Women’s labor and political agency in Delhi

Rashi Sabherwal has spent the last several years traveling back and forth to India, studying what she calls “big questions of power.”

“Who holds power, and how do women gain access to political power?” she asks. “How do citizens demand services, shape policy, and hold representatives accountable? And do women really have a say in that?”

Those topics are at the heart of her doctoral thesis as the sixth-year political science Ph.D. student digs into her research, focusing on the political participation of Indian women workers and how they engage in economic life and political life. “The core question is: What types of jobs matter, and then how do they matter?” she says.

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She spent the past two years in Delhi, culminating in a survey of 2,000 women working across the city: street vendors, who sell shoes and garments on the street; domestic workers, who cook and clean in other people’s homes; and home-based workers, who work on a piece-rate basis for contractors, assembling garments and other items in their homes. All are considered “informal workers,” whose professions are not regulated by the government and who don’t have contracts.

Among her early findings are that women working as street vendors have become informal social advocates, helping fix neighborhood problems and serving as local allies in unsticking the wheels of government.

The dominant literature around this subfield in political science stems from postwar industrial North America, during which time women gained incomes and independence, Sabherwal says. “I was interested in what happens if you take this entire theory and apply it to a developing economy, where informal labor is a large part of employment and you don’t have these factory settings, where women are meeting in the workplace and developing a class consciousness, where women are earning enough that they can exit a marriage contract,” she says.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in political science from Macalester College, Sabherwal returned to India where she worked for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Inclusion Economics for about seven years. “Both are great places to work for young people who are interested in questions around economic development and policymaking.”

It was there she began looking more seriously at barriers that women face. One project trying to understand challenges to digital technology involved conducting more than 150 interviews about whether and how women should use smartphones. “A lot of the answers we got were that women shouldn’t use phones, or that they should only use them in a supervised way because these smartphones were a gateway to knowledge on the internet,” she says. “Having women know more stuff and getting ideas and ambitions seemed dangerous in that it had the power to overturn the status quo.”

Sabherwal began her doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University working with Tariq Thachil, then in 2020 followed him to Penn where he is now professor of political science and Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India.

She says Penn has provided a solid foundation for her studies and research thanks to the number of South Asian scholars and speakers. “It’s been a great place to think about questions in India and South Asia from a broader, more interdisciplinary perspective,” she says.