Corporate Women and Public/Private Dichotomy: Problems, Solutions and Modifications

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Workplace and Professions

Abstract

Women’s strategies are always played out in the context of identifiable patriarchal bargains that act as implicit scripts that define, limit and inflect their market and domestic options’ (Kandiyoti 1988). Two words that stand out are ‘women strategies’ and ‘patriarchal bargains’ where one influences the other. The capability to strategize (Sen 1985) depends on the various factors like employment. Financial independence plays a major role in shaping the identity of the women by situating work within the private sphere and normalizing the spatial transcendence of the working women. The influx of women into the primary labour market with the rise of the IT sector in India in general, Kolkata in particular have modified the structured relationships within the family and society at large. Employment has helped women to transcend the confines of the private sphere and engage in public body of work thus boosting their agency function to a great extent. It has also prompted women to take resort to certain measures and tactics to deal with the temporary vacuum that is created in the private sphere due to their absence. This paper deals with the problems within the public and private spheres faced by the married women engaged in the IT hub of Kolkata, the extent to which women engaged in the corporate sector exercise their agency in solving the problems they face within the family and work, the structural-functional changes that has taken place within the family because of women’s employment and the way they perceive themselves amidst the daily vacillation between the public and private spheres. The study is based on the empirical survey done on the 155 married women working at the IT sector in Urban Kolkata, India.

Keywords: private sphere, public sphere, corporate women, IT hub, family, corporate job, agency

Author

• Sreyashi Ghosh, Indian Statistical Institute