Join us for the launch of Asiya Islam’s ‘A Woman’s Job’. This new book explores the place and politics of women’s workforce participation in discourses of development, modernisation, and globalisation through the everyday lives of young women workers in urban India.

Against the backdrop of rapid socio-economic change in post-1990 India, scholars and policy makers have expressed surprise at the low rate of women's participation in the workforce, particularly in urban areas. A Woman's Job presents a unique urban ethnography of young lower middle class women's lives in Delhi as they weave in and out of service employment, education, and domestic contracts. Urban, educated, and skilled, these young women seek employment in cafes, malls, call centres, and offices in the globalising landscape of Delhi. Their participation in work enables access to 'things', such as, jeans, smartphones, English language, and the metro, that symbolise global modernity. However, caught in a web of gender, class, and caste inequalities, their identification as 'working' women also generates social anxieties. The book shows how women adopt 'middle-ness' as a strategy of life-making at the multiple sites of work, home, and leisure.

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Meet our speakers and chair

Mary Evans has been an academic in UK universities for several decades. Initially interested in the politics of European Literature, that interest was enhanced and developed by engagement with feminist and gendered accounts of fiction. This led to publications on Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Austen and more recently detective fiction. Alongside that interest were two other concerns: the changing order of higher education and the cultural mechanisms of austerity policies. In all cases these interests have been shared with many others and various contexts. Thank you to all those people.

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, where she has worked since 1999. Her main interests are histories of queer feminist theories and the development of alternative stories and methods (with a particular focus on archives). She’s the author of Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018), and editor of nine edited volumes and special issues on these themes. Her current project is Feminist Knowledge Struggles: Telling Stories Differently, which develops original queer feminist methodologies to challenge the amenability of gendered and sexual discourses to the Right.

Dr Asiya Islam is Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies the relationship between gender and work and is particularly interested in the gendered shaping of the service and emerging digital economy in the Global South, as well as in advancing critical and creative feminist approaches to ethnography. She is engaged in a longitudinal ethnography with young lower middle class women in Delhi, India. This project maps young women’s entry into service work, their intermittent exit to pursue skills training and higher education, as well as to participate in domestic and status production work, and their recent forays into digital work. It presents a nuanced picture of women’s working lives amidst discussions of low rate of women's participation in the workforce in India, and is the basis of her monograph ‘A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in Urban India’ (Cambridge University Press). More recently, she has been researching gender inequalities in and gendered shaping of digital work. This has included research on the ‘gender digital divide’ in India, how women establish work rhythms and worker subjectivities when working-from-home (funded by the British Academy), and working lives of women in platform delivery work in Delhi, India and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Sharmila Parmanand is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Programme Director of the MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation. She co-convenes the Women and Development study group for the UK Development Studies Association and is an Associate Academic at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and an Editorial Board member for the Anti-Trafficking Review journal. She has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge on a Gates Scholarship. 

Shirin M Rai, FBA, is Distinguished Research Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests are in the fields of political economy of development, gender and political institutions and performance and politics. Her recent books include the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward) and Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019. She is currently working on a book titled Doing Politics Sideways. Depletion: the human costs of caring (OUP) explores the multiple facets of social reproductive work and argues that its undervaluing depletes those who perform this work. Struggles to reverse depletion are struggles for a good life, generative of new imaginings of how this work of care, both draining and joyful, can be reorganised.