Gender Discrimination in Urban Corporate Workspaces: A Sociological Study of Women Professionals in Kolkata

This study seeks to explore the discrimination women face in the corporate sector, especially in the landscape of Kolkata. Examining whether gender discrimination is still persistent even today, affecting women’s economic and professional sectors, and how women navigate and respond to such biases. This research tries to dive deeper into the complexities women might experience. The research adopts a quantitative methodology with limited qualitative inputs, using a questionnaire-based survey to identify patterns of discrimination. A purposive sample of 30 women professionals from Kolkata’s corporate sector was selected. Data analysis uncovered the multi-face dynamic of the discrimination woman faces , Multiple thematic understanding detected in this research as : the dichotomist relationship between women’s economic labour and domestic role how societal norms and family pressure affect women’s career prospect , the transfiguration from dependency to independency ,unprofessional behaviour or sexual harassment being another barrier to women’s career advancement and additionally, intersection of ethnicity becoming a burden in the career ladder of woman in corporate culture. A key finding was prominent from the research and data analysis a pattern of silence among women in the survey . This overarching silence reflects a subservient notion of fear and foreboding persistent among women in corporate culture. This silence could lucidly be granted as a passive response or rather this silence could be resonating with the fear of her authorities or with the panic of damaging relation with the colleagues or inviting rivals in professional surrounding. Significant number of woman who are neutral about their opinion mostly might even be facing discrimination and not acknowledging the situation, as this is what is normalised for them, and they are accustomed to it as being the pattern and the trend in the culture of the corporate sector. Hence, majorly this silence could echo the fear of backlash.