The Individualization of the Social Contract: Women Workers, Rights, and Regulating Femininity

• In Event: 1265 - Puzzles and Tensions in Women's Education and Employment

Abstract

Increasing Indian women’s employment, particularly women’s formal urban employment has been a policy concern for decades. In India, the Information Technology (IT) sector and the nursing profession are two significant sources of formal women’s employment. Drawing on 111 in-depth interviews with IT workers and nurses in the cities of Hyderabad and Chennai, this paper examines the current challenges for women workers and the pitfalls of the current regime labor protections aimed at protecting women’s employment. These include namely, the provision of maternity leave and regulations protecting women’s security. I argue that first, the enforcement of maternity leave and the focus on women’s security serve to uphold women’s status quo vis-à-vis safeguarding their sexual identities as mothers, daughters, and sisters, but not as workers. Second, this focus by the state and employers does little to alleviate the actual challenges that women workers face, and consequently, address India’s low female labor force participation rate. This focus of state regulation ignores how firm and hospital policies disempower women workers under the guise of women’s empowerment, and the material consequences it has for their wellbeing. In both sectors, the sources of women’s marginalization remain unaddressed: in nursing, relatively low wages, and in IT, the structural disadvantage that underpins women’s exit from work.

Author

• Sara Duvisac