In a land of deities and such varied diversity, women are been worshipped as goddess but in our society an Indian woman traditionally plays a four fold role that is as a daughter, wife, housewife and a mother. The roles of a woman are conventional and well defined in our society but with the changing times, women are entering new spheres of life. With the changing mindset, women are actively participating in social, economic and political activities.
“It is impossible to think about the welfare of the world unless the world is improved. It is impossible for a bird to fly on only one wing”. It was very well quoted by Swami Vivekananda. India has been the second most populous country of the world having a population of 1210.10 million in which 586.47 million are females according to 2011 census. In the urban region, females have a share of 48.1% and 48.6% in the rural region. At the time of independence, there were 946 females per 1000 males  and remained almost same for some years but then decreased and it is 943 per 1000 males(2011 census). There can be many reasons for this decline such as preference of a male child, increase in female foeticide, male dominated society and patriarchal mindset.
The next important question that comes infrontof us is how women education has changed over time? The literacy rate of women in India is 65.46% whereas it is 82.14% for males. There is wide gender disparity in this context. In terms of education the condition of India is poor as it has been ranked 38thamong 51 developing countries when it comes to earliest grade at which at least 80% of women are literate. The stereotype view that women should only do the household work and education is not considered important for them can provide a base for this disparity. But in an another view, the growth of female literacy rate  is 11.8% which is  way faster than male literacy rate that is 6.9% in 2001-2011 period. In urban areas there is 80% of women are literate and 59% in rural region. These stats can give us an vital argument that India is been progressing and breaking the stereotype. There has been an increase in the number of schools and education is definitely improved with time. Government has also launched many programmesfor the upliftmentof women education like BetiBachaoBetiPadhaobut there is a long journey that India has to go in order to fully attain women literacy.
Despite the increase in growth of female literacy rate compared to male literacy rate, the labor participation rate of women is extremely low that is 33% in 2008 whereas the male has 81%  labor participation rate. In recent years, the unemployment of women has risen which is highest among young women, the official unemployment rate was between 17 to 22%. In India it has been estimated that approx60% of agricultural work is done by women only but their hourly wage vary from 50-75% of male rate which makes very difficult for them to overcome absolute poverty. In rural areas women are not having any option rather than to work in order to support their families. 
That is what seemed during 2000-2004. Growth in agricultural  income was stagnant yet the number of self employed female workers increased by 17 million indicating that there was distress employment..
It is seen that labor force participation rate is very low among urban educated women. It is observed that around 57% of educated women having graduate degrees were doing household work only (therefore they are out of labor force) as compared to 31%  in rural areas with primary or secondary education in 2009-10. One of the reasons for such low labor participation rate is very slow generation of employment in manufacturing sector. Between 2000-04 women employed for 3.7 million of the new 9.7 million new manufacturing jobs created in the country. Therefore women employment was increasing in the low paid sectors. Now in 2004-09, 3.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost and women who lost their jobs were more than 80%. Now when it comes to service sectors it was the major source of employment for women post 1990 years mainly in low paid services such as domestic help. But at the same time there is only a small share for females of relatively high quality jobs in India like only 20% of new jobs created in financing, real estate and business services in 2000s.
In 2004-05, it was found that there is very large gender pay gap of 57% in the formal sector whereas the gender pay gap among casual workers is around 35-37%. In the unorganized sector, it was around 20-30%. Despite working for more hours their wage was lower than males and it was shown in 2000 Now the next question that comes to our mind is that what government has done to strengthen the economic performance of women in India. There are various programmesor schemes that government has initiated for their upliftment.