ABSTRACT
A key feature of scholarship on women and gender in India is the concern with women's participation in paid work and employment. Questions of what constitutes work, the impact of employment on family dynamics and on women's well-being, the segregation of women workers in certain jobs low in occupational hierarchy, payment or status, a concentration of women in the informal sector or in unpaid labour, the gendered economic inequalities reflected through wage differentials and the casualisation of the female labour force, and the construction of identity of women as workers, despite the foregrounding of their domestic/reproductive roles, in colonial and post-colonial India have all been the subject of extensive debates and discussions in social science scholarship in India (Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2010; Raju and Bagchi 1993; Swaminathan 2009). In addition, for over two decades now, the impact of globalisation or the neo-liberal structuring of the economy on women's work patterns has been the focus of research attention, yielding both vast amounts of empirical data and theoretical insights (Mazumdar 2007; Rege 2007; Unni 2002).
