Gender equality in families: Bengali middle‐class employed women in India

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine certain aspects of the domestic lives of Bengali middle‐class women in Calcutta. Bengali women are a group which remain largely unstudied by sociologists. The present study examines the extent to which paid employment has had any impact on the domestic division of labour within middle‐class Bengali households. The data show that there has been very little alteration in traditional patterns of household work. The findings should help rebut some of the commonly held assumptions about the relationship between earning power and gender equality.