Gender ratio in India In 2020, the sex ratio of the total population in India is 108.18 males per 100 females. There are 717,100,970 or 717.10 million males and 662,903,415 or 662.90 million females in India. The percentage of the female population is 48.04 percent compared to 51.96 percent male population.

Gender issues include all aspects and concerns related to women’s and men’s lives and situation in society, to the way they interrelate, their differences in access to and use of resources, their activities, and how they react to changes, interventions and policies.

The root cause of gender inequality is the role and place which society assigns to women. Throughout countries in the Middle East and North Africa, labor market participation rates for women are among the lowest in the world, whereas access to primary and secondary education is almost the same for boys and girls.

Indian Census has the tradition of bringing out disaggregated information by sex on various aspects of population. The first and foremost component of gender statistics revealed by Census 2001, 532 million constituting 52 percent are males and 497 million constituting remaining 48 percent are females in the population.

References to a third sex can be found throughout the texts of India’s three ancient spiritual traditions – Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – and it can be inferred that Vedic culture recognised three genders.

Poverty – This is the root cause of gender discrimination in the patriarchal Indian society, as the economic dependence on the male counterpart is itself a cause of gender disparity. A total of 30% of people live below the poverty line, and out of this 70% are women.

The Gini (inequality in income distribution) coefficient points to an increasing inequality in India. The coefficient in 2014 was 34.4 per cent (100 per cent indicates full inequality and 0 per cent full equality). The coefficient increased to 35.7 per cent in 2011 and to 47.9 per cent in 2018.

There are many different gender identities, including male, female, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender, and all, none or a combination of these.

Hijras are officially recognized as third gender in the Indian subcontinent, being considered neither completely male nor female. However, in general hijras are born male, only a few having been born with intersex variations.

Hijras figure prominently in India’s Muslim history as well, serving as the sexless watchdogs of Mughal harems. Today hijras, who include transgender and intersex people, are hard to miss.

According to the judgement, hijras are biological males who reject their masculine identity and identify either as women, or “not-men”, or “in-between man and woman” or “neither man nor woman”. They identify themselves as women trapped in male bodies, although many aravanis would prefer to be called ‘Thirunangi’.