Introduction
The relationship between women’s employment and empowerment is characterised by contradictions and contestations (Kabeer, 2008). In Chapter 2, I noted that despite the increase in women’s employment in white-collar services globally, including banking, gender inequalities in labour markets persist. This chapter expands on how these trends relate to perceptions that equate paid work with women’s ‘empowerment’ or an improvement in women’s status (Kabeer, 2008; Pearson, 2004; Stichter and Parpart [eds], 1990). I first review conceptualisations of women’s empowerment and highlight the contested nature of the term. I then discuss the need for further research on women’s empowerment in white-collar services such as banking. Although the contested nature of empowerment has been an important area of study for development geographers, there has been less concern about the empowerment of professional women in general, probably because, based on their access to economic resources, it is assumed they are empowered (Martin and Meyerson, 1998). However, I argue that this raises pertinent questions about how to position professional women in white-collar employment who despite their access to sufficient economic resources, are nonetheless facing gender inequalities in the workplace.
A central feature of women’s ‘empowerment’ relates to its potential to create change towards greater gender equality. The aim of this chapter is to assess, based on empirical evidence on women’s employment, some of the important channels through which women can claim their rights in the workplace, and improve labour market outcomes for women, specifically through collective action, or through public action by the state and/or legislation (Elson, 1999; Tzannatos, 1999). In doing so, I draw attention to the scarcity of research on the role of the state and the influence of legislation on women’s everyday lived experiences of work and employment in banking services in countries like India. I also argue that women
in white-collar service employment tend to utilise passive acts of resistance to challenge gender inequalities in the workplace suggesting that the concept of empowerment needs to include a greater focus on ‘everyday resistance’.
Finally, while most studies tend to emphasise how women’s paid work changes intra-household power relations, I argue for further analyses of how societal norms on femininity, and appropriate gender roles can constrain women’s position in the workplace, and crucially, their responses to gender inequalities. Furthermore, I highlight how women’s responses to gender inequalities are inextricably linked to their class status, calling for an intersectional approach to analyses of empowerment.
Feminist interpretations of empowerment
The assumption that women’s incorporation into the labour force leads to greater empowerment can be traced to early Marxist theories, especially those proposed by Engels (Pearson, 2004).17 However, the debates about the links between women’s employment and empowerment only came to the fore during the 1970s, after Boserup’s (1970) seminal work drew attention to the marginalisation of women from modernisation and industrialisation processes. Increasing women’s access to paid work then became a central component of subsequent development strategies (Kabeer, 1994). Regardless of research that has since contested the notion that participation in the paid labour force engenders uniformly positive outcomes for women (Pearson, 2004), the assumption that increasing women’s employment leads to greater empowerment persists. For example, one of the indicators for the Millennium Development Goal on the empowerment of women is the share of women’s wage employment in the non-agricultural sector.18
An assessment of the empowering impact of employment first requires an understanding of the concept of empowerment. The term has been used in widely
17 Pearson (2004: 117) terms this view as the ‘Engelian myth.’ 18 Source: Millennium Development Goals Indicators, Available at:
divergent contexts from business to social work to development. In relation to women’s empowerment, within the diversity and variety of feminist interpretations of the term, certain commonalities can be discerned. First, the use of a gender analysis of power underpins most approaches. In addition to traditional definitions of power, mainly ‘power to’ (ability to make choices) and ‘power over’ (the exercise of authority), which requires increasing individual’s access to resources, a gender analysis of power includes ‘power with’ (which implies collective action) and ‘power within’ (refers to assets such as self-esteem and self-confidence) (Rowlands, 1997). A gender analysis also draws on Foucault’s concept of power19 as relational, or existing within a network of social relationships. This also includes an understanding of how internalised oppression can create barriers to women’s exercise of power, and women’s ability to challenge gender inequalities (Kumar and Varghese, 2005; Mosedale, 2005; Rowlands, 1997).
Second, empowerment “refers to the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such an ability” (Kabeer, 2001: 19). Therefore, this requires that to be empowered, one would have to have been disempowered in the first place (Kabeer, 2001, 2008). Following from this, Kabeer (2001, 2008) defines empowerment as the expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices (choices that are critical for people to live the lives they want, such as the choice to create livelihoods and who to marry). She states that the ability to make strategic choices is composed of three inter-related components: resources (which enhance the ability to make choices), agency (the ability to define one’s goal and act upon them) and achievements (outcomes of agency). Despite the utility of this approach, there is little clarity on how to identify the disempowered. This may be less relevant when the subjects of discussion are poor women with few economic resources, but raises pertinent questions about how to position professional, middle-class women who may have
19 For a useful overview of theories of power, see Alsop, Bertelsen and Holland (2006: Appendix 2). For a discussion of power and gender, see Kabeer (1994) and Parpart, Rai and Staudt (2002).
access to sufficient economic resources, yet who nonetheless face gender inequalities in the workplace.
Making choice a central element of empowerment inevitably requires an analysis of societal norms and regulations as “conceptions about what is possible, desirable or conceivable in one’s life are shaped in important ways by the society in which one lives and one’s place within its social order” (Kabeer, 2008: 24). For example, when a woman chooses to take up paid work or marry someone she chooses, this may be viewed as exercising agency in contexts where these choices are denied, whereas they would be less significant in contexts where these choices are granted (ibid.). Hence, Raju (2005) notes, empowering processes cannot be conceptualised simply at the level of the individual, but must also be embedded in the wider social context. A multi-level approach to understanding power relations recognises that transforming women’s lives to achieve gender equality requires changes at multiple levels, from the individual, household to community. It also involves other stakeholders such as husbands/partners and community leaders. Such an approach also overcomes critiques that conceptualisations of empowerment focus exclusively on the local and individual level (Parpart, Rai and Staudt, 2002; Raju, 2005).
Another fundamental aspect of feminist approaches to empowerment is that empowerment cannot be bestowed; it has to come from within, implying that participation is an essential aspect of empowerment. However, studies have shown that participation (or access to decision-making) is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for empowerment (Cornwall, 2001; Williams, 2004).20 Indeed, this approach has been critiqued in international development debates regarding the empowerment of the poor and other marginalised groups, particularly the assumption that simple incorporation into development projects leads to empowerment (Williams, 2004). For participation to achieve its transformatory potential, it is essential to understand the ways in which it relates
to wider power structures. These studies also highlight the need to recognise the repressive structures (of gender, caste and class) within communities, which is especially relevant to discussions of women’s empowerment (Hickey and Mohan [eds], 2004; Williams et al., 2003).
In addition, for participation to be effective, it needs to be “one among several tactics for achieving the empowerment of the poor” (Williams, 2004: 102). Extending this to women, researchers have stressed that in addition to participation, empowerment also involves cognitive (women understand their condition and causes of subordination), political (the capacity to organise and mobilise for social change, or collective action) and psychological (the belief that women can act to improve their realities) elements (Bisnath, 2001). The key point is that for empowerment, participation should become a process through which subordinated groups seek to challenge their exploitation by dominant groups (ibid.).
While these interpretations of empowerment draw attention to collective action, some researchers query an over-emphasis on collective action as central to empowerment. Desai (2002: 218) for example, suggests that subtle strategies to challenge existing power relations can also “achieve profound, positive changes in women’s lives without stirring up wide-scale dissent.” In her study of women’s empowerment in a development project in North India, Raju (2005: 202) also hints at the adoption of subtle strategies by women, which has significant implications for understanding the scope for women’s resistance and challenges to gender inequalities:
Women tried to redefine and expand their spaces . . . without being too radical in their approach . . . they used the existing social constructs of male behavior, even if it meant following in many instances existing gender codes . . . women avoid a confrontational approach and try to carve out extended spaces for themselves within the constructs already available, a strategy that can be termed “incremental pragmatism.”
Some studies have also demonstrated that empowerment in one sphere (such as the public sphere) can often be accompanied by disempowerment in another (such as the domestic sphere) (Raju, 2005). So for instance, women could be making remarkable achievements in participating in political decision-making, while at the same time, ideas about their responsibilities in the home remain resistant to change. Although this was discussed in relation to rural development projects (ibid.), the analysis of the tensions between different spheres can also be extended to women’s employment in the formal sector.
Empirical insights into empowerment and the employment of women
Turning to empirical evidence of the impact of paid work on improving women’s status both within and outside the household reveals that most studies focus on women’s employment in export-oriented manufacturing (Gates, 2002; Kabeer, 2000; Wright, 2006), the informal sector (Greenhalgh, 1991; Mies, 1982), and more recently, call centres (Ng and Mitter, 2005; Patel, 2010). The work and employment experiences of professional women in general have also drawn some attention in the academic literature (Gupta et al., 2006; Liddle and Joshi, 1986). However, recent, specific sectoral studies of contemporary services have focused mainly on the IT sector (Fuller and Narasimhan, 2008; Kelkar et al., 2005; Radhakrishnan, 2009), with few studies of women in banking. One reason could be that women’s employment in white-collar services in the Global South falls outside the remit of both development and economic geographers. Although the contested nature of empowerment for women has been a concern for development geographers, there has been less concern about professional women. It is assumed that professional women are already empowered, because they have access to economic resources. However, as Martin and Meyerson’s (1998: 338) study of women in senior management positions in the US indicates:
Although these women had considerable formal power . . . these women exhibited a pattern of disempowerment directly related to their status as women working in a male world.
These observations are supported by studies of professional women in the IT sector in India (Fuller and Narasimhan, 2008; Kelkar et al., 2005; Radhakrishnan, 2009), underscoring the need for more research that conceptualises empowerment
in relation to white-collar service employment.
Existing research, drawing upon women’s experiences in export oriented manufacturing, IT services and transnational call centres yield a mixed picture of women’s empowerment, with claims of increased autonomy and opportunities for women countered by other research suggesting exploitation of women.
Within the complex debates on women’s empowerment and employment, two specific strands of thought can be discerned. The first challenges perceptions of empowerment that rest on the distinction between the public and private spheres. The public/private binary implies that simply gaining access to the public sphere through paid work, and the associated earnings will be sufficient for women’s empowerment (Patel, 2010). In reality, this ignores the nuances of women’s paid work, and its inextricable links with the household, family, kin and community relations (Pearson, 2007).
At the same time, the potential impact of women’s earnings cannot be dismissed entirely. Studies across the world have shown that access to paid work and earnings increases women’s sense of identity and self-worth (Kabeer, 2000). When women become an economic asset, it also provides them with more respect within the family, which sometimes also results in greater say in family decision- making (Kabeer, 2000, 2008). For instance, women in the software sector in Chennai felt they were able to resist the demands of their mothers-in-law, primarily because their salaries contributed a large share to the household budget (Fuller and Narasimhan, 2008). Access to an independent income also allows women greater self-determination, and reduces women’s dependence on their families (Kabeer, 2000; Ward, 1990; Wolf, 1992). Some studies illustrate how transnational call centre work has not revolutionised women’s lives. But working in call centres has altered household relations, and allowed women to recodify societal expectations of appropriate gender roles, including mobility, and in the process, reshape their own identities in positive ways (Basi, 2009; Patel, 2010). For example, women were able to resist pressures to marry, even going as far as to refuse marriage proposals that required them to stay at home, as they were keen
to pursue their careers (Basi, 2009; Patel, 2010). As Patel (2010: 131) observes: “The fact that they not only voice such a desire but are also safe enough to assert their will reflects how far society has come for some women.”
However, traditional gender roles have remained remarkably resistant to change in other aspects, most notably in terms of the domestic division of labour (Basi, 2009; Fuller and Narasimhan, 2008; Kelkar et al., 2002). Despite women’s increasing involvement in paid work, the “impressive resistance of men to an equal involvement in domestic work” (Pearson, 2000, cited in Kabeer, 2008: 48) has resulted in greater workloads for women, variously termed the ‘second shift’, or the ‘double day’ (ibid.). Instead, as discussed in Chapter 2, the burden of domestic work has shifted to other women, either poorer, working class women who are paid to do this work, or older women within the family, such as mothers and mothers-in-law. Patel’s (2010: 108) account of how a call centre worker, who earned more than her husband was still commanded to “Serve food!” is a telling reminder that education and income do not necessarily translate into changes in gender relations.
Part of the problem for women working in services in the new economy in India is that in negotiating changes in gender relations, they are constrained by class dynamics as well as their location at the crossroads of conflicting global and local ideologies. This has been remarked upon in a number of studies, mainly from India (Basi, 2009; Patel, 2010; Radhakrishnan, 2009). Middle-class women, who form the bulk of service sector workers, are construed as the embodiment of national honour and preservers of local cultural traditions. Consequently, when women enter work in IT services and transnational call centres, which are widely depicted as sites of Western imperialism, women have to delicately navigate between local and global images of appropriate gender identities. Women’s autonomy in these contexts can sometimes be interpreted as Westernisation, leading to conflicts with other family members (Basi, 2009). Women’s responses to these conflicts are to enact a form of femininity that adheres to traditional norms, such as putting family ahead of career ambitions (Radhakrishnan, 2009).
These may be strategic choices on the part of the women, based on their belief that they cannot entirely subvert patriarchal norms (Basi, 2009). While they could exercise agency over certain aspects of their lives, such as how to spend their leisure time or what clothes to wear, the strength of patriarchal norms restricted their agency in other areas, such as decisions about marriage, whether they could work after marriage and which jobs they could do (Basi, 2009; Radhakrishan, 2009).
The exploitation of women in the workplace
The other main issue in discussions of empowerment focuses on women’s working conditions, or exploitation in the workplace. A major concern relates to women’s concentration in the informal economy, where women have no access to employment benefits or social protection (Beneria, 2001; Pearson, 2007). Changing trends in the global economy have also raised alarms about the increasing casualisation of employment of some formal sector jobs such as call centres (Mitter et al., 2004; Ward, 1990). The low value attached to women’s work tends to be reflected in low wages, excessive working hours, and poor conditions of work, including health and safety concerns, which “bear little resemblance to the regulated protected ideal of the formal economy” (Pearson, 2007: 204).
These trends are presented as the outcome of global capitalist processes, in which gender subordination is consciously reproduced by capital to suit its purposes. By repeated inferences to cheap, docile female labour, transnational capital has constructed an image that has crept into the corporate vocabulary as real, natural and not up for challenge (Ong, 2000; Wright, 2006). Wright (2006) adds the ‘myth of the disposable Third World woman’ to the prevailing discourse that presents women as passive, patient, flexible, secondary workers, arguing that the creation of this transient, disposable workforce with limited rights is vital for the continued development of capital.
The methods by which capital reinforces these myths have also been extensively discussed. Commonly cited is the use of the term ‘factory daughter’ to signify the relationship between male managers and female workers (Wolf, 1992). The word ‘daughter’ emphasises the junior status of the worker and also allows managers to draw on cultural notions of filial piety and obedience to control the female workforce (Ong, 2000; Wright, 2006). Despite their powerful imagery, given that the context in which these myths were constructed is around employment in export-oriented manufacturing, the question is whether it is relevant to employment in white-collar services, such as banking.
Patel’s (2010) comparison of the extensive media attention and reactions to the rape and murder of a call centre worker, Pratibha Srikant Murthy in Bangalore, India with the attention given to the rape and murder of hundreds of women working in the maquilas in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico suggests that Wright’s (2006) conceptualisation should be qualified as the ‘myth of the disposable, Third World,
working class woman’. The murder of Murthy provoked outrage because middle-
class women are not supposed to be subjected to such violence, whereas for working class women, violence is meant to be part of the hazards of the job (Patel, 2010). Class dynamics are also interlinked with the conflicts of national and global ideologies. Because the bodies of middle-class women are considered sites of national honour, and violations of women’s bodies are viewed as intrusions upon the nation-state, these women need to be protected (ibid.).
The emphasis on protection of women’s bodies leads to a similar preoccupation with surveillance, and discipline and control of the workforce that was previously noted by researchers of export-oriented manufacturing (Pun, 2005). For example, call centre employees are closely guarded and monitored at work through key card entry and strict security to ensure non-employees do not enter, and workers are