When Gender Meets Descent: The Double Burden No One Wants to See

There are women who fight to break the glass ceiling and there are women who were never even allowed into the building.

Across the world, women from communities discriminated on work and descent (CDWD) live at the intersection of two deeply rooted systems of oppression: gender and social hierarchy. Their bodies, labour, and voices are shaped by centuries of both patriarchy and inherited exclusion – two forces that work together to keep them invisible.

The Weight of Inherited Injustice

For many women, inequality starts early: being told what jobs are “meant” for them, what schools they shouldn’t attend, or whom they’re “allowed” to marry. But for women from marginalized descent communities, these restrictions multiply. Take the stories of Roma women in Europe, often stereotyped, surveilled, and excluded from health care and education. Or Dalit and manual labourer women in South Asia, confined to the most stigmatized forms of work. Their oppression isn’t just about gender but rather it’s about an entire social order that deems them less worthy and less capable of doing anything.

Mainstream women’s rights movements have made progress – but too often, they speak for women who already have access to education, rights, and recognition.The women most affected by inequality rarely make it into the panels, the data, or the decisions. Their voices remain silent given the fact that reaching the grassroot has always been hard for policy makers. This is the reason GFoD – Global Forum for Communities Discriminated in Work and Descent in collaboration with many other CSOs have been working hard to bring the voices of women from the grassroot in the global discussions, to make sure that their voices do not remain silent and that their intersecting struggles are acknowledged. 

That’s why intersectionality matters – not as an academic term, but as a moral compass.
To advocate for women without acknowledging descent, caste, or ethnicity is to ignore the foundation of their oppression.

From Resistance to Redefinition

Women from CDWD communities have never waited for permission to resist. They have led movements for land rights, labour dignity, education, and representation – from Roma youth activists challenging antigypsyism, to Dalit women’s collectives building local economies, to African descent women reclaiming space in global forums.

These are not stories of pity – they are stories of power and hope. And when The Inclusivity Project (TIP) or GFoD amplify their voices, it isn’t to “include” them in someone else’s agenda but to make sure their realities shape the global agenda itself.

Because when women from the most marginalized communities rise, they don’t just liberate themselves – they challenge the very systems that make exclusion possible.