Limits Imposed By Gender NormsMaithreyi Krishnaraj WOMEN WORKERS IN URBAN INDIA Edited by Saraswati Raju and Santosh Jatrana Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 335, £74.99 VOLUME XL NUMBER 7 July 2016 While providing new opportunities
to women workers, global capitalism,
tends to both not only use
prevailing gender stereotypes but rearticulates
them. This is the core message of
the book. Surveying women’s location in varied
professions from high tech occupations,
to traditionally male dominated professions,
while there is exploitation, there is also a
degree of agency exercised by women. Metro
cities belying the assumption of a liberal,
more accommodating spaces to women nonetheless
re-entrench culturally engraved sociocultural
norms about where women can work
and what kind of work is permissible. Looking
at different locations where they work
like petty production work, home based
work, modern professions that require education
and special skills and training, what
emerges is this: gender norms pose limits to
what they can gain through equal wages and
equal access to positions of power and leadership.
Equal wages is sidelined by segmentation
of work into gender segregated work.
In the West labour struggles involved demand
for equivalent work.
Reading the book one despairs of ever
achieving gender equality at the workplace.
One recalls nineteenth century records of
women in factory work in England where
women spoke of ‘one hand tied behind’ implying
that responsibility for family curtails
free choice. The hope that the book gives is
the possibility of forging a collective identity
to challenge discrimination in the labour
market. That a market economy is a neutral
organization unlike a feudal economy with
its fetters of tradition bound categorization
of workers is falsified because the market
economy harbours ample prejudices of caste,
class and ethnicity. This is borne out by
plenty of research in this area. This phenomenon
is not only among the lower echelons
of the working class but reaches all the way
to the top, partly because of gender labelling
of jobs and partly because of sexual division
of labour that assigns family responsibility
as a mandatory one solely to women
that cannot be repudiated, subject as it is to
heavy sanctions for violations. Yet breaches
are possible as the book illustrates. To quote
a significant passage in the preface to the
book, ‘What are the ways in which the resilience
of traditional gender ideologies and structural constraints limiting women’s options
are maintained over time and importantly,
the set of circumstances under which
ideologies and constraints can be challenged,
weakened, defused and renegotiated?’ The
preface is exceedingly well written and gives
the reader a ... Table of Contents >> |