The Impact of Caste and Class on Women’s Work in India

Walk into any Indian city and you will see women working everywhere – corporate boardrooms, garment factories, construction sites, classrooms, and homes where they wash dishes for other families. Yet their experiences of work are wildly different, and the difference is not just about education or skill. Caste and class quietly decide who gets to do what kind of work, who earns what, and who is even allowed to step out of the house for paid labour. To understand women’s work in India, we have to look at how gender intersects with these two powerful social forces.

Why intersectionality matters when we talk about women’s work 🔗

The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to explain how different identities – gender, race, class, caste – overlap to produce unique forms of advantage or disadvantage. A single-axis view that treats all women as one group misses the everyday reality on the ground. A Dalit agricultural labourer in Bihar and an upper-caste IT professional in Bengaluru are both “women workers,” but their work lives have almost nothing in common.

Indian feminist scholars, particularly Sharmila Rege, pushed back against mainstream feminism for universalising the experiences of upper-caste, middle-class women. Rege proposed a “Dalit feminist standpoint” that insists any feminism ignoring caste is incomplete. This insight is critical because it reshapes how we read labour statistics, wage gaps, and workforce participation rates.

Historical overview: how caste and class shaped women’s work 🔗

For centuries, the caste system did not just rank communities; it assigned them occupations. Women’s work was an extension of these caste-based occupations. Brahmin women were associated with religious rituals, teaching, and household management. Artisan-caste women worked alongside men in weaving, pottery, or metalwork. Women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were pushed into the most stigmatised and physically demanding tasks – agricultural labour, manual scavenging, leatherwork, and sanitation.

The idea of “purity” and women’s seclusion 🔗

Upper-caste households used women’s withdrawal from paid work as a marker of status. The logic was simple but harsh – if your women stayed home, your family was respectable enough not to “need” their labour. This is why, historically, working outside the house was considered a social stigma or a low-status activity for women, and only the poorest women, mostly from oppressed castes, worked in blue-collar jobs out of sheer necessity. Once a family’s income improved, women were often pulled out of the workforce as a sign of upward mobility.

The caste-based sexual division of labour 🔗

This historical division produced what some scholars call a “feminine caste contract” – a sociopolitical arrangement where the most degrading, invisible, and underpaid work is reserved for women from oppressed castes. The clearest example is manual scavenging. Despite legal bans, an estimated 95% of manual scavengers in India are Dalit women. The healthcare housekeeping and sanitation workforce shows a similar pattern, with women from oppressed castes and backward classes predominantly recruited into work regarded as “polluting”. The work is essential, but the workers are invisible.

Contemporary shifts: liberalization and the changing class landscape 🔗

The 1991 economic liberalization promised to break old hierarchies. New service-sector jobs in IT, banking, retail, and healthcare opened up to women who had the right education and English-language skills. In theory, the market should care only about productivity, not caste. In practice, the picture is more complicated.

The paradox of rising education and falling participation 🔗

Indian GDP has grown steadily since liberalization, female schooling has risen sharply, and fertility rates have fallen. Yet women’s labour force participation rate fell from 42.7% in 2004-05 to 23.3% in 2017-18, recovering only modestly in recent years. This is the opposite of what classical economic theory predicts.

Part of the answer lies in caste-class dynamics. As rural households gained income through mechanised agriculture and remittances, many pulled their women out of farm labour to imitate upper-caste norms of female domesticity. Economists call this the “status production” effect – keeping women at home becomes a visible marker of having moved up the class ladder. The IMPRI Institute identifies patriarchal norms causing domestication of women as a sign of upward social mobility, caste and religion as central reasons for the declining female labour force participation rate.

Class mobility without caste erasure 🔗

Liberalization has created a new middle class where caste is less visible in office cubicles than it was in feudal villages. A Dalit woman who becomes a software engineer can, in theory, escape the occupational trap her grandmother faced. But research consistently shows that caste still shapes who gets hired, who gets mentored, and who reaches the top. The corporate sector remains overwhelmingly upper-caste at senior levels, and Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC women are concentrated in entry-level, contractual, or informal roles.

Even within the same workplace, caste can determine which woman gets the white-collar job and which cleans the office bathroom. The class boundary inside an office is often also a caste boundary.

The complex reality of intersectionality today 🔗

The labour market for Indian women is now a layered structure. At the top are formally employed, highly educated women – mostly urban, mostly from upper or dominant castes, and mostly from middle or upper-middle-class families. At the bottom are women in informal, casual, and unpaid work, predominantly from Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and Muslim backgrounds.

The informal economy is overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly marginalised 🔗

Over 90% of employed women in India are in the informal sector, where there is little access to social security, maternity benefits, or legal safeguards. Within this informal economy, the most vulnerable jobs – domestic work, agricultural labour, brick kilns, construction, waste-picking – are dominated by women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. They face the triple burden of low wages, no protection, and social stigma attached to their work.

The wage gap is not just about gender 🔗

Wage data confirms what intersectional theory predicts. The International Labour Organization estimates a 27% gender pay gap in India, with women earning about 73% of what men earn for the same work. But this average hides sharp internal differences. Dalit and Adivasi women earn significantly less than upper-caste women, and the wage gap between Dalit women and upper-caste men is the widest of all combinations. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) found average women’s wages of Rs. 1,815 against Rs. 3,842 for men in its surveys of informal workers.

Mobility is unevenly distributed 🔗

Economist Ashwini Deshpande, who has spent decades studying caste and gender in Indian labour markets, argues that the problem with female labour force participation is less about women’s willingness to work than the economy’s failure to create enough jobs they can realistically take on. But “jobs they can realistically take on” is itself an intersectional question. An upper-caste woman with a postgraduate degree faces a different set of options than a Dalit woman with the same qualifications, because networks, references, and informal hiring biases keep many doors quietly shut.

The U-shaped curve of caste and work 🔗

Indian data shows a curious pattern: workforce participation is highest among illiterate women (largely lower-caste, working out of necessity) and among highly educated women (who can access prestige jobs), with a dip in the middle. Researchers note that it has always been more socially acceptable for women of lower castes to be in the labour market, while moderately educated women from forward castes face the strongest pressure to withdraw. Class aspirations and caste norms interact to push women out of the workforce in precisely the years when they have just enough education to qualify for jobs but not enough to override social prestige concerns.

What changes – and what does not 🔗

Liberalization, urbanisation, and rising education have changed some things. Caste is less openly invoked in hiring conversations. Inter-caste marriages are slowly increasing in cities. New occupational categories have emerged that do not map neatly onto the old varna order. A young Dalit woman today has options her grandmother could not have imagined.

But the underlying architecture has not collapsed. Caste-based occupational segregation persists in sanitation, domestic work, and agriculture. The gender pay gap is wider for marginalised-caste women. Sexual harassment at work is more common and less reported among women in informal and caste-stigmatised jobs. And the unpaid care economy – cooking, cleaning, child-rearing – still falls almost entirely on women, with the heaviest load on those who can least afford to outsource it.

Why this matters for policy 🔗

Policies that treat “women” as a single category miss the point. A scholarship scheme for girls or a maternity benefit law may help an upper-caste, urban, salaried woman significantly more than it helps a Dalit agricultural labourer who is not even counted in formal employment statistics. Genuine progress requires policies designed with intersectionality in mind – reservations that recognise both caste and gender, labour laws that cover informal workers, social protection that does not require formal employment, and cultural shifts that stop treating women’s domesticity as a status symbol.

The conversation about women in the Indian economy cannot be flattened into one story. There are many stories, and they are deeply shaped by the caste and class positions women are born into.

What do you think? Should affirmative action policies in employment be redesigned to explicitly recognise the combined disadvantage of gender and caste, rather than treating them as separate categories? And in your own circle, how visible is the link between caste, class, and the kind of work women do?

References

1. https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-gender/intersectionality-caste-class-gender-india/
2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.03092
3. https://gender.study/gender-and-governance/intersectionality-gender-inequality-class-caste/
4. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aswp.12264
5. https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/As-India-advances-womens-workforce-participation-plummets
6. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/female-labor-participation-india/
7. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
8. https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/gender-wage-gap/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_India
10. https://cgi.princeton.edu/news/ashwini-deshpande-women%E2%80%99s-labor-force-participation-creating-economic-opportunities-transform
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6424343/