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 preview to assess the rationale of its conclusions from the essays included.
The introduction by the editors gives the changes ushered in by the so called liberalization in 1991, which withdrew state control of the economy and reduced regulation of the market. Jobs became more insecure with greater informalization side by side of feminization. Opening to external trade induced more exports but this was not a level playing field and the principle of comparative costs meant that cheap labour was sustained by the more advanced First World. Not only commodity exports but services, especially in the IT and ITES sector, began to dominate this principle. Despite educated women in this sector, getting more opportunities, a glass ceiling was usually in place restricting upward mobility. Long ago in my first study of women scientists in India done in the early nineteen eighties, women’s upward mobility was restricted not only by family responsibilities but by the masculine ethos of the establishments. Information regarding important conferences would not be made available to women, work allotment kept challenging tasks away from them.1 Women find it difficult to accept transfers or work overtime and additionally miss out on the old boys’ net work.2 Hence women’s increased participation in the labour force is not a straightforward story of progress. So what we see is a horizontal spread over many locations but not much vertical progress.
The introduction discusses home-based workers and how market can cut costs by using this unprotected labour that is also flexible. Paid domestic work is the largest category but treated as an extension of what they do at home.3 One of the reasons for women’s increased labour force participation is men’s unemployment.4 Some recent data suggest that one third of households are female supported. A significant change in the attitude of domestic workers is the desire to see their daughters get educated and move to a better job. This is true in many cities like Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. May be the Delhi experience is different or the worker profile there is different.
Chapter 4 describes how in a post-resettlement colony, women’s work is socially constructed. Dalit women are in export industries as service work has become tradeable across international borders. Housekeeping in big companies is another emerging area where the work is tiring. In the IT sector, the physical environment being clean, and workers given gloves, uniforms etc., endow it with prestige. Chapter 6 is a survey of workers in a Delhi settlement covering many occupations that includes teachers in private schools. Age, marital status, education, migrant status determine the worker status. A notable change is the increased presence of young and better educated women in the workforce in the services sector. What the author of the article Neetha N. says is corroborated by our GDP composition where more than 60% now comes from services with manufacturing gone down considerably. Though the nature of work and conditions of work establish gender polarity, Neeta argues that access to some income even if meagre give women some resources they can fall back on.
The most interesting study to me is that of the Benares zari workers. While men do the weaving, women do the embroidery— seen as peripheral work, though tiring, needing a lot of attention. Besides because it is done at home, it is seen as spare time work. Actually women try to schedule it according to their family work-load which means they hardly ever get ‘free time’. Chapter 7 once again takes a tour of informal workers to reiterate the same undervaluation—which arises because of low opportunity cost of women’s labour. Chapter 8 on garment workers in Kolkata adds nothing new. Most reported as self employed though they are contract workers. Sub-contracting conceals who the real employer is. Among the self employed are also unpaid family labour. This heightens women worker’s invisibility. The article on Kerala apparel workers betrays the paradox of exploitation through tight control in a State boasting high social development. In addition it has to conform to notions of conformity to femininity.5 Some protest by women in a collective petered out, gaining small concessions but lacked political support from male dominated trade unions. Chapter 10 depicts the constraints women face in the IT sector in Kolkata with regard to limited choices and limited mobility. Yet none of the women wished to discontinue perceiving it as adding value to their family status.
What to me seemed a new inquiry related to the banking sector. The share of women in banks increased but organizational practices are not free from gender prejudices. While ostensibly women friendly with maternity leave available in the public sector, it delays promotions for women by six months.6
Women body screeners (in malls, airports) was an innovative inquiry. Instituted as part of cyber security in establishments, it is a critical function. Women see this as duty to the nation. This role is, to quote what the book has phrased interestingly, ‘neither hyper feminized nor as victims of male violence, nor hyper masculinised as the military’. Women here use sophisticated technical equipment but do not earn full rewards of the larger technical infrastructure. The author has not cited a recent announcement that now allows women in combat jobs in the Defence sector. A question facing feminist: do we recognize difference between gender or accept male defined equality.7
So the story ends. Progress, yes here and there. Questions persist: Is it always some steps forward but never the top? Better work but excluded from leadership except to a very few?
References:
1 This was a study of NISTAD by the author.
2 When I was teaching in the Netherlands, I was alone leaving my family in Mumbai—I used to attend the after work evening wine get togethers—all the women faculty would leave after work to fetch their kids from day care while the men would exchange a lot of important professional information. A recent study in the USA about scientific publications as criteria for promotions would see women’s names and give preference to men. They ran gender blind list and found the result different.
3 Unionization of domestic workers has been tried in some cities but with little success because the domestic worker establishes a patron-client relationship. A bill introduced in the Maharashtra assembly to give minimum wage and stipulate hours of work hours has to date never been passed. The maid receives interest free loan, gets gifts of old clothes, special gifts for festivals, etc.
4 I have often argued that many household studies focus only on women without finding out what the men in the family are doing.
5 In one of my trips to Kerala, to Ottapalam, I went to a department store where I found that there were two sections—one was marked ‘for chaste women’ and the other ‘fashionable women’.
6 This is not unique to India. While I studied the Welfare state in the Netherlands, part time work for women was instituted so they could manage home and work. This reduced their benefits in the long run unlike for men.
7 I was travelling in a public bus in Mumbai for work, eight months pregnant, standing, yet no male offered to give me a seat saying ‘women want equality. So let her stand’.
Maithreyi Krishnaraj, a pioneer in Women’s Studies and former Professor and Director at SNDT Women’s University’s Research Centre for Women’s Studies till 1991, is currently Hon. Visting Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore.