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Paper short abstract:

This paper will be a short documentary. It examines the intersection between economic abuse (controlling a woman’s work life) and women’s employment in India. It explores five women's experiences of navigating the systemic and familial challenges to negotiate economic freedom through paid work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will be in the form of a short documentary (20 mins). This film explores the intersection of economic abuse and women’s employment in Patna (Bihar), India. Bihar’s female labour force participation rate of 6.4% in 2022 (NFHS-5, 2019–21) is one of the lowest in the country. Preventing women from working is a form of economic abuse, recognised in the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, India (2005).

The film is based on the accounts of five women, following interviews with 50 women and group discussions with 25 more women representing diverse class, religious, and caste backgrounds. Further, they represented a diversity of occupational categories, including professional roles, manual work, daily wage work, and homemakers.

The film explores the role of the invisible burden of unpaid care work, male control over women’s work life, and deeply normalised social norms and systemic challenges in limiting women’s ability to participate in the labour market. The film’s protagonists—a government sanitation worker, a private mall security guard and a domestic worker, a self-employed rickshaw driver, an entrepreneur, and a homemaker and artist, although from diverse backgrounds embody similar strategies to fulfill their aspirations for economic autonomy. These strategies including careful maintenance of existing power relations and complex negotiations lead to a variety of outcomes – from significant control to no control over finances challenging the simplistic binaries of empowerment and oppression. The paper argues that context-specific policies as key to achieving women’s economic safety and equitable economic participation.