Walk into any office, construction site, newsroom, or someone else’s home where domestic help is employed, and you’ll find work happening. What you won’t always see is the violence, coercion, and quiet discrimination that shapes how millions of women experience that work. Gender-based violence and harassment at work isn’t a fringe issue. It cuts across income levels, sectors, and job titles, and understanding its many forms is the first step toward changing them.
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What counts as violence and harassment at work
Workplace or occupational violence includes threats, physical abuse, and verbal or nonverbal hostility directed at workers. It doesn’t always look dramatic. A raised voice, a threatening gesture, or a pattern of intimidation from a supervisor all count.
Sexual harassment is a related but distinct problem. It can be perpetrated by, and directed at, employers, employees, contractors, and clients alike. It ranges from subtle comments and unwanted attention to overt, deliberate acts of coercion. Some harassment stems from an abuse of authority, such as a manager pressuring a subordinate. Other cases arise between co-workers with no formal power difference, or through inappropriate behaviour toward consultants, clients, and members of the public who interact with a workplace.
India’s legal response
India’s primary legal safeguard against workplace sexual harassment traces back to the Supreme Court’s 1997 judgment in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, which treated harassment at work as a violation of a woman’s constitutional right to equality and dignity. That judgment produced the Vishaka Guidelines, which eventually became the foundation for the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, commonly called the POSH Act. The law requires every workplace with ten or more employees to set up an Internal Committee to receive and investigate complaints. It’s a significant legal tool, but as many labour researchers point out, the gap between having a law and enforcing it consistently across sectors remains wide.
Who faces the highest risk
Harassment doesn’t strike everyone equally. It concentrates around specific conditions: large numbers of young women competing for limited job opportunities, workplaces where a small number of men supervise a large female workforce, and jobs with little security or bargaining power.
Some of the most vulnerable groups include:
Women in educational and training institutions often face harassment from those who control their academic or career progression, making it harder to report without risking their future.
Domestic workers operate inside private homes, cut off from co-workers, unions, or any external witness to what happens on the job.
Migrant workers frequently don’t speak the local language, lack legal documentation, or depend entirely on an employer or recruiter for housing and income, which limits their ability to walk away or seek help.
Workers with little job security, including those on informal or contract arrangements, often stay silent because a complaint could mean instant unemployment with no recourse.
In many of these situations, harassment doesn’t begin on the first day of work. It starts even earlier, during recruitment and hiring, especially where job openings are scarce and applicants have few alternatives.
Human trafficking and forced labour
Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative illicit economies in the world, and women and girls bear a disproportionate share of its damage. Global data on forced labour tells a sobering story: the International Labour Organization estimates that 27.6 million people are trapped in forced labour worldwide, generating roughly 236 billion US dollars in illegal profits every year, with the vast majority of this exploitation happening in the private economy rather than through state-imposed labour.
Women and girls in forced labour situations are far more likely than men to end up in domestic work, while men are more often pushed into construction. The ILO also notes that women are typically coerced through unpaid wages and exploitation of their vulnerability, and they face a higher risk of physical and sexual violence, including threats against their families, compared to male victims.
Domestic work: exploitation hidden in plain sight
Paid domestic work is one of the sectors where abuse most often slips outside the reach of labour law, particularly for migrant women employed in private homes. Employers sometimes use threats and coercion to withhold wages entirely or pay far below fair rates, while forcing workers into shifts stretching up to 18 hours a day without a single day off. Because this work happens behind closed doors, it rarely gets inspected, and workers have almost no institutional support to fall back on.
Everyday realities across different sectors
Beyond trafficking and domestic work, gendered vulnerability shows up in ordinary, everyday jobs across the economy.
Poverty and limited access to education push some women into the labour market at a very young age, while for others, economic desperation works in the opposite direction, pushing them out of formal labour and toward sex work as one of few remaining options.
Migration for work reshapes family dynamics too. When men relocate for better job opportunities, their wives are often expected to follow, regardless of the toll this takes on the wife’s own career or professional network.
Women journalists frequently hit a glass ceiling, with very few reaching senior editorial or leadership roles while a majority remain concentrated in less prominent assignments.
Construction workers face a stark trade-off: staying in villages with no income, or migrating to cities for work that offers little to no social protection, safe housing, or job security.
Women in the BPO and call centre sector often remain clustered in lower-paying, entry-level roles rather than moving up. Odd working hours, night shifts, and screen-heavy tasks bring a specific set of health consequences: eye strain, disrupted sleep, digestive problems, and anxiety linked to travelling home in the dark.
Why this keeps happening: the economic and social backdrop
Much of this vulnerability is rooted in deep, structural gender gaps rather than isolated incidents. Women in India remain concentrated in insecure, low-paid, and informal work, and this isn’t a minor statistical footnote – it’s tied directly to the country’s economic potential. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute found that raising India’s female labour-force participation rate could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the country’s GDP, with much of that gain coming simply from bringing more women into the formal economy on fair terms.
Data compiled through India’s own labour and household surveys backs this up. National surveys tracked by the UNDP show that women continue to be overrepresented in casual, self-employed, and unpaid family labour categories, particularly in agriculture, even as their overall numbers in the workforce shift over time. Meanwhile, broader gender gap analysis points out that women perform the overwhelming majority of unpaid household labour in India, work that never shows up in official employment statistics at all, while the vast majority of employed women remain in insecure, informal jobs with few protections.
This combination – informality, invisibility, and limited bargaining power – is exactly what makes harassment, exploitation, and violence easier to get away with. A worker with no contract, no union, and no formal employment record has very little leverage to report abuse or demand accountability.
What needs to change
Addressing gender-based violence and vulnerability at work isn’t a single fix. It requires action on several fronts at once:
Closing education gaps in secondary and tertiary schooling, especially in states where enrolment for girls still trails behind boys.
Lowering barriers to job creation so that more formal, secure employment opportunities exist for women entering the workforce.
Expanding skills training in sectors where women currently have limited representation, helping them move beyond low-paid, entry-level roles.
Widening access to financial and digital services for women entrepreneurs, many of whom currently struggle to access credit or digital payment systems on equal terms.
Strengthening diversity policies within organisations, paired with genuine internal accountability, not just symbolic committees.
Enforcing existing legal protections more consistently, so laws like the POSH Act translate into real outcomes rather than remaining paperwork.
Investing in infrastructure and care services, including childcare and eldercare support, which would ease the disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic responsibilities that currently falls on women.
Shifting long-held attitudes about what work is “appropriate” for women, and about who is responsible for care work at home.
There are signs of gradual change. Many households are slowly moving toward more shared responsibility for care work between men and women. But this shift is uneven, and it’s happening far more slowly than the scale of the problem demands.
What do you think? Why do you think harassment and exploitation remain so common in informal and domestic work compared to more visible, formal workplaces? And what would it take, realistically, for legal protections like the POSH Act to reach workers who currently fall outside its scope?
References
- https://cltri.gov.in/POSHACT.pdf
- https://www.ilo.org/topics-and-sectors/forced-labour-modern-slavery-and-trafficking-persons
- https://www.ilo.org/topics/forced-labour-modern-slavery-and-trafficking-persons/what-forced-labour
- https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Employment%20and%20Growth/The%20power%20of%20parity%20Advancing%20womens%20equality%20in%20India/MGI%20India%20parity_Full%20report_November%202015.ashx
- https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2025-02/the_states_narrative_on_womens_work_in_india.pdf
- https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/gender-gap-female-labour/
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