manufacturing and service sector enterprises, and these were divided further according to business size: registered industrial units (large), medium enterprises, small enterprises and Micro Small Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).<sup>3</sup> A probability proportional to size (PPS) method was used to obtain a proportionately distributed sample of enterprises (200 each from the three cities). Within each city, the PPS method was used to define the proportion of enterprises to be interviewed by size and sector. Since there were only 20 large units in the universe, a decision was taken to interview them all; in addition to the 600 enterprises randomly sampled. An attempt was made to cover all listed product and service categories (again, in proportion to their share in the population). Several firms drawn from the original sample frame had to be replaced with others either because they had shut down or moved addresses. Two of the 20 large enterprises refused to give an interview, bringing the count of firms who were eventually surveyed to 618.

**Survey instrument:** The questionnaire was designed to collect information about the nature of the enterprise e.g. years in operation, sector, size, employee strength, proportion of permanent and temporary employees, number of male and female employees, benefits offered to employees and geography of sales i.e. whether the firm’s production or services are localized and cater to their immediate neighborhood, or the whole city, other towns or cities in MP, India or outside India. In addition, firms were probed about their hiring practices, the number of new employees recruited in the past three years, proportion of men and women among new hires, how they advertise vacancies, the hiring process, and parameters they consider while hiring candidates for different functional areas, especially when hiring female candidates.

The added richness of this data set comes from the fact that employers were asked about their attitudes to gender norms. Two questions – whether girls and boys should receive equal education and whether women should work after they are married - follow from tradition in South Asia (like elsewhere) where families historically tended not to educate daughters as highly as they did their sons and where there are strong beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home. We also analyze results from four additional questions in the survey that relate directly to the labor market. They follow questions in global surveys and ask if, when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to jobs; if men and women deserve the same wages and benefits if they do the same jobs and if men make better employees than women do. Finally, to get at attitudes regarding attitudes towards occupational sex segregation, we asked if certain jobs are better suited to men or to women.

While it does not detract from the richness of our data set, we are acutely conscious of the fact that norms and attitudes are notoriously tricky to measure. First, responses to questions on attitudes are inexorably ascribed by context – who the respondent is, where they live, how they were raised, among others (see for instance Grand, Bernier and Strohmer, 1982). These can affect both the respondents’ interpretation of the question as well as their response. According to Zaller (1992), ‘individuals do not typically possess ‘true attitudes’...rather, they construct ‘opinion statements’ on the fly...based on whatever considerations are momentarily salient’ (Zaller, 1992). This also means that a change in question order or wording may result in different responses. Second, the more specific an attitude measure, the more likely it will be related to actual behavior (Ajzen, 1988). There are several scales that measure employer attitudes to hiring persons with disabilities, for instance. But the responses to these vary by the 7