India's Gender Statistics: A ready-reckoner dataset
How many women work in India’s banks? Or in the airlines, or in healthcare? How does gender representation compare across sectors, and does it fizzle out at the top of organisational hierarchy? Who “mans” our public offices? How many women own land in India? How many lead start-ups?
Finding answers to these very simple questions should not be difficult. Surely not in today’s time, when we are surrounded by an abundance of data points of all kinds.
And yet, I have often spent hours, if not days, to find such simple statistics in the course of my work. And I know many of you may have done so, too.
Sometimes, reports and articles cite contradictory numbers without any clarity on the original data source. Or, old numbers get repeated over and over again. Yet on other occasions, numbers are presented without context: do absolute numbers help when percentages might tell a fuller story?
It doesn’t have to be this way. This data table was born out of a response to these challenges.
[Note: The table is best viewed/used on a laptop or computer. Use the search bar to look for specific indicators. And browse different pages by clicking the arrows on the top.]
It lists a set of indicators, with values for women, men, and transgender persons. I have attempted to use original and official data sources where available. I have also tried to include the most recent numbers, and will keep updating these as more updated datasets are released.
I hope some of you will find these useful—in the course of your work, while browsing trivia, or in teatime debates with friends. In the interest of keeping the data table compact, names of data sources are mentioned in their short forms, but a list with their full names and links to original files is available here.
This data table is going to be a constant work-in-progress, and I will keep adding more indicators to this as and when I can. Please do feel free to let me know if there are particular indicators you would like to see here. Despite all this, this will never be an exhaustive table, but my hope is that it will have enough to make your search for basic gender data a little less cumbersome.
Note on usage: This is a free-to-use public dataset. Please feel free to use these numbers in your work, but you should not download this data and use it commercially. All original data sources are mentioned. You can credit this table in the format of your choice.
Suggested citation: [Original data source of the specific indicator] via Akshi Chawla (2025) India’s Gender Statistics.
If you spot any errors, please let me know by writing to me using the form below.