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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.

Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century has burst upon the sky of economics, like a huge round of fire crackers. It has sold 2 million copies and has been translated into several languages. The book has focused on economic inequality—its source and its impact. Piketty’s main thrust is to reveal that the wealthy, he calls it the one percent, will continue to accumulate wealth. He reveals the dynamics of such a process, and then concentrates on the tax system as a possible source to reduce this phenomenon. It is of course a startling revelation, especially the argument on the process.

‘The Special Cells are located in the police system to draw on the power of the law and the Constitution to aid abused women to rebuild their lives, but this power is neither benign nor apolitical’ writes Anjali Dave in Women Survivors of Violence; Genesis and Growth of a State Support System. There is no one better qualified than Anjali Dave—a feminist activist, social worker and teacher—to critically look at the course and consequence of engaging with the state to address the issue of violence against women.

Anxiety about the safety of women in India has always been a topic of discussion in social and academic meetings. While articulate non-academics bemoan the continuing relevance of the topic in a developing and seemingly modern society, academics attempt to understand the underlying reasons for the persistent perception of women as vulnerable beings. The debate took a more urgent turn when world media reported the gang rape of a young physiotherapy intern in a moving bus on one of the arterial roads of Dehi during the night of December 16, 2012. The media’s coverage of the incident and civil society’s mobilization to demand an amendment in the law led to the passing of The Criminal Law (Amendement) Act of 2013.