Full Description
This volume examines the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in urban India. Employment opportunities have opened up and are constantly expanding for women, but this book interrogates whether their working status is breaking gender stereotypes or reaffirming them. It argues 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 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 places in designated spheres, and the overt and covert processes of resistance that women offer in defining new roles and old ones anew.
Contents
Preface; 1. Setting the backdrop Saraswati Raju and Santosh Jatrana; 2. Women workers in urban India Saraswati Raju and Debangana Bose; 3. Gendered vulnerabilities: work-life trajectories of female domestic workers in Jaipur Kaari Mattila; 4. Occupational domestication in a post-resettlement context: an analysis of women's work in Kannagi Nagar, Chennai Karen Coelho; 5. Old jobs in new forms: women's experiences in the housekeeping sector in Pune Kiran Mirchandani, Sanjukta Mukherjee and Shruti Tambe; 6. Persistent inequalities and deepened burden of work? An analysis of women's employment in Delhi Neetha N.; 7. Spare change for spare time? Homeworking women in Banaras Amit Basole; 8. Gender, work and space: home-based workers in the garment industry in Kolkata Swati Sachdev; 9. Labour control and responses: women workers in an apparel park in Kerala Neethi P.; 10. New urban economic spaces and the gendered world of work in Kolkata Tanusree Paul; 11. Gender equality and women's employment in the banking sector in India Supriti Bezbaruah; 12. Women body screeners and the securitization of space in Indian cities Winifred R. Poster.
