Socialisation through Work: Lived Experiences of Informal Sector Women Workers in the National Capital Region

How are women socialised into gendered work, and how do they learn patriarchal values through work? This paper explores this question by examining the experiences of informal sector women workers in the National Capital Region. These women, including paid domestic workers, self-employed workers, and home-based workers, were in gendered occupations. How were these women inducted into the world of work? There were commonalities and differences observed in the socialisation processes. As far as commonalities are concerned, firstly, within all contexts and processes, women were inducted into gendered division of work by mainly intimate women members of both natal and marital families; secondly, they learn patriarchal values and subordination of women’s work through these processes; thirdly, they learnt to provide unpaid labour in both productive and reproductive domains as per the needs of the families. However, the socialisation processes differed across geographical contexts and with the diversity of productive and reproductive tasks. The processes of socialisation into gendered work varied depending on the needs of families. There were outliers, too. Socialisation influenced their future choice of occupations that demanded cheap, flexible, informal labour.