- Research & Conference Papers
Gender Based Violence and Women’s Work
This study by Zubaan and Azad generates a qualitative analysis on the correlation between women’s entry into work and the violence women face within the home, community and workplace, based on the testimony of participant women workers.
Through the testimony of participant women workers, many of whom are domestic violence survivors, the study investigates the notion that women’s employment and workforce participation reduce the prevalence of violence in their lives, particularly in the domestic sphere, as a result of gaining empowerment and agency.
On probing, this linear positive correlation between women’s employment and reduced risk of violence did not hold up, revealing that often women’s choice to seek and retain employment becomes an occasion for renewed and vicious attacks against them, especially in the domestic sphere. Women who enter the workforce by rupturing the cycle of structural denial are in turn faced with a more difficult-to-grasp resentment and violence in the personal sphere that plays out due to their newfound independence and choice to exercise agency. The violence in such instances functions both as a deterrent for women’s workforce participation as well as diminishing the sense of accomplishment and identity women gain when they choose employment and financial self-sustenance. Such abuse, hostility, and violence are motivated by a need to restore the patriarchal status quo within families and communities when faced with the social rearrangement taking place as a result of women becoming gainfully employed and independent. Social scientists who have studied this aspect of women’s work anticipate that this kind of patriarchal backlash could dissipate or reorganize with time, as either the woman who faces violence will walk out of the abusive relationship as she now has the financial means to do so or the families and communities will move the needle on their norms and adjust to revised gender relations.
The study reveals the need for network and support spaces to address this under-articulated aspect of women’s work, so that women and also families and communities can better negotiate such social transitions, with the aim of aiding more women to choose employment without having to put themselves through retaliatory abuse and violence.
