Women & Work – Stories that steered us in November 2025
News, research and data about women and work - curated by our team
Hello, and welcome to CEDA’s newsletter ‘Women & Work’!
India’s historic first-ever women’s cricket world cup win gave November a bold new headline- one that resonated far beyond the stadium, stirring conversations about opportunity, recognition, and what women can achieve when barriers fall. But the month was also anchored by the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, reminding us that triumph is never isolated from the ongoing struggle for safety and dignity. This edition sits at that crossroads: the roar of a breakthrough, and the quieter battles that still shape women’s working lives- because even in a month of victory, the system still whispers “not yet!”
Before we get started, a request: We are curating ‘Women & Work’ with the hope that it can provoke, stimulate and amplify conversations about women’s participation in paid work in India. If you like this edition, please do share it on your social media, and with your friends, family and colleagues. Thank you.
In case you would like to read any of our past editions, they are available here.
🗞️ In The News
November opened with a seismic moment: India won the women’s cricket world cup for the first time.The victory didn’t just rewrite sporting history- it showed what happens when women finally get equal backing and visibility. Overnight, the team became national icons and kicked off overdue conversations on investment, pay equity, and who gets to thrive when barriers fall. For working women everywhere, it was a reminder that visibility isn’t symbolic- it shifts culture, opportunity, and the limits of what we believe women can achieve.
November closed with another landmark for women in sport: India’s blind women’s cricket team has made history by winning the inaugural Blind Women’s T20 Cricket World Cup. The team’s achievement reflects years of disciplined training, strategic play, and commitment to building high-performance sport within the blind cricket ecosystem. Their victory also marks an important moment for disability inclusion in Indian sport, highlighting the need for stronger institutional support, visibility, and investment. Read more about our athletes here.
A New York Times report from November 2025 shows how extreme heat is hitting India’s informal women workers, who make up over 90% of the country’s female workforce, the hardest. With temperatures routinely around 40°C+, women face dehydration, infections, dizziness, and exhaustion, worsened by scarce access to water and toilets. Sensor data from nearly 300 workers revealed that indoor workplaces can be even hotter than outside, amplifying the health risks. The findings warn that heat stress is becoming a major, underreported public health crisis for women already working at the margins. Read more here.
Karnataka has become the first Indian state to offer a universal menstrual leave policy, granting women aged 18–52 one paid day off each month- covering government, private, contractual, and outsourced workers, with no medical proof required. The policy promises protection from discrimination and a rare example of policy catching up to women’s lived realities and treating menstrual health as a legitimate workplace right, not an inconvenience. Read more here.
💡 Research Spotlight
They’ll Freeze Your Eggs, But Will They Make Room for Your Kids?
In 2014, Silicon Valley made headlines for an unexpected “perk”: employer-funded egg freezing. Since then, the debate has been fierce. Is it a leap toward reproductive autonomy or a subtle corporate push to stay child-free a little longer? A study by S.A. Miner, W.K. Miller, C. Grady, and B.E. Berkman cuts through the noise by asking the people whose voices were missing: the women working at companies that actually offer this benefit.
What the Study Explores
The researchers weren’t just interested in whether women liked the benefit. They wanted to understand:
How women interpret the meaning of employer-backed egg freezing
What emotions shape their decision-making
How workplace culture influences reproductive choices
Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 women, the researchers explored how this benefit interacts with women’s ambitions, uncertainties, and plans for family-building.
Key Findings
Women delay motherhood but not for their employers: The reasons were deeply personal- no partner, unfinished dreams, career goals, and stability. Egg freezing wasn’t steering their decisions; their life circumstances were.
Almost half didn’t even know their employer offered egg freezing: Yes- 44% learned about the benefit during the interview itself. Hardly the centrepiece of their career planning. For many, it was a forgotten line item in a benefits brochure.
No one felt pressured, but no one felt supported either: Women did not describe feeling pressured to freeze their eggs. What they did describe was a deeper reality: Egg freezing doesn’t fix the hard part- being a mother while maintaining a demanding career. The benefit buys time, but it doesn’t buy support.
Delaying childbearing feels like delaying the inevitability of work–life conflict: Women described egg freezing not as liberation but as a pause button on a future collision- ambitions vs. caregiving, deadlines vs. diapers, identity vs. expectations. Instead of solving work–life imbalance, it simply shifts it further down the road.
What This Means- Beyond the Buzzword of “Choice”
The study lands on a powerful truth: Women don’t feel pressured to use egg freezing. They feel limited by what happens after they become mothers. Employer-funded egg freezing might stretch the reproductive timeline, but it doesn’t stretch workplace flexibility, cultural acceptance, or structural support. Women in the study offered their own ideas for what actual empowerment would look like:
Childcare in the building
Flexible hours that don’t penalise parents
Normalisation of non-biological paths to parenthood
Cultures where parenting isn’t seen as a detour from ambition
In other words, women want options that expand now, not just extend later. Because the real issue isn’t when women have children- it’s whether the workplace makes room for them at all.
You can read more about the study here.
📊 Datapoint
The internet is everywhere, but less so in women’s hands
India talks of a digital revolution but for millions of women, that revolution stops at the doorstep. NFHS-5 data visualised on CEDA’s Socio-Economic Data Portal (SEDP) shows that 66.6% of Indian women had never used the internet: a number that reads less like a statistic and more like a fault line running through the country’s workforce. The world of work is shifting online: applications, training, payments, safety tools, government benefits- all funnel through a screen. Yet for an overwhelming majority of women, that screen is distant, restricted, or simply unavailable. This isn’t just a digital gap. It’s a gap in opportunity, income, mobility, and agency. India’s digital economy is expanding at full speed. But until women can access and use the internet freely, that growth will remain uneven- brilliant on paper, but dim where it matters most. A connected India must include connected women. Otherwise, the future of work arrives and leaves them out.
The SEDP portal provides a powerful tool for exploring and analyzing socio-economic data at the state and district-level across a range of sectors including health, education, and employment. Use SEDP to uncover critical socio-economic trends and drive informed decisions in research, policy, and advocacy. Explore here.
⏳ Throwback
Somewhere along the way, a bizarre rule slipped into the manual of modern womanhood: apparently, ambition can climb corporate ladders only if your legs are smooth. It sounds ridiculous (because it is), yet this superstition has followed women into workplaces for more than a century, whispering that confidence, competence, and credibility all begin with hair that’s been shaved, waxed, plucked, or otherwise disciplined into silence. Long before women typed their first office memo or stepped into their first staff meeting, their bodies were already being negotiated, each stray strand quietly measured against their worth.
Imagine the classic pre-interview scramble: shirt ironed, CV rehearsed, and then the sudden jolt- Wait, did I shave? Will one missed patch be the thing they remember? It feels petty, private, almost silly. But it’s not. It’s the echo of a marketing bomb detonated in 1915, when Gillette introduced the “Milady Décolleté,” the first women’s razor. Wrapped in delicate illustrations and urgent warnings, the ads announced a brand-new crisis: “unsightly” female body hair. What began as an invented crisis soon became doctrine: a respectable, employable woman was a hairless one. As women entered offices and factory floors, beauty brands rebranded smooth skin as hygiene, neatness, professionalism itself. On top of lower wages and higher scrutiny, women now carried another quiet job: making their bodies conform to a standard set in a boardroom, not a bathroom.
Every panicked shave before a presentation, every paycheck drained into waxing salons, every hesitation before raising an arm became a tiny toll: time, money and emotional bandwidth. A shadow economy of grooming grew beneath the real economy of wages and promotions. And when anyone broke the script ( an unshaven leg, an unruly brow), the backlash was swift: side-eye, whispers, doubts about her competence. Professionalism morphed into velvet-gloved gatekeeping.
Today, the packaging is pastel and the language is empowerment, but the old order still whispers: Be smooth. Be clean. Be employable. The story was never about razors-it’s about power. And the real rebellion isn’t the perfect wax; it’s refusing to let century-old beauty mandates determine who looks “ready” for work.
Because ambition grows just fine on its own- razor or not!
📽️ Lights, Camera, Hustle: Women’s Work Lives in Movies
This fictional CV is a creative work inspired by the character Kumari Pinky, as depicted in the film Udta Punjab (2016). All names and references are respectfully credited to the series’ original creators, filmmakers, and rights holders.
Thank you for reading! If you have feedback, questions, tips, or just want to say hello, feel free to do so by replying to this email, or drop in a word at editorial.ceda@ashoka.edu.in
For more updates and conversations, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and X. We look forward to staying connected with you!
Curated by: Sneha Mariam Thomas for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian
Your November list reads like a syllabus for anyone trying to understand why gender justice can’t be separated from tech and labor.