Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of collective self esteem, age, income, marital status, and education of Indian women in predicting their fashion clothing involvement.

Data were collected by contacting women in their offices, colleges, and malls in five different cities of India (n=397). The self‐administered questionnaire contained items from collective self esteem and fashion clothing involvement scale.

Fashion clothing involvement of Indian women is influenced by age, importance to identity, and public esteem.

There is a large representation of the younger consumer group in the sample. This makes the study findings relevant for targeting young population groups. Distinction has not been made in the sample according to student, working women, and housewives. Further research can be undertaken to understand if women's fashion clothing involvement varies according to their working and non‐working status.

The findings can prove helpful to international and national apparel manufacturers and brands in planning branding and marketing strategies to promote fashion clothing among Indian women.

This is the first study to understand the fashion clothing involvement of Indian women with respect to collective self esteem.

Despite more than 50 years of research into gender and work, the impact of female expatriates persists to be underrepresented in mainstream international human resource management (IHRM) literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the perceptions of married Indian information technology (IT) women regarding career and expatriating discussions they have with their husbands and its impact on their decision making to undertake international assignments.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 married Indian IT women who had undertaken international assignments after marriage. The study includes two data sets, 1: women on less than one-year assignment; 2: women on greater than one-year assignments.

The study found that women who went on short-term assignments of less than one year travelled alone and found it fortunate and convenient to leave their children in the care of their husbands, in-laws, parents and maids. While in the cases of women travelling for longer-term assignments, most husbands accompanied them. The study suggests that while spousal support was the key, having a shared purpose with husbands along with extended family support was equally significant to facilitate women undertaking an international assignment. As an impetus, the authors note a change within the Indian society where both partners come together to make decisions about expatriating.

The authors discuss the implications for IHRM as they relate to gender diversity within organisations.

The research, underpinned by the early workings of a theory of career hierarchy, explores the complexities in expatriation decision-making processes of married women from the emerging economy of India with traditional family values, who are working within a modern and liberal IT industry.

Though female labour force participation (FLFP) rates have been widely analysed across countries, the analysis of migrant women's participation has been consistently ignored in the literature. The few studies that have been conducted concentrate largely on sociological and anthropological aspects of migrant women (see Foner (1976)). This article will investigate immigrant FLFP rates, which are generally found to be different from their counterparts in the immigrants' country of origin. To evaluate the immigrant FLFP rate we analyse and quantify the nature and significance of its various demographic, socio‐economic and cultural determinants.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.

This paper aims to present the challenges facing women in India due to the intersectionality of gender and other forms of identities impacting on their personal and professional lives by exploring the intersection of gender, colour, caste, ethnicity, religion, marital status, and class as sources of discrimination against women in Indian society and workplaces.

The approach is discussing the socio‐cultural traditions leading up to the complexities of multiple intersections of identity for women living and working in India, offering a paradigm shift from Western issues of gender equality towards understanding women's empowerment issues within the Indian context.

Indian women are marginalized in their access to education and healthcare, and they are also compromised in their personal and professional development by being undervalued, underemployed and under‐rewarded. The social implications are the impact of awareness, changing attitudes and corporate social responsibility interventions towards improving the quality of life of women in India. Multinational corporations as well as Indian organizations may be influenced to implement diversity policies and practices beyond individual identities to incorporate the complex intersectionality that is the reality and dilemma of the challenges faced by Indian women in society, in professional careers and within organizations.

Readers will find originality and value in understanding the complexities of gender equality issues in India as compared to other countries and contexts. It can inform researchers, academics, practitioners and policy makers on how to address the disparities and discrimination against women and guide comparative discourses between India and other countries towards eliminating discrimination against women.

This chapter sets up the national event of Carnival in Trinidad as a contested space of liberation and tradition. It explores the intersections of gender and race for a group of young Indian Trinidadian women and highlights the ways in which agency, articulated as sexual liberation and ‘free-up’, is enabled and disabled in relation to mas¹ performance.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad in 2011 (Raghunandan, K. (2014). The Dougla poetics of Indianness: Negotiating race and gender in Trinidad. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds), this chapter draws on a selection of interviews conducted with a group of young Indian Trinidadian women between the ages of 18 and 25.

The binaristic positioning of modern, morally destructive masquerader vis-à-vis the traditional non-participant is an inadequate approach and this has, to a significant extent, dominated media representations of Indian women which draw on these monolithic stereotypes. There are many ways of ‘doing’ gender and race. Playing mas is only one of them.

These findings are in no way representative of the entire Indian descent population, nor can the young women’s talk be regarded as wholly representative of their lives. Rather, these are a snapshot of their discursively produced subjectivities within a particular time and space.

By problematising the mixed and multicultural image of Carnival, this chapter makes a contribution to Carnival scholarship in its analysis of Indian Trinidadian women’s voices which do not typically feature in Carnival literature. In its drawing upon these voices as epistemological sources, it makes a contribution to wider discourses of race, gender and the nation in the Trinidadian context.

India's dynamic turn toward globalization brings new eating practices driven by desires for status and convenience. Traditional expectations of women as keepers of domestic culture persist as fears of a possible loss of Indianness are projected onto women. In the reflexive identity processes of urban middle-class Hindu women, new normative beauty ideals are often impossible to attain, resulting in Western-style food-related health problems. Awareness of these risks may be deflected by matrimonial, body image, and time pressures, as depicted in a preliminary model of food globalization and women's identities.

This paper aims to study the impediments and difficulties that prevent Indian women from becoming entrepreneurs.

Data were obtained through a survey involving 15 experts. Based on the feedback provided by the experts, ten relevant barriers in the context of Indian micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) were chosen. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data. These ten barriers create obstruction for Indian women as entrepreneurs. These barriers were ranked, and causal relationships among them established using interpretive structural modeling and Matrice d’Impacts croises-multiplication appliqúean classment (cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) (ISM–MICMAC) approach.

This study identifies, on the basis of extant literature and experts’ opinion, ten barriers to female entrepreneurship. These barriers were ranked, and causal relationships among them established using the ISM–MICMAC approach. On the basis of ranking, women can move forward in MSMEs after removing these obstacles and it will have good results.

In this research, with literature reviews and experts opinion, ten barriers have been identified for women’s entrepreneurship and have been used to build the model.

To bring Indian women forward in the field of entrepreneurship, both the society and the government should work together, and efforts should be made to overcome the obstacles coming in the way of entrepreneurs.

Female entrepreneurship in India faces many problems including negative attitude of authorities and society toward women. The society and authorities have no format or model for Indian women to move forward in the entrepreneurship sector.

This study seeks to identify, on the basis of a thorough review of literature and expert opinion, major barriers to female entrepreneurship in the context of Indian MSMEs.

Drawing from the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) theory, this paper aims to identify unique job demands, job resources and personal resources in the context of Indian women flexpatriates (IWFs) and understand how they manage to perform in their short-term international assignments (SIAs).

This study takes a qualitative approach by conducting in-depth interviews of 15 IWFs.

Thematic analysis reveals dual-role workload, emotional demands and diluted importance of the assignments as job demands; opportunity for professional growth, social support and combination of work and leisure as job resources, and building up of self-esteem and self-efficacy as personal resources. Also, the unique Indian family structure, Indian women's desire to have “me-time” and zeal to strengthen their identity emerge as differentiating factors for IWFs that enhance their performance.

IWFs are enthusiastic to take up SIAs as it gives them opportunity to enhance their career and strengthen their identity. In addition to their willingness to travel, advance planning of SIAs and profiling of women based on marital status, family type and children can be done for selection.

Despite hailing from paternalistic and male-dominating society and facing familial challenges, IWFs find SIAs liberating, which gives them an opportunity to spend some “me-time,” strengthen their identity and enhance their professional growth.

This is the first qualitative study contextualizing flexpatriation with gender and region by studying Indian women professionals.

The issue of women’s under-representation in male-dominated occupations has been a topic of research for the last few decades. The extant literature has identified gender differences and social and structural discrimination based on a theoretical lens and sensitising concepts around which career barriers were experienced by women within a developed nation’s context (Eaton et al., 2020; French & Strachan, 2009; Hernandez & Ritchie, 2015; Miner et al., 2018). While there has been research on women in transport in developed countries, there has been little research on women employees’ career experiences within Indian Railways. To address this gap, this chapter explores the career barriers of women employed in male-dominated occupations within Indian Railways, in relation to gendered cultural norms. In-depth semi-structured interviews have been undertaken to understand the lived experiences of women employees. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings highlight the interplay of barriers such as gender roles, limited empowerment and occupational segregation, working conditions, lack of role models and mentors, backlash by men, queen-bee behaviour, beta career priorities and restricted informal networks that collectively restrict women in achieving senior level positions in such occupations.