Workplace Issues and Challenges of Women Employees

Abstract

Women employees are facing more challenges in their day-to-day life. Hence, to maintain their work-life balance, they are crossing many hurdles, wherein workplace issues has been one of the major challenges faced by every women employee in the world. The reason being much harassment is occurring against the women employees in all employment sectors. Even though there are more legal remedies and statutory labour welfare measures to protect women in the workplace. The foremost issues of working women globally are career progression, pay parity, harassment, child rearing and work-life balance. Hence, there is a sheer necessity to understand the aforementioned issues. The present chapter intended to analyze the workplace issues of working women as an outcome of a program conducted on legal awareness for students and working women. In furtherance, the researcher has used the data sources from the project sponsored by NCW (National Commission for Women), wherein in both gender were taken as respondents. The study included 148 respondents out of which there are working women and students from both the genders and analysed in two dimensions, one is from the perspective of working women about workplace issues and other from students’ perspective to understand awareness level on workplace issues of women employees. The results showed that working women respondents have strongly agreed that workplace harassments and conflict of work-life balance are stronger issues than other challenges like shiftsystem, long working hours and gender discrimination. Also, the students (both male and female) revealed that awareness level of male students regarding workplace issues is good and opined that conflict in work-life balance and work doing night shift are predominant issues of working women and awareness of female students indicated that sexual harassment and child rearing are the major hurdles in their career progress.