In India, during the '60s and the '70s of the last century only a handful of the educated Bengali middle class women of West Bengal could be found in the workforce. At that time going out for work was considered to be the inability of the husband to 'take care' of her. The '80s and the '90s saw a gradually increasing stream of them joining different sectors, who however left the domestic field almost unaltered in their bid to become 'super women'. A change could, however, be noticed from the turn of the present century, when these women are not only getting engaged in different jobs in great numbers but are aspiring higher positions that demand more time and energy from them. This requires a refashioning of the roles of women in the domestic front-- from wearing the more 'comfortable' jeans to hiring maids for looking after the child; from dining out frequently to buying gadgets; from buying flats near parental house to learning to drive. This woman not only redefines her role and space in the family but in the process redefines the space of other members of the family and also paves the way for significantly newer spaces in the society like chains of home-delivery system, aya-centres, crèches etc. Thus the 'visibility' of women in the work place leads to the development of new spaces for them in the domestic sphere and ironically, what is 'home' for them becomes 'workplace' for others, who again are mostly women. This is how new spaces are constantly being created.

There is a traditional view point for women as home maker. Working women appear to be new phenomena in the recent centuries, although women had always been working outside their homes in various capacities. Women had been the basic nutrition provider to her family. Among the hunting gathering communities basic sustenance was procured by collection and gathering, where women's role was quite important as is shown in various investigations. Among rural communities women had not only contributed much in the food production arena in various ways, but also been involved in a number of crafts. With mechanization of industries, globalization and change in the economic sector, employment opportunity for women has widened. Gender difference is a biological reality. Tradition has fixed attitude for gender discrimination both for men and women. The paper is based on a study among the working women of the Metropolitan city of Kolkata. The study has shown how women are discriminated at their place of work, leading to harassment. Samples are taken from women working both in organized and unorganized sectors. Data is collected from all kinds of working group starting from domestic help to women working in public and corporate sectors. The finding is quite interesting. It shows how the space for women at their working place is stressed and even violated not only by the other gender but by the same gender as well.

The present paper is wedded to identify the prospects and challenges of women participation as over the last few years, a large segment of workers predominately women are engaged in the activities of informal sector (IS) economy of the developing countries like Bangladesh. This paper is an attempt to examine and analyze the condition of wage workers in IS with particular reference to Savar Upazilla located in Dhaka. The present work to some extent contributes to the understanding of the socioeconomic problems of IS economy relating to gender and workforce, their opportunities and challenges in considering the real field situation. Method of research mainly based on primary survey in addition to study of available records. Thus, it is based on exploratory as well as explanatory social research. Multistage, purposive, random sampling and FGD techniques have been applied to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. The study depicts of theoretical dialogue between the traditional forces of society and economy and modern legal state and international context of equality and human rights. These two sets of forces are systematically interacting and giving a new shape to society, economy and culture in a developing society. Finally, the paper wraps its jobs with some policy recommendations that may be considered by the development practitioners and policy makers of Bangladesh.

The present paper explores two linked variables, sex of the speakers and sex of the addressee, which are more influential in determining appropriate pronouns in Hindi (Tu, Tum and Aap). Women are more restrained in their possible choices of pronouns. Pronouns give not only information about her or his political views and social class but also information about a person's attitude towards members of the opposite sex. These rules of pronominal usage reveal information about the relationship of the sexes in a society, especially the maintaining of distinctions.

The data of the present study were collected through questionnaire - interview method. The source of the data were 200 subjects (120 men and 80 women), representing different section of society. The questionnaire aimed at eliciting information regarding pronominal usage between the subject and his/her mother, father, spouse, children and friends, etc.

The response to the questions indicates that in most of the situations, sex has a considerable effect on the selection of pronoun. In certain cases sex overlaps with other core factors like age and occupational status to determine a particular choice.

Space and time are two aspects of urban life that are critically interrelated. It is a well known fact that though women are increasingly participating in the labour market, the consequence of the limited time investments that women devote to paid work impacts on their ability to compete with their male counterparts. Also, the management of time is strongly conditioned by the accessibility of urban spaces, in this case the street. The suitable location, time of vending and hours of vending are thus crucial for viability of street food vending business.

While cities offer scope for socio-economic opportunities to women, the reality is that women face stiff competition for space in addition to other vulnerabilities and are thus more likely to be among the poorest of the urban poor.

This paper seeks to find out how gendered are urban streets of Guwahati city and how does accessibility to vending space impacts gender differently in street food vending.

The state of Oaxaca is famous for its regional cuisine considered to be the most sophisticated in Mexico. Thus, over the last decades it has become the site of booming culinary tourism industry owning to both state-led strategies for local development based on promoting cultural and ethnic tourism as well as numerous private enterprises.

The key element for its success are Indigenous women who provide government officials, professional chefs and cookbook authors with local knowledge of products and techniques of cooking. Although, such dissemination of native 'know how' may help to preserve the culinary heritage of Oaxaca, it generally leads to appropriation, commodification and commercialization of women's expertise for the benefit of mestizo or foreign chefs and cookbook authors. At the same time Indian women are widely perceived as skillful but passive and subordinate exotic 'others' and marginalized in the public celebrations of Oaxacan cuisine.

This paper analyzes the emergence of first Oaxacan native women chefs who have managed to parlay their local knowledge into a marketable commodity and the authenticity of being an ethnic minority into business opportunities. The owners of highly acclaimed restaurants, authors of books, special guests at international food shows and festivals Indian women have been recently moving from the sphere of female domestic and ethnic cookery to male haute cuisine crossing the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, class and space.

It demonstrates culinary tourism as a site of grassroots resistance and (re)negotiation of the image and position of Indigenous women within their local communities, and more broadly national and transnational public sphere

In Timor-Leste, the equal participation of women in RWSS became a big challenge for the community organizers and the policy makers. This paper aims to explore the nature and the politics of women participation in rural water supply and sanitation (RWSS) by choosing two communities in Maubara sub-district, employing the face-to-face semi-structural interviews. The research design was multi-sited ethnographic case studies. In addition, direct on-field observations also help to discover the attitudes and the nonverbal communication of the community members. The researcher found out that there are two different patterns of participation: one has an organized, initially guided, top-down pattern of participation, and the other one has a more spontaneous way mobilizing community members based on their emergency needs. The first pattern has imposed gender mainstreaming strategy and women are included in the GMF (water management group) and some worked in technical team but the women inclusion could be seen as token, most of women participated in the project by doing the works that are the extension of their domestic works on daily basis. In the second pattern, women totally are excluded from the planning activity; In general, the participation of women in RWSS project is instrumentally oriented. There are various factors that facilitate and enhance the participation of women like: social, economic and cultural barriers factors, community leadership, geographical location, and including other natural factors.

Since 1996, in the neighboring towns of Irun and Hondarribia situated in the Spanish Basque Country, there has been an unresolved polemic raging over the participation of women on equal footing with men in the parades which constitute the principal act of the annual local festivals known as Alardes. Following the privatization of a previously public festival as a measure by the local authorities to avoid upsetting the majority opposed to granting women equal terms of participation in the parades, the conflict has produced huge debate both within the local populations and beyond, in the law courts and wider political community.

It illustrates the problems posed for achieving equal rights in what in the Spanish state is a relatively recent arena in terms of challenging the gender order: ritual and festival. The cases studied have also been compared with other areas in Alicante and Andalucia where women are demanding equal rights with men in parades, processions and pageants, and bring an innovative perspective on how, in symbolically charged rituals, women's incursion into the public space is seen as a sacrilegious challenge to a traditional gender order. The analysis reveals that public festivals have constituted a stronghold of male power which had remained in place while other more urgent ground- such as the workplace - was being gained for women, and that the resistance is couched in terms of the defense of tradition and cultural specificity, interlocking with a discourse of Basque nationalism.

It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without taking into account its other, that is, male engagements with and in space. Our joint paper contrasts the public spaces of a market and a bus station in central Accra, Ghana. While the former is historically associated with female entrepreneurship, masculinity is deeply inscribed in the activities defining the latter. However, recent developments gradually undermine this gendered divide. Economic liberalization and the subsequent cutback in formal employment opportunities triggered the influx of ever more men into the predominantly female occupation of market trade. Especially, as import procedures have been drastically simplified and access to cheap global consumer goods is democratizing, the role of strong female gatekeepers in the reproduction of the gendered market system becomes increasingly obsolete. Yet, simultaneously, the public space of the bus station adjacent to the market and complementary in many of its economic activities, is increasingly shaped by intensive negotiations between male station personnel and "intruding" female entrepreneurs over the scarce resource "space". Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how gendered notions of entitlement to public space are renegotiated under the impact of global capitalist temporality.

Poland has a progressive law regarding rape: it defines it regardless of the relationship of the rapist and the victim (thus also penalizing marital rape) and their gender (men can be victims as well). However, the law is not fully executed because of widespread stereotypes concerning rape: the victim is often perceived as being guilty of what happened. This paper draws on multiple sources (analysis of press and publications on sexuality; analysis of court cases; interviews with psychologists and sexologists serving as expert witnesses in courts; participant observation during classes for future expert witnesses and others dealing professionally with sexual violence; interviews with feminists working with victims of sexual assault) and shows that feminists have been instrumental in shifting discourse on sexual violence and court practices by bringing women's/victims' voices into the public sphere. In the 1970s and the 1980s predominantly male experts (lawyers, criminologists, sexologists) emphasized women's responsibility for rape. In the 1990s a new group of experts emerged - women (usually feminist) who were engaged in helping victims. These new experts managed to shift public discourse to focus on the victims' suffering; in the next decade feminists started to stress the issues of women's sexual autonomy and pleasure, which has also reflected on public discourse. Furthermore, the analysis of court cases shows that feminist language has been gradually appearing in legal settings and lawyers more and more often refer to feminist concepts in their work with rape victims.

One of the primary concerns of the Millennium Development Goals is to "promote gender equality and empower women". The paper examines how certain forms of violence against women are portrayed in selected Nigerian video films and novels. Women and girls in Nigeria are still subjected to various culturally based forms of abuse, exploitation and discrimination, the most common of which include wife battering, rape and other forms of sexual violence during wars and conflict situations, female genital mutilation, trafficking in women, and inhuman widowhood practices. The paper discusses how Nigerian dramatists and novelists present or misrepresent gender related violence in their works. It relate the discussion to the local social and cultural contexts in which these writings and films are set, and to the wider global debates about gender justice and the cultural specificity of human rights. The paper focuses on a representative selection of video films and novels which portra

y the Nigerian woman burdened in various ways with patriarchal prejudices and at times very obnoxious native laws and customs that flagrantly violate her human rights and dignity. It concludes with some comments on the adverse social consequences of violence against women, and the relevant international conventions, local legislation and other social responses that seek to redress these gender related anomalies in Nigeria. It also considers how home videos which are now widely used to dramatize these social ills can more creatively be used to promote the campaign to eliminate all forms of discrimination, abuse and violence against women.