ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the enabling and constraining factors that allow or deny poor women’s access to public space and their engagement in the informal economy. This chapter compares women’s negotiation and resistance strategies to their male counterparts referring men’s strategies from the previous chapter. Few women operate informal businesses in comparison to their male counterparts due to the nature of gendered space and constraints posed by patriarchal norms and purdah (veil) in women’s access to public space. The comparison between men’s and women’s resistance strategies reveal that they use more or less similar strategies to avoid payment but women often have a favourable position operating businesses in the parochial realm and claim those spaces as their own, denying payment to local enforcers. Women also use their vulnerabilities to avoid payment of protection money.
