Across India, a pressing issue that affects opportunities for many women is:

Concept: A single-correct question of this kind asks for the best answer among those offered, not merely for a statement that is true. Social barriers to opportunity are named at different levels of description: some name a condition attached to a sector, a season or a place, and some name an attitude attached to a person's social identity. The two levels are not equivalent, because an identity-level barrier also governs who is allowed to reach the sector-level and infrastructure-level goods. So when a stem names a social group and asks for a pressing issue affecting that group's opportunities across an entire country, the best answer is the issue that is itself about that group.

Application: The stem fixes two things: the reach is the whole of India, and the group named is women. Of the issues offered, only gender bias is itself about women. It is the treatment of a girl's or woman's schooling, mobility and paid work as a lower priority than a boy's or man's, and it is carried by social norms rather than by a crop calendar, a training centre or a city boundary. It appears as girls being withdrawn from school earlier, restrictions on travelling for work, unequal pay for identical tasks, hiring judgements made on assumptions about a woman's availability, and an unpaid domestic workload added on top of paid employment. Because norms travel with the person, the same barrier operates for a rural agricultural worker and for an urban graduate, in every state.

Cross-check: Contrast with the other issues offered, each read at the level it is actually stated:

• Seasonal work in agriculture is stated at the level of a sector and its calendar: farm labour demand rises with sowing and falls after harvest, compressing farm earnings into a few months. It bears on agrarian households, and on male and female workers in them alike, so it is not an issue about women.

• Limited access to skill development is stated at the level of infrastructure: it is about where vocational and technical training places exist. It is a real barrier and it does affect many women, but the same shortage limits men in the same district; it becomes a specifically female disadvantage where families and institutions treat a girl's training as lower priority, which is gender bias operating through it.

• Urban migration pressures are stated at the level of a location: they are about how far destination cities can absorb arrivals into housing, transport and informal work. They bear on migrants of every gender, so they are not an issue about women.

Result: So the issue that operates right across India and is specifically about women's opportunities is gender bias, and it is also the issue that shapes women's access to training, mobility and pay. The other three name sectoral, infrastructural or locational conditions that apply to workers of any gender, so each is at best a partial answer to a stem that asks about women.