ABSTRACT
Women participate in paid work especially outside the home much less than men. Moreover, women generally tend to concentrate in low-paid unskilled jobs in the informal sector of the economy. These features are more predominant in the developing countries with India leading in many respects. However, developed countries to an extent also share the same experience of gender segregation in the labour market. Scholars from different disciplines of social sciences have offered explanations mainly based on empirical findings of the Western countries with an aim to theorise labour market discrimination. Many of these explanations are quite relevant for the developing countries as well. Recent research on developing countries’ experience of labour market disparities has enriched both theoretical and empirical literature on the issue. Feminist scholars have grouped the theoretical interpretations of women’s labour market behaviour broadly into two categories with some convergence over the years: individual choice and structural constraints. In this chapter, we aim to understand a typical labour market behaviour of urban women in West Bengal, a state not among the richer ones in India. Women’s comparatively low work participation and heavy concentration in low-paid domestic service in this state apparently look like an individual choice. In reality, it is constrained by the structural rigidities originating from cultural practices on the one hand and economic performance and inadequate state intervention on the other. In the rest of this section, we will discuss some relevant theoretical and methodological issues. The next two sections deal with women’s work in rural and urban West Bengal. We close this chapter with a discussion of girl children’s work behaviour in the urban areas of the state.
