Indian Culture Restricts Women's Access to Work

India is a multifaceted society where no generalization could apply to all of the nation’s various regional, religious, social, and economic groups. Nevertheless, certain broad circumstances in which Indian women live affect the ways they participate in the economy. Indian society is extremely hierarchical with virtually everyone ranked relative to others according to their caste(or caste-like group), class, wealth, and power. This ranking even exists in areas where it is not openly acknowledged, such as certain business settings. Though specific customs vary from region to region within the country, there are different standards of behavior for men and women that carry over into the work environment. Women are expected to be chaste and especially modest in all actions (Dube and Palriwala, 1990), which may constrain their ability to perform in the workplace on an equal basis with men.

Another related aspect of life in India is purdah—literally, the veiling and seclusion of women. Fewer women, especially younger women, observe purdah today, but those who still do face constraints beyond those already placed on them by other hierarchical practices(Heitzman and Worden, 1996). These cultural rules place some Indian women, particularly those of lower caste, in a paradoxicalsituation: when a family suffers economically, people often think that a woman should go out and work, yet at the same time the woman’s participation in employment outside the home is viewed as “slightly inappropriate, subtly wrong, and definitely dangerous to their chastity and womanly virtue” (Dube and Palriwala, 1990, p. 131). When a family recovers from an economic crisis or attempts to improve its status, women may be kept at home as a demonstration of the family’s morality and as a symbol of its financial security.

As in many other countries, working women of all segments of Indian society face various forms of discrimination including sexual harassment. Even professional women find discrimination to be prevalent: two-thirds of the women in one study felt that they had to work harder to receive the same benefits as comparably employed men. It is notable that most of the women in this study who did not perceive discrimination worked in fields (e.g., gynecology) where few, if any, men competed against them (Liddle and Joshi, 1986).