Gendering fun: Hostels, labs, and the city

• In Event: Aspirations, Gender and Social Inequities in South Asia

Proposal

India has recently achieved near parity in female enrollment in higher education (AISHE, 2019) but continues to have one of the lowest female labor force participation rates in the world (John, 2021). What constrains the futures of educated women? The paper explores this question in the context of professional higher education in India, which is by definition tied to employment.

Theoretical Frameworks
Research has explored how non-elite youth are routed to working-class jobs through formal education (Ling, 2015; Ray, 2017; Royster, 2003; Willis, 1977). Aspects that have been explored include tracking into “lower-ability” programs; the misalignment of policy responses and contexts of poverty; youth cultures that reject an academic system that marginalizes them; and professional networks that advance the opportunities of some while excluding those of others. The Indian context poses an additional problem. With respectable femininity defined around domesticity, educated women can become respectable only by valuing marriage and conjugal relations over employment (Belliappa, 2013; Bhattacharya, 2021; Radhakrishnan, 2011).

While this research provides valuable insights, cohort-level studies that trace the professional trajectories of diverse youth from the same cohort are rare. This paper combines cohort-level data with college ethnography and interview data to present an intersectional analysis of college-to-work opportunities.

Methods
The project was anchored at one of the oldest pharma colleges in India. In addition to participant observation at the college from Sept 2019-March 2020, 161 alumni were interviewed, with sampling attending to intersectional inequalities. 11 respondents were from former-untouchable castes, 12 from Scheduled Tribes, and 28 from castes listed as educationally backward. 72 were hostelites during their time at the college. 82 of the 161 interviewed alumni were women. Additionally, a recently graduated focus cohort was surveyed to document professional trajectories.

Findings
I first present the professional trajectories of the focus cohort. This is severely stratified by gender, caste, region, and class. Women and former-untouchable castes cluster in the lowest paid job of clinical pharmacy; a diverse section of men acquire higher paid jobs in pharma marketing and sales; well-to-do women pursue graduate education in India; and relatively better off men pursue higher education cum emigration to Canada.

In the second part, I focus on the best paid jobs available to recent graduates—pharma marketing. I show how masculine fun [masti], learned in college hostels, labs, and across the city, produces subjectivities that align young men with pharma marketing. Women too have fun, but theirs is a demure, spatially truncated fun (Lukose, 2009).

To begin with, the structure of hostel life concentrates fun spatially to the men’s hostel. Regardless of whether they reside in the hostel or not, young men routinely visit and stay at the men’s hostel. Ironically, exam times are the most “fun” times, with communal learning, horseplay, and crossing (Rampton, 1995) blending into each other. The hostel extended into the city, with young men wandering the city at night for a cup of tea, a bike ride, or just to sit along temple walls. Women’s hostel on the other hand restricted entry to residents; even female cohort mates are disallowed entry. Additionally, strict timings kept women out of the city, if they did not return by 8pm, they faced severe consequences. Furthermore, women described themselves as “sincere” and pursued relatively fun-less study routines during exams. The only equivalence of fun achieved during college life was in laboratories, which were structured as gender-neutral, science spaces. Thus, while women and men had fun in college, specific kinds of gendered subjectivities were advanced.

Marketing jobs required graduates to socialize with stranger-experts (medical doctors) in varied kinds of spaces (hospitals, clinics, restaurants, and cafes), during night and day. For young women, such socialization with diverse people in uncontained spaces and beyond a typical working day was “unthinkable.” “Maine socha hi nahi” [I didn’t even think about it” was the most frequent response from young women to my questions about a marketing career. Unlike in China, where young women work in sales (Sier, 2021), pharma sales is unthinkable for young women in India even though it is the only well-paid option available.

Contribution
Research has cautioned that the college-to-workplace transition reinforces inequalities. This paper demonstrates how gendered fun at college tracks youth into specific professional trajectories. Unlike in Willis’ seminal study, this is not an anti-academic fun, rather academics is integrated into fun. While masculine fun is spatially and temporality expansive, women pursue “respectable” fun and “sincere” academics that constricts their professional horizons.

On the one hand, anthropologists of youth culture have elaborated the gendered dynamics of fun but ignored the implications of fun for achievement (Krishnan, 2014; Nakassis, 2016). On the other hand, education researchers narrowly focus on access and discrimination to explain inequality (Subramanian, 2019). Combining insights from both, I have shown the implications of gendered fun for professional inequality. Further, I extend respectability beyond conjugality to show how it interrupts the opportunities of educated women.

References
AISHE. (2020). All India survey in higher education. GoI.
Belliappa, J. (2013). Gender, class and reflexive modernity in India. Springer.
Bhattacharya, S. (2021). Desperately seeking Shah Rukh. Harper Collins.
John, M. E. (2021). Feminism, sexual violence, and the times of# MeToo in India. In Handbook of Gender in South Asia (pp. 335-350). Routledge.
Krishnan, S. (2014). Making ladies of girls (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford).
Ling, M. (2015). “Bad students go to vocational schools!” The China Journal, (73), 108-131.
Lukose, R. A. (2009). Liberalization's children. Duke University Press.
Nakassis, C. V. (2016). Doing style. University of Chicago Press.
Radhakrishnan, S. (2011). Appropriately Indian. Duke University Press.
Rampton, B. (1995). Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation. Pragmatics, 5(4), 485-513.
Ray, R. (2017). The making of a teenage service class. Univ of California Press.
Royster, D. (2003). Race and the invisible hand. Univ of California Press.
Sier, W. (2021). Rural university graduates as sales workers in south and central China. Pacific Affairs, 94(2), 265-283.
Subramanian, A. (2019). The caste of merit. Harvard University Press.
Willis, P. (2017). Learning to labour. Routledge.

Author

• Leya Mathew, Ahmedabad University