UGC NET Women Studies key terms

A social system in which men hold primary power and predominance in roles of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property, structuring gender inequality across institutions and everyday life.

Judith Butler's idea that gender is produced through repeated stylised acts and speech rather than expressing an inner essence, so identity is constituted by its expressions over time.

The view that gendered meanings, roles, and expectations are produced through culture, socialisation, and institutions rather than being fixed by biology, and therefore can change.

The analytical separation between biological sex characteristics and the socially assigned meanings and roles of gender, introduced to challenge biological determinism in explanations of male-female difference.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework showing that race, class, caste, gender, and other social positions interact to produce distinct experiences of advantage and disadvantage that single-axis analysis cannot capture.

The claim that knowledge is situated and that marginalised groups, by virtue of their position, can hold distinctive insights into social relations that dominant groups tend to miss.

Donna Haraway's concept that all knowledge claims are produced from particular embodied locations, so objectivity must be understood as partial and accountable rather than neutral and universal.

In feminist research, the researcher's sustained examination of their own position, power, and influence on the research process, participants, and interpretation of findings.

The recognition that a researcher's social location, including gender, caste, class, and institutional affiliation, shapes access, interpretation, and ethical obligations in fieldwork.

The branch of philosophy examining how gender shapes the production of knowledge, challenging claims of value neutrality and asking whose experiences count as evidence and authority.

An approach holding that rigorous method plus attention to the social position of the knower can yield stronger, less partial accounts of the world than conventional value-neutral research.

Analysis of how economic structures, property relations, and state policy interact with gender to allocate resources, value labour, and sustain inequalities within households and markets.

Domestic and caregiving labour, largely performed by women, that sustains households and the economy but is excluded from national accounts and typically lacks wages or social protection.

The disproportionate incidence and depth of poverty among women, driven by unequal access to resources, employment segregation, care burdens, and dependence within households.

A statistical instrument recording how individuals allocate time across paid work, unpaid domestic and care work, leisure, and rest, used to make invisible care labour visible in policy.

A public finance tool that assesses budgets for their differential impact on women and men, and reallocates resources to address gender gaps in policy outcomes.

The strategy of integrating a gender perspective into the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of all policies and programmes, rather than relying on separate women-only interventions.

An approach from the 1970s that sought to integrate women into existing development programmes, emphasising their productive roles and access to resources and employment.

A framework that shifts attention from women in isolation to unequal power relations between women and men, addressing structural causes of gender inequality in development policy.

Development practice that supports women's own collective agency, organising, and decision-making power rather than only improving their access to services or income.

The 2030 Agenda goal committing states to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, with targets on violence, unpaid care, leadership, and reproductive rights.

The 1979 UN treaty obliging states parties to eliminate discrimination against women in law and practice across political, economic, social, cultural, and family life.

The 1995 outcome of the Fourth World Conference on Women, setting a comprehensive global agenda across twelve critical areas of concern including violence, economy, and decision-making.

Authoritative interpretative statements by the UN treaty body elaborating state obligations under the women's convention, including on violence, political life, and health.

The principle that a state can be held responsible for failing to prevent, investigate, punish, and provide redress for violence committed by private actors, not only by its own agents.

The equality guarantee prohibiting the state from denying any person equality before the law or equal protection of the laws within Indian territory.

The prohibition of discrimination on grounds including sex, with enabling clauses permitting special provisions for women and children, the basis for affirmative measures.

The distinction between treating everyone identically under neutral rules and achieving equality of outcomes through measures that account for structural disadvantage and differing circumstances.

Special measures, permitted under equality provisions, designed to protect or advance disadvantaged groups, justified when they redress structural inequality rather than entrench stereotypes.

A pattern of physical, sexual, emotional, or economic abuse by an intimate partner or family member, recognised in Indian law as a civil wrong with protection and residence remedies.

Unwelcome sexually determined behaviour including physical contact, demands for favours, remarks, and showing pornography, addressed in India by the 2013 statutory framework and internal committees.

The 1997 Supreme Court standards, later codified in statute, laying down employer duties to prevent and redress sexual harassment at the workplace.

Statutory paid leave and related entitlements for employed women around childbirth, intended to protect health and reduce dismissal linked to pregnancy.

Entitlements to decide freely on the number and spacing of children and to access the information, services, and conditions needed for reproductive health and bodily integrity.

The principle that a person has the right to control their own body and make decisions about it free from coercion, including on sexuality, reproduction, and medical treatment.

A framework linking reproductive freedom to social justice, insisting that the right to have or not have children requires conditions such as housing, healthcare, and freedom from violence.

A voluntary, informed, and revocable agreement to a specific act, central to sexual violence law and ethics, distinguished from submission resulting from force, fear, or incapacity.

Social norms, jokes, media representations, and institutional practices that normalise or trivialise sexual violence and shift blame toward victims rather than perpetrators.

Treating a person primarily as a body or instrument for another's use or pleasure, denying their subjectivity and agency, a recurring critique of advertising and popular media.

Laura Mulvey's term for visual conventions that frame women as objects of a presumed heterosexual male viewer's desire, shaping narrative and camera perspective in film.

The absence, trivialisation, or stereotyping of a group in media and cultural representation, which limits the imaginable roles and recognition available to its members.

Scholarship examining how media production, texts, and audiences construct gender, reproduce or challenge stereotypes, and shape public understanding of women's lives.

The allocation of tasks between women and men, typically assigning domestic and care responsibilities to women and higher-status paid work to men, across households and labour markets.

The concentration of women and men in different occupations and job grades, contributing to pay gaps and limiting mobility, often described as horizontal and vertical segregation.

The difference between average earnings of women and men in paid employment, reflecting segregation, care penalties, and discrimination rather than unequal pay for identical work alone.

Paulo Freire's process of critical awareness through which people recognise and name the structures oppressing them, adapted in feminist practice to build collective action.

Organising independent of political parties and the state, prioritising women's self-defined agendas, commonly associated with the resurgence of Indian feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.

A forest protection movement in the Garhwal Himalaya from the 1970s in which village women embraced trees to resist logging, linking ecology with livelihood and gendered protest.

A perspective connecting the domination of nature with the domination of women, arguing that patriarchal structures devalue both and that environmental struggles are feminist struggles.

The process by which groups are pushed to the edges of economic, social, and political life, restricting access to resources, voice, and decision-making power.

The multidimensional denial of participation in social, economic, and political institutions, experienced by groups such as Dalit women, disabled women, and sexual minorities.

Principles guiding research with human participants, emphasising informed consent, safety, confidentiality, reciprocity, and avoiding the extraction of knowledge without benefit to communities.

A qualitative method collecting narrated personal accounts to document experiences absent from official records, widely used to recover women's histories and testimonies.