Historical Background of Gender Discrimination in Indian Workplaces

Walk into any Indian workplace today and you will see a story written in layers. Some women sit in glass-fronted offices coding for global clients, others stitch garments for export brands in cramped units, and many more bend over fields, brick kilns, or other people’s homes for wages that rarely make it to a payslip. This unequal landscape did not appear overnight. It is the product of centuries of caste rules, patriarchal norms, and economic shifts that decided long ago who got to work, who got paid, and who got to lead. Understanding this background is the first step to making sense of why gender politics still shapes the Indian workplace.

The deep roots of gender discrimination 🔗

Gender discrimination in India is not a modern HR problem. It is a social inheritance built over generations through caste, religion, and family structure. Historians of ancient India point out that women in the early Vedic period held a relatively equal standing with men in economic and ritual life, but their status declined steadily as Brahmanical norms, the rigid caste system, and joint family controls hardened around them. By the time codified texts like the Manusmriti gained authority, women were broadly treated as dependents of fathers, husbands, and sons, with little independent claim to property or public work.

Feminist scholars describe this layered system as Brahmanical patriarchy, a structure where caste purity and women’s sexuality are policed together. Controlling who a woman marries, what she eats, and where she works became a way to preserve caste boundaries. The result was a society in which a woman’s labour was assumed to belong first to her household and her caste, not to herself.

Colonial reinforcement of inequality 🔗

British rule did not dismantle this order, it often hardened it. Colonial administrators treated caste as a natural historical order and layered Western notions of gender on top of it, producing a state that simultaneously preserved caste hierarchy and imported Victorian ideas about the “respectable” home-bound woman. Upper-caste reformers pushed for women’s education, but mainly within a model of the educated wife and mother. Lower-caste and Adivasi women, who had long worked outside the home in fields and crafts, were rarely part of this conversation about empowerment.

The triple jeopardy faced by Dalit women 🔗

For Dalit and other lower-caste women, oppression has never been a single axis. The feminist historian Uma Chakravarti and others describe their condition as a triple oppression of caste, class, and gender, where they face caste violence from dominant castes, class exploitation as labourers, and patriarchal control from men in their own community as well. A 2024 study on labour market aspirations found that around 95 percent of manual scavengers in India are Dalit women, a chilling statistic that shows how caste, gender, and economic deprivation converge to lock women into the most degrading and dangerous jobs.

This intersectional disadvantage is also documented in formal research. A study using a large skill-training programme in rural India found that Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women had the lowest income aspirations and expectations across all groups, supporting what scholars call the double jeopardy hypothesis. When a Dalit woman walks into a job interview, she is not just one identity meeting a recruiter. She is carrying the weight of who her ancestors were, what work they were allowed to do, and what neighbourhoods they were forced to live in.

How history shaped today’s stratified labour market 🔗

The Indian labour market did not evolve as a neutral meeting of skills and opportunity. It inherited social rules about who does what kind of work. Caste-based occupational segregation, where leatherwork, scavenging, weaving, or priestly duties were tied to specific groups, did not disappear with industrialisation. It mutated into a modern hierarchy where some communities cluster in low-paid, insecure work while others dominate professional and managerial roles.

Occupational segregation and locked mobility 🔗

Research published in the Journal for Labour Market Research notes that India has remarkably low levels of occupational and spatial mobility, and caste-based labour market networks have locked entire groups of individuals into narrow occupational categories for generations. For women within these caste groups, the trap is doubly tight. They are expected to follow the caste’s traditional occupations and also obey gender norms that limit where they can travel, when they can work, and whom they can interact with.

Even when women cross the threshold into formal employment, they often enter “feminised” sectors like nursing, teaching, garment manufacturing, or domestic work, which are paid less and offer slower career progression. This is not an accident of preference. It reflects long-standing social ideas that women are naturally suited to caring, cleaning, and stitching, ideas that get translated into hiring patterns and salary structures.

The persistent gender wage and participation gap 🔗

The numbers expose how stubborn this stratification is. India’s Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) tells a striking story. According to the Observer Research Foundation, the FLFPR stood at 24.1 percent shortly after Independence in 1955, rose to 33 percent in 1972, and then steadily declined to its lowest level of 23 percent in 2017. This is unusual. In most economies, women’s workforce participation rises with GDP and education. In India, it fell during decades of fast growth, suggesting that economic expansion alone cannot dislodge entrenched gender norms.

The wage gap has been just as sticky. Research highlighted by the London School of Economics found that the female wage has remained about 60 to 65 percent of the male wage on average over the last three decades, while women in India also spend up to 352 minutes a day on domestic work, compared to just 52 minutes for men. That second figure is crucial. The Indian workplace runs on the assumption that someone else, almost always a woman, is taking care of the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving for free at home. This invisible subsidy props up the formal economy while keeping women out of it.

The informal economy and women’s invisibility 🔗

A large share of working Indian women are not in offices or factories at all, but in the informal economy as domestic workers, street vendors, home-based piece-rate workers, agricultural labourers, and waste pickers. A 2025 study in Discover Sustainability found that women in informal employment face significant income insecurity, lack of legal protection, and limited access to social benefits, which exacerbates existing gender inequalities. Periodic Labour Force Survey data also shows that much of the recent rise in women’s workforce participation has come from unpaid family labour and own-account work, not from salaried or wage employment, which means more women are “working” on paper without gaining real income security.

Globalisation: a double-edged sword 🔗

India’s economic liberalisation in 1991 opened doors that had been closed for decades. Multinational companies arrived, the service sector exploded, and new industries from IT to BPO to e-commerce created roles that had no traditional caste association. For many urban, English-educated women, this was genuinely transformative. Globalisation gave them access to jobs in software, finance, aviation, banking, and insurance, sectors that simply did not exist at this scale before the 1990s.

New opportunities for some women 🔗

The benefits are real and worth recognising. A critical review of globalisation’s impact noted that in India, the ratio of women in senior management has reached 39 percent, compared to 31 percent globally, and more than 98 percent of enterprises have at least one woman in top management. The export-oriented growth of the post-liberalisation era also expanded women’s presence in industries like garments, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Information and communication technologies, in particular, have created flexible, remote, and skill-based opportunities that partly bypass older social gatekeeping.

Reinforcing old disparities in new ways 🔗

However, the gains have been deeply uneven. Globalisation has often pushed women further into informal and precarious work rather than formalising them. A PubMed review of macro-economic change in India concluded that liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation, in the absence of strong public policy, will worsen women’s position because they amplify existing discrimination through the household, the market, and gender relations. Global brands outsource production to small subcontractors who hire women on piece-rates, with no contract, no benefits, and no recourse. When demand shifts or a recession hits, these are the first jobs to vanish.

There is also a digital and educational divide. The same forces that lifted urban graduates have left out women without English, without internet access, or with caste and class backgrounds that exclude them from professional networks. Globalisation, in other words, has rewarded women who were already closer to power and made life harder for those at the bottom of the caste and class hierarchy. As one critical review put it, globalisation cannot eliminate gender disparity in the absence of public policy, and to fully use its promise as a driver of equality, governments must address gender gaps in endowments, agency, and access to economic opportunities.

Why this history still matters at work 🔗

Every modern workplace policy, from maternity leave to anti-harassment committees to reservations, is essentially a response to this long history. The Vishaka Guidelines, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, the Maternity Benefit Amendment, and reservations in public employment all exist because the default setting of Indian work life was built to exclude or exploit women, particularly women from marginalised castes. Constitutional guarantees under Articles 14, 15, and 16 on equality, non-discrimination, and equal opportunity in public employment were written precisely because the social baseline was so unequal.

But laws can only do so much when the underlying structure remains. A woman who finally enters a corporate office still goes home to do the bulk of unpaid care work. A Dalit woman engineer may face quiet exclusion from social networks that decide promotions. A migrant worker from a Scheduled Tribe community building city flyovers may not even appear in any official labour register. The historical background of gender discrimination is not a closed chapter, it is the operating system on which today’s workplace runs.

What do you think? If caste, class, and gender are so deeply intertwined in shaping work, can policies that address only one of them, like gender quotas alone or caste reservations alone, ever be enough? And what would a workplace look like if it genuinely accounted for the unpaid hours women put in at home before they ever clock into a “real” job?

References

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