Every election in a democracy tells us something valuable about society and how it is changing. The ongoing general election in India — the largest democratic exercise in history — is sure to generate many such meaningful statistics. But one projection stands out for what it reveals about half of the population in what remains a deeply patriarchal, gender-unequal society. In 2019, for the first time in the history of independent India, the percentage of registered female voters exercising their franchise is expected to catch up with and perhaps even surpass that of men. That would be a historic moment. After all, the fact that female voters lagged behind male voters in terms of political participation for so many decades was itself an index of the highly gendered and discriminatory nature of Indian social life. Typically, women’s work was thought to belong to the domestic sphere, not the public one (although one wonders whether they even had a vote, so to speak, in the household). So women were not encouraged to exercise their franchise. In many rural or remote areas, the journey to polling booths was not safe, especially given the heightened tensions of polling day, and many women opted out for this reason. Perhaps even the gendered nature of household work — from which there are no holidays — disincentivized women from taking a morning or afternoon off to vote.Without access to education, women themselves did not feel like active citizens or stakeholders in India’s bright new democracy. Used to having their menfolk take decisions for them in every other arena, women at first found it odd that they had a vote that had exactly the same weight as a man’s. The story is told, from India’s first election in 1952, of officials from the Election Commission of India visiting households all over the country to prepare the electoral rolls, only to be frustrated by women refusing to provide their names, but rather addressing themselves as “X’s wife” or “Z’s daughter.” Unsurprisingly, given this vast gulf in self-perception, -confidence and -awareness between men and women, vastly more men voted than women (and of the women who did vote, one may surmise, many made their choices based on the instructions of men). In the national election of 1962 — the first election for which we have statistics on gender — 62.1 percent of registered male voters exercised their vote, but only 46.7 percent of women. By 2014, however, that gap had reduced to 67 percent for men and 65.5 percent for women. Mapping the female vote on a 50-year-scale provides deep insights about how society changes, and illustrates how slow and incremental the progress is. It does not require much argument to establish that a verdict in a democracy is much more just and meaningful when there is close to equal participation from both genders. By that logic, Indian democracy is of a much better quality today than it was at the beginning. One might go even further and say that, in general, Indian women tend to be more thoughtful, grounded voters than men. Partly because of their greater involvement in the small economy that is the family, and partly because their socialization make them less susceptible to political rhetoric that is based on hate and violence (which makes them the very opposite of the popular stereotype of women as unreasoning, emotional and impulsive), women tend to vote based on concrete economic considerations. Even Indian politicians (mostly men) have understood this and have begun to target the women’s vote as a bloc in its own right; one that often transcends boundaries of religion and caste. One of the key planks of social welfare in the Narendra Modi era in India has been the central government’s provision of free cooking gas cylinders to about 50 million poor women (who otherwise would have had to burn wood or coal for fuel). It is a good political investment: Every time the household has a meal, it has reason to be grateful for the ease with which it was cooked. In Odisha, one of India’s poorest states, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has won power for four successive terms largely because of his strategy of welfare schemes for women voters. In Delhi, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party has heavily prioritized its work in education, childcare and health care as a result of feedback from female voters. Many government welfare benefits and grants are deposited directly into the beneficiary’s bank account, allowing women a new level of financial autonomy and authority, not to mention political awareness. Further, while women’s representation as actual candidates in elections and as elected members of Parliament is still low — about 10 percent — an amendment to the constitution passed in 1993 reserving one-third of all positions at village-level elections for women has led, in a quarter of a century, to the creation of a new class of enthusiastic and capable grass-roots female leaders in rural India, traditionally the most patriarchal of spaces. In all these ways — and sometimes for reasons that have to do less with good intentions about gender justice than the hard realities of political arithmetic — the dynamics of the women’s vote in independent India is a vivid and meaningful story, revealing much about how the power of the single vote can, in time, transform society. It is likely that, in future decades, election 2019 will be seen as the moment when the Indian woman voter became the full equal of her male counterparts.