| dc.description.abstract | This study explores women’s experiences of work and employment in the banking
sector in India, addressing the paucity of research in this area. The research
assesses how the assumptions of theories on gender, work and employment,
primarily based on empirical experiences from the Global North can be interpreted
in the Indian context. It argues that experiences of gender inequalities are
geographically reconfigured in the Indian banking sector through the interplay
between gendered organisational practices, local cultural discourses on femininity,
institutional factors, particularly government laws and organisational structures.
The research draws upon a case study of the banking sector in the National Capital
Region (NCR), one of India’s largest consumer financial centres, combining a
questionnaire survey of 156 female bank employees with 74 qualitative interviews
with female and male bank employees in three types of banks. The study uncovers
how gender discrimination, albeit covertly, is widespread in Indian banks.
Gendered organisational practices create universal constraints for Indian women’s
career development. This study, however, reveals how local cultural discourses on
femininity, emphasising respectability and family values lead to distinctively
Indian patterns of gender inequalities in the banking sector serving to highlight the
intersection of gender with class identities. Crucially, the comparison of
government-owned, foreign-owned and Indian private banks demonstrates that
local cultural norms and gendered organisational practices are mediated through
different organisational structures to create varied experiences of gender
discrimination for women in the different banks.
Finally, the study provides new conceptual perspectives for addressing the
limitations of existing theorisations on gender, work and employment. It develops
the concept of ‘family-based femininity’ highlighting the influence of the family in
shaping the nature of gender inequalities in the workplace. Where previous
typologies focused on resistance in the workplace, this research introduces the
notion of ‘compliance in the workplace’, whereby women passively conform to
gendered organisational practices, with little intention to create change. | en_US |
