Give to Gain: The Promise We Are Yet to Keep

This year’s International Women’s Day theme is Give to Gain.

I have been sitting with those three words since they were announced, turning them over, holding them against thirty years of work and observation. And I have come to understand them as something more than a slogan. They are, when read with full seriousness, a call to account.

Because here is what I know to be true: women have always given. Abundantly, consistently, and at considerable personal cost. The gaining is the part we have not yet got right.

What Thirty Years Taught Me That No Report Could

I have sat with women across thirty years in this work, in villages across the country and in various boardrooms, in government offices and on the floors of anganwadis, in community halls and in living rooms. Women who have never held a bank account and women who manage budgets that run into crores. Women with postgraduate degrees and women who never finished school.

Across every one of those divides, one thing has remained constant.

Women give. Unreservedly and without keeping count. The homemaker gives her time, her sleep, her career set aside, her ambitions quietly deferred, her health attended to last if at all. She gives to her children, her husband, her in-laws, her parents, her community. She gives without being asked because giving has been so deeply woven into her sense of identity that she has long stopped distinguishing between what she chooses to offer and what has simply been assumed.

This is not weakness. It is, in many ways, a profound form of strength. But strength exercised only in one direction, outward and toward others, without ever being turned inward, leaves a woman without the resources to sustain herself. Without financial independence. Without professional identity. Without the knowledge of her own rights, her own health, her own worth.

Women have kept their end of this bargain faithfully, for generations.

The question this IWD asks us to confront is whether the world has kept its end in return.

COVID Showed Us Exactly Where We Stand

In 2020, when the pandemic arrived and livelihoods collapsed, something happened in small towns and villages across India that was painful, predictable, and almost entirely absent from the mainstream conversation.

Girls were the first to be taken out of school.

Not because families did not love their daughters. But because when resources ran short and choices had to be made, the calculus was swift and unambiguous. Boys are breadwinners. Boys will support the family. Boys’ education is an investment. Girls will marry. Girls’ education is a cost.

That value system did not begin with COVID. The crisis simply stripped away the pretence and showed us, with terrible clarity, what families actually believe when they can no longer afford to believe otherwise.

Girls gave up their education so that their brothers could continue theirs. A familiar sacrifice, made at an age when no child should be asked to sacrifice anything at all.

I watched this happen. And I knew I had to respond in whatever way I could.

The Shanti Ratan Scholarship: Giving Back What Was Given to Me

The Shanti Ratan Scholarship is named after my mother and my sister.

They are the reason I was able to complete my engineering degree. They supported me, in every sense, through a journey that was not easy for a woman of my generation. They gave, so that I could gain. And what I gained was not just a qualification. It was a foundation.

Years later, at the age of 55, I returned to education, this time to pursue a postgraduate degree in development management. That decision changed my life. It changed how I understood myself, how I valued my own knowledge, how I saw my own place in the work I had been doing for three decades. I had spent thirty years working in development. Going back to study it formally, at 55, gave me an entirely new lens on everything I thought I already knew. It changed my narrative of self-worth in ways I had not anticipated.

Education is a must. And it is a must for girls and women at any point of life.

Not only for the career it enables. Not only for the income it produces. But because education is the first step toward a woman knowing herself. Knowing what she is worth. Knowing what she has every right to ask for, to refuse, and to decide.

The Shanti Ratan Scholarship supports girls from underprivileged families in Karwar, a small town near Goa, in completing their education. It is a personal commitment, rooted in a simple conviction: that I gained because someone gave, and that the only honest response to that gift is to pass it forward.

Education is the first step toward a woman knowing herself. Knowing what she is worth. Knowing what she has every right to ask for, to refuse, and to decide.

Give to Gain Is a Call to Allies, Not Just to Women

This is the part of this year’s theme I want to dwell on, because I think it is the part most likely to be misread.

Give to Gain is not asking women to give more. Women are already giving more than their share. It is asking everyone else, institutions, corporations, governments, communities, families, and individuals, to give to women. To invest in their education, their health, their financial independence, their leadership, their growth. And to understand that when you do, the gain is not only theirs. It belongs to all of us.

Every study on this subject points in the same direction. When a woman is educated, her children are healthier and better educated. When a woman has financial independence, her household is more resilient. When a woman leads, organisations make better decisions. When women participate fully in the economy, the benefits compound across generations.

Society has been leaving this gain on the table for generations, not because the investment is unavailable, but because the will to make it has been inconsistent.

Give to Gain, understood properly, is a challenge to that inconsistency. It says: the gain you are looking for, in your family, your organisation, your community, your country, is already waiting. It is waiting inside the women you have not yet invested in.

Each One, Give One

I believe in the principle of each one, give one. Not as a programme. As a personal ethic.

Every woman who has had access to education, to a network, to financial independence, to knowledge about her own rights and health, has something she can give to a woman who does not. It does not have to be money. It can be a conversation. A mentorship. A referral. A skill shared. A sponsorship. A young woman introduced to a professional network she would never otherwise have entered. A girl’s school fees covered for one year.

It starts at home. It starts in the neighbourhood. It starts with the honest question: who in my immediate circle has less than I do, and what do I have that I can pass forward?

This is not charity. It is the recognition that most of us who have gained, gained because someone gave. And that the only way to honour that is to extend the chain.

KNOW: What Every Woman Deserves to Have

I have come to believe that there are four areas where a woman’s knowledge of herself is most consequential, and most consistently left unaddressed.

Know Yourself. Your strengths, your boundaries, your right to occupy space, hold opinions, and make decisions. For millions of women who have been conditioned to defer and accommodate, this is not a given. It is something that has to be claimed, often for the first time in midlife.

Know Your Finances. Where the money is. What is in your name. What you are entitled to. What you would do if the security you rely on were suddenly withdrawn. Financial knowledge is not only practical. It is the foundation of dignity.

Know Your Rights. Legal rights, workplace rights, rights within marriage, rights as a citizen. Most women do not know what the law already gives them. Making this knowledge accessible is one of the most direct investments any organisation or individual can make in a woman’s life.

Know Your Health. Not only reproductive health, not only pregnancy and childbirth, but health across the full arc of life. Adolescence, working years, midlife, menopause, old age. A woman who understands her own body and its needs is a woman who can advocate for herself in a health system that has, for too long, treated her as secondary.

These four things are not luxuries. They are the minimum conditions for a woman to function as a full person rather than as a function within a family. Investing in them is precisely what Give to Gain asks of us.

The Real Work Begins at Age Five

I want to end with the most important thing I believe, because International Women’s Day should not close with comfortable conclusions.

We cannot change this pattern in the generation that is already living it without also attending to what we are building into the generation just beginning. Real, lasting change in how women are valued and what girls are told they deserve requires that we begin with children. With a five year old girl who should be told that her education matters as much as her brother’s. With a five year old boy who should grow up understanding that care and contribution are shared responsibilities, not feminine ones.

A boy who watches his sister’s education treated as less important than his own carries that lesson into his marriage, his workplace, and his fatherhood. A girl who is told from the beginning that her worth lies in what she provides for others will spend her adult life giving generously and gaining far less than she deserves.

Changing that does not happen in a policy document or a corporate CSR framework, though both have a role. It happens in homes, in classrooms, in the stories we tell and the tasks we assign and the futures we encourage or quietly discourage.

Give to Gain asks what we are willing to invest in women. I would add: begin with the children. Begin early. Begin at home. Because the woman who knows her own worth from the beginning gives more freely, gains more fully, and builds a world that works better for everyone in it.

A Final Word on This Day

To every woman reading this who has spent years giving abundantly and is still finding her way to what she gains in return: your contribution is not invisible to everyone, even when it has been made invisible to you. The work you have done, in your family, your community, your profession, is the foundation on which a great deal rests, whether or not it has been named as such.

And to every person reading this who has the capacity to give to a woman’s growth, in whatever form that takes: the gain is yours too. More than you may yet realise.

That is the promise of this theme. It is a promise worth keeping.

If This Resonated With You

I write every week on the things I have spent thirty years thinking about: women’s health, leadership, social systems, and the gap between how things are designed and how they actually work. These are not abstract questions for me. They are the substance of my working life.

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Dr. Archana Mittal is a social impact leader and CSR architect with over three decades of experience working across corporate, NGO, and government ecosystems in India.