“If not work, then what?”: work, ambition, and satisfaction among young women in urban India

ABSTRACT

This paper explores aspirations among the youth in India by seeing connections to two themes – ambition and satisfaction. While aspirations can call on a range of values, what is it that drives people as they deal with aspirations? Is dissatisfaction a driver of ambition, or a hurdle for future progress? How does one look at ambition and satisfaction in the larger field of aspirations as sociological phenomena? Using macro-data to establish a broader context, along with in-depth interviews with working women from a range of occupations in Delhi, and a detailed case-study of one woman , this paper studies the role ambition and satisfaction play in women’s lives in urban India. It underscores the barriers and risks young women face in the labour market, which vary by their occupation, socio-economic status, and level of education. These barriers constrain and, at times, motivate women to be ambitious, to aspire, and to achieve.

KEYWORDS:

• Aspirations
• ambition
• satisfaction
• mobility
• failure

Acknowledgements

I thank the CSDS, New Delhi, for access to the NES 2009 dataset, and the World Values Survey for the 2012 survey. I thank the ICSSR for the grant that funded the ESMS survey. I am grateful to my respondents for their time and for sharing their stories. Finally, I thank the two reviewers, and Ankur Datta for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children; and connected to the research on India is work on Nepal that explores similar themes, see Lietchy, “Out here in Kathmandu”.

2. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class; Dickey, “The Pleasures and Anxieties”; and Dickey, “Anjali’s Alliance”.

3. Jeffrey’s important and much cited work (Timepass), for instance, focuses exclusively on men. Some examples of exceptions to the existing body of work are Dickey on Madurai (e.g. “The Pleasures and Anxieties”), or Salman’s work on Muslim men and women in Delhi (‘Beyond Discrimination’).

4. National Statistical Office, “Youth in India”.

5. Lukose, “The Children of Liberalisation”; Lokniti, CSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, ‘Attitudes, Anxieties and Aspirations’.

6. Lukose, “The Children of Liberalisation”.

7. Jeffrey, Timepass; Jeffrey and Young, “Waiting for change”; and for figures on the labour market engagement of the youth, see Mitra and Verick, “Youth employment and unemployment”.

8. Kumar, Indian youth and Electoral Politics; deSouza et al., Indian Youth in a Transforming World; and Advani,”Youth and Politics in India”.

9. see Dickey, “The Pleasures and Anxieties”; and Jeffrey, Timepass.

10. Vaid, Uneven Odds.

11. Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”.

12. There has been much debate around definitions of work especially in the context of gendered experiences, and exclusions of women from official statistics, see Padavic and Reskin, “Women and Men at Work”. Further in India, there has been some discussion around the quality of statistical data from official sources. This paper does not attempt to engage with that debate. For more, see Editorial, “Do Not Undermine”.

13. Directorate of Economics and Statistics, “Employment and Unemployment Situation”.

14. Bucholtz, “Youth and Cultural Practice”.

15. National Statistical Office, “Youth in India”.

16. Spenner and Featherman, “Achievement Ambitions”, 375.

17. Turner, “Some Aspects of Women’s Ambitions”, 271; see also Spenner and Featherman, “Achievement Ambitions”, 376.

18. See Morgan, “Expectations and Aspirations” for a discussion on the role of aspirations in the status attainment literature and its critique.

19. McClelland, The Achieving Society.

20. Fels, “Do Women Lack Ambition?”.

21. Appadurai, ‘”The Capacity to Aspire”.

22. Fels, “Do Women Lack Ambition?”.

23. As discussed through their ethnographic work on young men in Uttar Pradesh by Jeffrey et al., “Degrees Without Freedom?”.

24. Jeffrey and Young, “Waiting for Change”.

25. Vaid, Uneven Odds.

26. Vaid, “Gendered Inequality in Educational Transitions”.

27. Vaid, Uneven Odds.

28. Khanna, “Gender Wage Discrimination in India”.

29. Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”.

30. Khera, “Closing Gender Gaps in India”; and Korreck, “Women Entrepreneurs in India”.

31. de Neve, “Keeping it in the Family”.

32. See Vaid, Uneven Odds for a discussion on the thesis of modernisation and its critiques.

33. The ESMS project was funded by the ICSSR and based at the CSDS, Project ID: F.No. 2–167(Socy)/2010/RP; see for more details about the project and the data, Vaid, ‘Final Report’.

34. Pseudonyms are used throughout.

35. Table 21.1 in Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”.

36. While this paper does not strictly use a sequential mixed-method design, it uses a broadly concurrent mixed-methods approach to help understand the qualitative narratives within broader patterns (see for more Creswell and Creswell, Research Design).

37. By virtue of the research design, the qualitative data is not used to generalise to the youth in Delhi or in India. However, experiences of a set of young working women indicate the challenges and opportunities women face in the context of everyday life.

38. National Statistical Office, “Youth in India”.

39. Of course, there are women who are neither in work, nor education and neither are they searching for a job which are figures discussed by the NSSO. However, since the context of this paper is on working women, the figures discussed here pertain more directly to the labour market.

40. Lokniti, CSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “Attitudes, anxieties and aspirations”.

41. Detailed tables available from the author.

42. Class schema derived from Vaid, Uneven odds

43. While caste is an important form of stratification in India with ramifications for work and education, the present paper does not study caste inequality in detail (see Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”).

44. This importance of English has been discussed by Highet, “She Will Control My Son”.

45. See Srivastava, “Relational flexibility” for a discussion on this theme.

46. Appadurai, “Capacity to Aspire”.

47. Benei, “To Fairly Tell”.

48. A similar concern and pattern of education in English language institutions has been found among the OBCs studied in Mumbai by Munshi and Rosenzweig, “Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern”.

49. This resonates with Appadurai, “Capacity to Aspire”.

50. This resonates with Korreck’s work, “Women Entrepreneurs in India”.

51. Interestingly, this ties in with Fels’ work that highlights the importance of ‘recognition’ in driving ambition, Fels, “Do Women Lack Ambition”.

52. This discussion on social mobility also resonates with Harriss, “The Wall”.

53. As discussed in Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”.

54. Fels, “Do Women Lack Ambition”, throws light on these experiences of women from a psychological perspective; and see Vaid, “The City, Education and Social Mobility”, for a discussion of these cases.