A step women are still not allowed to take

ON a balmy Tuesday afternoon, a senior female colleague shared a video of Paytm’s ‘The Divide’ campaign. Coming from someone not prone to forwarding content, it was telling. It laid bare an inconvenient truth that she probably has spent decades silently observing: women in India are trusted with almost everything except money matters.

In the visuals, the women, young and old, take a step forward or backward in response to questions about financial literacy. Do you know the circle rate in your area? What’s the price of gold today? Do you know the details of the financial documents you are asked to sign? Do you make investments for your family/spouse? Can you explain the difference between a mutual fund and an SIP? As the questions progress, a yawning gap appears between the men and the women. It is eerily similar to the way inequality creeps into everyday life.

What makes the ad remarkable is that the women featured are not uneducated or illiterate; they are simply left out. These modern Indian women, immaculately dressed in saris or Western formals, appear to be well-educated, tech-savvy, bold, confident and yet shockingly ignorant of the fundamentals of financial decision-making. Indian women have made solid strides, from flying aircraft to taking boardroom decisions, yet they regrettably remain peripheral to major financial decisions within their household — despite the fact that they account for a significant proportion of the country’s digital banking users.

According to labour economists, women’s economic empowerment depends as much on intra-household bargaining as on labour force participation. But we often discount the million-dollar question: who gets to understand money? Financial illiteracy among women is not a personal inadequacy but rather an outcome of perverse social design.

In several Indian households, financial responsibility is split along familiar lines. Fathers de facto “take care” of investments; mothers “manage” expenses. Sons are introduced early to the world of financial instruments, while daughters are taught the virtues of saving and sadly, not growing, money. The unintended impact of this behaviour, which is deeply embedded and normalised in Indian society, is long-term: a woman who learns to earn, but not to invest, remains dependent both economically and psychologically. She may exude everyday budgeting flair, a kind of penny panache, but has no access to the key decisions that build tangible wealth.

My colleague who shared the video broke the glass ceiling many moons ago. She often says that the toughest barrier was not running regression models and drawing policy inferences but the hypothesis that women “don’t need to know all this.” That assumption still thrives in conversations in drawing rooms and boardrooms.

Financial literacy for girls cannot be a postscript. Schools must teach it with conscious attention to gender. Employers should mandate financial planning workshops for women employees. And families must encourage daughters to make real financial decisions early, not only after marriage.

Yes, at the end of the day, the video is only an ad that makes use of a potent sociological experiment. But if it shifts even a single household’s gaze, it has done its work. Empowerment is not granted; it is cultivated from within and its first bloom is a woman taking a step no one allowed her so far.