Santosh Jatrana

Women Workers in Urban India

In recent years, Indian cities have emerged as spaces of anonymous identities and seamless opportunities, sites that are balancing both modernity and traditional forms of living. This book engages with the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in the cityscape and bringing to surface contradictions that this duality offers. While employment opportunities have opened up and are constantly expanding for women, this edited volume interrogates whether their working status is breaking gender stereotypes or reaffirming them. It surmises that whether women are working in offices or from home, contributing to the IT sector or labouring as petty producers, they are unable to break out of the gendered codes that place them at the lower rungs of the occupational ladder. More importantly, the hierarchical social order, comprising of caste, class and ethnic identities seems to echo in the gendered structure of the labour market as well. This volume studies the intertwining of work with embedded patriarchal notions of women’s place in designated spheres, and the overt and covert processes of resistances that women offer in defining new roles and old ones anew.