the widespread desire of Indian (and other) employers to be the ‘protectors’ of female employees. Examples of such protection in the workplace may include not giving women responsibility for tasks that necessitate their engagement with unknown men, or male employers considering themselves guardian figures responsible for women’s safety and in the process, exercising control, and inter alia, curtailing the latter’s movements. World Bank (2018) details legal provisions that expressly deny women the opportunity to participate on equal footing as men, and many of such laws are intended to uphold the culture of a particular society. So, the supply of female labor rests on several factors that have to do with the woman’s characteristics such as age, and human capital endowments, her family and her community. But the demand side does not reflect a blind or perfect market either. It is influenced by the same norms and attitudes about female workers as the rest of society. In fact, the labor market internalizes familial gender norms and may in fact, help in solidifying them by the way in which it conducts its hiring and how it treats its workers.

Attitudes towards female workers may vary by the workers’ place in the life cycle. In its 2016 survey, Robert Walters, one of the world’s leading specialist recruitment consultancies, finds that nearly half of hiring managers in select East and South-East Asian countries did not employ any woman returning after a career break (taken likely because of marriage/pregnancy) in the year prior to the survey. Unequal salaries were identified as the most common type of discrimination facing 48 percent of returning women in the region, followed by lack of career advancement opportunities (38 percent) (Robert Walters, 2017). Similarly, a survey conducted on behalf of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) finds that employers in the UK are hesitant when it comes to recruiting pregnant women and young mothers. Sixty percent of the 1,106 employers interviewed for the survey said that a woman should disclose a pregnancy during the recruiting process; 46 percent thought it was reasonable to ask women if they have young children; and a third agreed it was reasonable to ask women about their plans to have children in the future, during recruitment.<sup>2</sup> In India too, married women with children may be seen as having low commitment to the labor market. Newly married women may not be given certain responsibilities in the implicit ‘fear’ that they may get pregnant. Using anecdotal evidence, Johari (2014) notes how Indian employers prefer to hire women without care duties. On their part, female workers with children or other care responsibilities are under considerable pressure to show that they are both good wives and mothers as well as good workers. They also need to live up to societal notions of propriety in their behavior and dress, especially outside the home. Younger, unmarried women too face tremendous obstacles, especially in cultures where female seclusion and older notions of modesty prevail. In India for example, families exert tight control over women’s mobility, including deciding whether a job is safe or appropriate. Marriage, and the social pressure to protect young women’s ‘virtue’, trumps the prospect of getting a good job.

While the empirical evidence on attitudes towards women workers in India is evolving, several studies show the pervasiveness of such discrimination. In a phone survey of 3,360 respondents across three states and one city in India, Coffey et al (2018) asked men and women whether married women should work outside the home, if their husbands earn a good living. There was little variation across the sample in disapproval for married women’s work: in most places, about half of the adults interviewed disapproved, with no significant differences between men’s disapproval and women’s 5