how the employers were interpreting the question. Since broad attitudes about education are not directly related to how employers actually behave, it is likely that some of the egalitarian responses were the socially desirable ones. We may have received different responses if we had asked whether the employers would allow their own wives, daughters or female wards to work after marriage, for instance.

The three questions that may reflect prevailing gender norms in the labor market more directly were, whether men have more right to jobs in times of job scarcity, whether men make better employees than women do and whether some jobs are better suited to men or to women. We saw greater variation in responses to these questions. A little over half the employers (53 percent) agreed that men should have more right to a job than women, when jobs are scarce, while another 34 percent did not answer the question. So, only about 13 percent actively disagreed that men have pre-eminence in rights to jobs, with little variation in the share of respondents who disagreed by firm size, sector or city. This is in keeping with findings from global surveys. In 2012, when asked a similar question about who has more right to a job, for the World Values Survey, nearly 52 percent of the respondents interviewed in India agreed, while 25 percent either refrained from giving an opinion or said they did not know. Another survey conducted by Pew Research finds that 84 percent of Indians agree with the statement, ‘when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’.<sup>13</sup> Further, over two-fifths of the respondents believe that men make better employees and another 30 percent did not answer the question; only about 28 percent believe that men and women are equally capable in the labor market.

Employers in our sample were even less egalitarian when it came to attitudes about the kind of work women can or cannot do. Most employers interviewed for the survey considered men as being better suited for jobs in most functional areas, except in customer services and care. In general, employers perceived men to be better suited for jobs in production/technical/operational domains (82 percent said so); while in jobs involving procurement/purchase, 71 percent agreed that men were better suited. For jobs in business development, marketing, sales and HR, 62 percent of the respondents and for jobs in in IT support 57 percent agreed that men were better suited (table 2). In contrast, they were ambivalent to hiring men or women for finance and accounts jobs, and preferred women for jobs involving customer interface or customer care: 62 percent of respondents believed women to be better suited for customer service in comparison to men.

**Table 2. Views on which jobs are better suited to men (% of enterprise)**

|**Functional jobs**|**Better suited to**<br>**men**|**Better suited to**<br>**women**|
|---|---|---|
|Production, Operations, Technical|81.6|18.4|
|Procurement, Purchase|71.4|28.6|
|Business development,<br>Marketing, Sales|62.3|37.7|
|Human resources and<br>administration|62.1|37.9|
|IT support, Computer, Data<br>processing|57.1|42.9|
|Finance and accounts|50.2|49.8|
|Customer service, Customer care|38.2|61.8|

Note: n= 618 enterprises 14