Understanding Gender Politics in Indian Workplaces: Caste, Class, and Gender Dynamics

Step into any Indian city or village, and you’ll see women working everywhere: stitching garments in cramped workshops, selling vegetables, teaching in classrooms, coding in glass-walled offices. Yet the experience of being a woman at work in India is rarely the same as being a man at work. It is shaped by deep-rooted social hierarchies of caste and class, by laws that have evolved over decades, and by everyday negotiations that often go unnoticed. Understanding gender politics in Indian workplaces means moving beyond simple statistics to ask who gets which jobs, who gets paid what, and who feels safe enough to stay.

The Indian labour market: a tale of two economies 🔗

India’s labour market is sharply split between the organised (formal) sector and the unorganised (informal) sector. Most Indian women work in the latter, often without contracts, social security, or legal protection. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24, India’s female Labour Force Participation Rate rose to 41.7%, up from 23.3% in 2017-18. But participation numbers tell only half the story. Researchers at Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis point out that this rise has not been accompanied by higher earnings, regular salaried jobs, or access to social protection.

The International Labour Organization estimates that around 82% of women’s employment in India is concentrated in the informal economy, compared with a smaller share for men. Women dominate sectors like domestic work, agricultural labour, home-based garment production, beedi rolling, and construction site assistance. The E-Shram portal registrations showed that women held roughly 96% of the share in domestic and household work, while men dominated agricultural and construction registrations.

What unorganised work really means 🔗

“Unorganised” is a polite term for a harsh reality. It means no written contract, no provident fund, no paid leave, no maternity benefit, and no protection if the employer suddenly stops paying. A woman selling cooked food outside a college, a tailor working from home for a contractor, or a daily wager carrying bricks on a construction site all share one thing: their livelihoods depend on relationships rather than rights. When the COVID-19 lockdown struck in 2020, this fragility became visible. Studies found that 47% of women lost their jobs during the first lockdown and did not return to work by year’s end, while only 7% of men faced the same fate.

How caste and class shape who works where 🔗

Gender in the Indian workplace cannot be understood without caste and class. The same job carries very different meanings depending on the social location of the worker. A Brahmin woman who chooses to work as a college lecturer and a Dalit woman who is expected to clean human waste both technically participate in the labour force, but their experiences are not comparable in any honest sense. Research highlighted by the International Dalit Solidarity Network shows that Dalit women workers face disproportionately high levels of verbal abuse, physical assault, and sexual harassment at work.

This is what scholars call intersectionality: the way overlapping identities produce specific patterns of disadvantage. Around 95% of manual scavengers in India are Dalit women, a statistic that captures how caste-based occupational segregation, gender norms, and economic deprivation converge to trap certain women in degrading and dangerous work. Upper-caste, urban, English-speaking women still face barriers, but their barriers are usually about glass ceilings rather than dirty floors.

Occupational segregation in numbers 🔗

A study published in the Journal for Labour Market Research on gender and caste-based wage discrimination found that wage gaps in India are significantly explained by occupational segregation, with Scheduled Caste workers and women clustered in casual labour and agricultural work, while upper-caste men dominate the better-paying and more prestigious occupations. Even within the same industry, women tend to be hired in lower-skill, lower-paid roles. The India Development Review notes that 72.3% of India’s roughly 35 million unorganised handloom workers are women, and women-headed firms make up 45% of unorganised manufacturing enterprises, with 95% of them operating from home.

Wage discrimination and the feminisation of low-paying jobs 🔗

The gender wage gap in India is not just a number on an international index. It is the daily reality of two workers doing comparable jobs and receiving very different pay. A recent quantile regression analysis in the Journal of Social and Economic Development found a pronounced gender wage gap in both regular and casual employment, with a notable “sticky floor” effect at lower income quantiles. In other words, the gap is worst for women already at the bottom of the wage distribution, the very women who can least afford it.

The same study identified a “marital penalty” for women and a “marital premium” for men, meaning marriage tends to reduce a woman’s earnings but boost a man’s. Employers often assume married women will prioritise family over work, and this assumption translates into fewer promotions and lower pay. Caste-based wage disparities also persist, particularly affecting casual workers in urban markets.

Why some occupations become “women’s jobs” 🔗

Certain occupations in India have become heavily feminised: nursing, anganwadi work, ASHA work, domestic help, garment stitching, primary school teaching, and beauty services. These are not random patterns. They reflect the social belief that women are naturally suited to care, cleaning, nurturing, and detail-oriented manual work. The trouble is that feminised occupations are almost always lower paid and lower in status. ASHA workers, who form the backbone of India’s rural health system, are still classified as “volunteers” rather than employees and receive modest honorariums rather than salaries.

Once a job is marked as “women’s work”, wages tend to stagnate even as responsibilities grow. The reverse is also true: occupations dominated by men often command higher wages even when the skill requirements are similar. This circular logic, where women earn less because they do “women’s work” and the work is undervalued because women do it, is one of the most persistent features of the Indian labour market.

Sexual harassment at the workplace 🔗

For many Indian women, the question is not just whether work pays well but whether work is safe. Sexual harassment ranges from inappropriate comments and unwanted touching to coercion and assault. It happens in corporate offices, on factory floors, in fields, in domestic employers’ homes, and in informal worksites where there is no HR department to complain to.

India’s legal response began with the Supreme Court’s Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan judgment of 1997, which framed sexual harassment as a violation of fundamental rights and laid down binding guidelines for employers. Sixteen years later, these guidelines became statute through the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, commonly known as the POSH Act. The Act requires every workplace with ten or more employees to set up an Internal Complaints Committee, defines sexual harassment broadly, and lays out procedures for complaint, inquiry, and redressal.

The gap between law and reality 🔗

Strong laws on paper do not automatically translate into safe workplaces. Compliance with the POSH Act remains uneven, particularly among smaller firms and in the unorganised sector, which by definition lies outside the formal employer-employee relationship. The 2025 amendments to the Companies (Accounts) Rules now require companies to disclose POSH complaint statistics in their Board Reports, including complaints received, resolved, and pending for over 90 days. This is meant to increase transparency, but it primarily affects the formal sector.

For domestic workers, agricultural labourers, and informal sector employees, the POSH Act is largely a distant promise. There is no internal committee in a household that employs a part-time helper, and Local Committees set up by district authorities are often under-resourced and poorly publicised. Reporting harassment also carries social costs: women fear losing jobs, family disapproval, and judgmental treatment within the judicial system itself.

Maternity, motherhood, and the workplace 🔗

The other major workplace battle for Indian women is around motherhood. Pregnancy and childbirth still routinely cost women their jobs, their promotions, or their willingness to stay in the workforce at all. The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, was India’s foundational law on paid maternity leave for women in factories, mines, plantations, and similar establishments.

The 2017 amendment was a significant step forward. It extended paid maternity leave for women with fewer than two surviving children from 12 weeks to 26 weeks, introduced 12 weeks of leave for adoptive and commissioning mothers, allowed work-from-home options where the nature of work permitted, and mandated crèche facilities in establishments with 50 or more employees. India became one of the more generous countries globally in terms of statutory maternity leave for formal sector workers.

Who actually benefits from maternity protections 🔗

The catch is, once again, the formal-informal divide. The Maternity Benefit Act applies to organised sector establishments. The roughly 90% of Indian women who work informally, whether as domestic helpers, farm labourers, or home-based workers, have little practical access to its provisions. Even within the formal sector, some employers reportedly avoid hiring women of childbearing age or push them out subtly after their leave ends, treating the legal cost of maternity benefit as a reason to discriminate at the hiring stage.

Inadequate childcare infrastructure adds another layer. Without affordable crèches, school timings that accommodate working parents, or shared domestic responsibility at home, women carry what scholars call the “double burden” of paid work and unpaid care work. The Economic Survey in recent years has highlighted that women’s unpaid care work contributes substantial unrecognised value to the economy, yet rarely translates into income, savings, or empowerment for the women themselves.

Putting it all together 🔗

Gender politics in the Indian workplace is not a single issue. It is the layered effect of where women are allowed to work, what they get paid, how safe they feel, and whether the law reaches them when things go wrong. Caste decides which women clean toilets and which women run boardrooms. Class decides who can afford to leave a bad job. Gender norms decide who is expected to cook dinner after a ten-hour shift. Together, these forces shape an Indian labour market where formal participation rates are rising on paper but the quality, dignity, and security of women’s work remain deeply uneven.

Real change requires more than well-drafted laws. It requires extending the reach of those laws into the informal sector, investing in care infrastructure, recognising unpaid work, challenging the social belief that certain jobs are inherently feminine or masculine, and confronting the caste hierarchies that decide who does the most undervalued work. None of this is quick. But understanding the architecture of the problem is the first honest step.

What do you think? If India’s female labour force participation is rising mainly through unpaid family work and low-paid self-employment, can we really call it progress? And how should workplace laws like POSH and the Maternity Benefit Act be redesigned to reach the women who need them most: the domestic workers, farm labourers, and home-based producers who form the bulk of the female workforce?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2057970
2. https://ceda.ashoka.edu.in/too-good-to-be-true-steadily-rising-female-labour-force-participation-rates-in-india/
3. https://gender.study/gender-and-governance/women-india-informal-sector-indispensable/
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1407054/india-share-of-workers-in-informal-sector-by-gender/
5. https://idsn.org/key-issues/dalit-women/violence-against-dalit-women/
6. https://gender.study/gender-and-governance/intersectionality-gender-inequality-class-caste/
7. https://labourmarketresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12651-013-0152-z
8. https://idronline.org/article/gender/how-many-women-does-indias-manufacturing-sector-employ/
9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40847-025-00492-3
10. https://main.sci.gov.in/judgment/judis/13856.pdf
11. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/2104
12. https://knowledge.dlapiper.com/dlapiperknowledge/globalemploymentlatestdevelopments/2025/workplace-harassment-rules-tightened
13. https://labour.gov.in/sites/default/files/maternity_benefit_act_1961.pdf
14. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/economicsurvey/