecting women.

However, trade is not uniformly harmful. Exporting firms employ a significantly higher share of women than non-exporters, with estimates indicating women account for around 33% of employment in exporting firms, compared to 24% in non-exporting firms.

These jobs can enhance women’s economic autonomy, strengthen their position within households, and generate positive spillovers in education, health, and intergenerational wellbeing.

Global Value Chains: Opportunity and Risk

Gender Segmentation Within GVCs

Global Value Chains (GVCs) connect domestic firms to international markets and standards, offering potential gains through higher wages, formalisation, and skill development.

Yet, GVCs often reproduce gender hierarchies. Women remain concentrated in the lowest tiers of value chains, while upgrading into higher-value activities frequently bypasses them altogether.

This demonstrates that economic upgrading does not automatically lead to gender upgrading. Limited access to training and upskilling prevents women from transitioning into higher-paying and more secure roles created through trade liberalisation.

Why Gender-Responsive Trade Is Essential

Beyond Equity: Competitiveness and Resilience

Gender-responsive trade is not a symbolic or optional add-on. It is a precondition for sustainable and development-oriented globalisation.

For India, integrating gender considerations into trade policy is central to its broader development transition. Enhancing women’s participation as workers, entrepreneurs, and exporters is not only a matter of social justice but also of economic competitiveness.

Economies that fail to fully utilise female talent incur substantial productivity losses, particularly in an era of global uncertainty and slowing trade growth.

Conclusion

The India-EU FTA, celebrated as the “Mother of all deals”, represents a major step in India’s global economic engagement. Yet its long-term success will depend on whether it addresses the structural gender inequalities embedded within India’s labour markets and production systems.

Trade policies that ignore gender realities risk reinforcing exclusion, while gender-responsive trade frameworks can unlock productivity, resilience, and inclusive growth. For India, embedding gender considerations into trade policy design, implementation, and evaluation is not just about making trade work for women—it is about making trade work better for the economy as a whole.