(Co-authored with Lekha Chakraborty)

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs’ (UNOOSA) Space4Women Landmark Study (2025) documents a persistent gender imbalance in public space organisations worldwide: with women constituting approximately only 30% of the global workforce in public space agencies, a figure that declines sharply to 19 percent at board and senior levels. These disparities challenge the foundational norm established by the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (1967), which mandates that outer space exploration used for the benefit and interests of all people. As space activities increasingly shape economic growth, national security, and sustainable development, gender equity in the governance and financing of the space sector emerges as both a normative and economic imperative.

The Rationale for Gender Budgeting in Space

The global space economy is projected to nearly $1.8 trillion to world GDP by 2035, positioning space as a major engine of innovation, technological diffusion, and productivity growth. Despite this, gender asymmetries persist across the sector, particularly in STEM-intensive roles and leadership positions. These asymmetries not only constrain the talent pool but also raise concerns regarding the equitable distribution of public resources in a sector that is overwhelmingly state-financed. Understanding whether public expenditure in space is gender-neutral, regressive, or progressive therefore becomes central to evaluating its alignment with international equity commitments.

According to the DoS Annual Report 2024–25, ISRO employs 14,556 personnel, of whom women account for approximately 19% (2,911 employees). This aggregate figure conceals significant heterogeneity across organisational units and hierarchical levels. Women are constitute roughly 35% in administrative and support roles, but remain significantly underrepresented in core technical and scientific positions, accounting for only about 12.5% of STEM personnel. Such patterns indicate both horizontal and vertical segregation, consistent with broader trends in high-technology sectors.

Fiscal marksmanship measures the degree of alignment between Budget Estimates (BE) and Revised Estimates (RE) or actual expenditures and serves as an indicator of forecasting precision. In FY 2024–25, ISRO’s portfolio of 36 sanctioned space projects, with a cumulative cost of ₹72,268 crore, recorded a net overestimation of ₹833.54 crore between BE and RE. This reflects conservative planning associated uncertainties with supply-chain disruptions and infrastructure development, particularly in human spaceflight programmes. At the aggregate level, the Department of Space’s allocation of ₹13,042.75 crore in FY 2024–25 resulted in a net overestimation of ₹1,317 crore (10.1% of BE), with RE settling at ₹11,725.75 crore.

These fiscal dynamics underscore the need for gender budgeting in the space sector. Persistent gender imbalances, as highlighted by UNOOSA (2025), limit the sector’s potential and contradict the Outer Space Treaty’s equity principles. In a state-financed domain like space, where public funds drive innovation, ensuring gender-neutral or progressive allocations is essential for inclusive growth. Without targeted fiscal tools, disparities in workforce participation translate into unequal benefit distribution, perpetuating structural barriers.

Exploring Gender Budgeting: Frameworks and Application

Gender budgeting offers a structured approach integrating of gender perspectives into public financial management, gender budgeting seeks to ensure that budgetary policies promote gender equality in both resource allocation and outcomes. Ex-ante gender budgeting is forward-looking, undertaken prior to budget formulation and approval, and involves tools such as gender impact assessments to anticipate how proposed expenditures may affect women and men differently. By contrast, ex-post gender budgeting evaluates outcomes after budget implementation, categorising expenditures into those directly targeted at women, those with indirect gender impacts, and those considered gender-neutral.

Methodologies such as Public Expenditure Benefit Incidence Analysis (BIA) are central to this retrospective evaluation.

India institutionalised gender budgeting through the Gender Budget Statement (GBS), presented as Statement 13 in the Union Budget. The GBS for FY 2025–26 totals ₹4.49 lakh crore, representing 8.86 percent of total Union expenditure. Notably, despite its strategic importance and growing fiscal footprint, the space sector remains absent from the GBS. This omission motivates the application of an ex-post gender budgeting framework to the Department of Space, using benefit incidence analysis to assess whether public spending in the space sector is equitably distributed across genders.

Benefit incidence analysis provides a systematic method for tracing how public expenditures are distributed where workforce imbalances persist (Younger et al. 2017). In the context of India’s space sector, BIA is applied to FY 2025–26 Budget Estimates amounting to ₹13,416 crore. Given data constraints, benefits are proxied as unit costs per employee (salaries, training, and infrastructure access), assuming uniform utilisation ratios as a baseline assuming uniform utilisation rates across employees. Female benefit incidence is computed as:

[X_f = r * (B / E) * W]

where (r) denotes the proportion of women in the workforce (0.193), (B) is the budget estimate, (E) is total employment, and (W) is the number of women employees.

The progressivity ratio—defined as the ratio of women’s share in total benefits to their share in employment serves as a benchmark of equity. A ratio of one indicates neutrality, values above one imply pro-female progressivity, and values below one suggest regressive allocation (van de Walle 1998).

Applying this framework to 20 operational ISRO units, which together account for ₹7,339 crore or 54.7 percent of the Department of Space’s BE. Women, constituting 19.3 percent of the workforce in these units (2,812 employees), capture approximately ₹1,441 crore in benefits, corresponding to a 19.6 percent share. This yields a progressivity ratio of 1.01, indicating proportional allocation at the aggregate level. However, this apparent neutrality masks substantial inter-unit variation. R&D centres such as the U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bengaluru, exhibit benefit incidence with 32.6 percent, while several technical and operational units display markedly lower incidence rates, reflecting entrenched occupational segregation.

Moreover, the analysis is limited to direct, employment-linked benefits and does not capture indirect or downstream gender impacts of space activities. Satellite-derived services such as precision agriculture, disaster early warning systems, and telecommunications often yield disproportionate benefits for women in rural and disaster-prone regions. The absence of gender-disaggregated data on these externalities implies that the true gender impact of space expenditure may be underestimated.

This analysis is inspired by UNOOSA’s Space4Women Landmark Study 2025 applies fiscal incidence analysis to diagnose fiscal equity. These findings reveal aggregate gender differentials in incidence. UNOOSA infers that such disparities stem from “structural barriers,” urging “policy uptake” for inclusive growth echoed here in calls for gender budgeting in space sector. Fiscal incidence, a public finance tool tracing expenditure distribution (Younger et al. 2017), unveils this gender neutrality. While India’s space programme demonstrates global leadership through cost-effective achievements such as the USD 75 million Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing and ambitious plans for human spaceflight and the Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2035, equitable participation remains constrained.

Toward Inclusive Space Governance

Embedding ex-ante gender budgeting within the Department of Space through ring-fencing allocations for women in STEM education pipelines, targeted recruitment and retention in mission-critical disciplines, and gender-sensitive training and infrastructure could shift the sector from passive neutrality toward active inclusion. Such measures would align India’s space governance with the equity mandate of the Outer Space Treaty and UNOOSA’s call for “barrier-busting” policies, ensuring that the benefits of the rapidly expanding space economy are genuinely shared by all.

References

Chakraborty, Lekha. 2016. Asia: A Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts. IMF Working Paper 16/150. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

Chakraborty, Lekha. 2022. Fiscal Policy for Sustainable Development in Asia-Pacific: Gender Budgeting in India. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. 2025. Space4Women Landmark Study. Vienna: UNOOSA.

Department of Space, Government of India. 2025. Annual Report 2024-25. New Delhi: DoS.

United Nations. 1967. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. New York: United Nations.

van de Walle, Dominique. 1998. “Assessing the Welfare Impacts of Public Spending.” World Development 26 (3): 365-79.

Younger, Stephen D., et al. 2017. “Fiscal Incidence in Ghana.” Review of Development Economics 21 (3): 549-75.


(The variant of this blog appeared first in 'The Policy Edge', on January 2, 2026.)

Link: https://www.policyedge.in/p/indias-space-push-has-a-fiscal-blind