Can women achieve economic independence through skills alone when institutional inequalities and entrenched misogyny continue to stifle their progress?

When discussions turn to women's economic liberation, the conversation often begins with skills. It must also address the systems that determine whether women can use those skills, earn fairly, establish businesses and exercise economic choice. Training women without examining the barriers they encounter afterwards risks preparing them to enter systems that remain unequal.

As a medical doctor working across public health, gender and development, I have studied and taught health economics, financial planning and competing economic traditions, including Keynesian and neoliberal thought, at public and private universities. These fields are closely connected: taxation, income, employment and financial security shape people's health, opportunities and life chances. Yet the relationship between public health and economic policy remains insufficiently understood.

Professionals working across disciplines may find their expertise questioned when they do not fit conventional professional categories. Add gender and the often-dismissive label of activist, and women may have to work harder to ensure their arguments receive serious consideration. The familiar dismissal - feminist hain, badmizaj aur chirchiri hain - can become a convenient way of avoiding the substance of what they say.

My engagement with economic justice led me to publish A Tax Break for Economic Freedom? in 2010, with support from the German foundation FNF. The book challenged........

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