CHANGING GENDER ROLES AND FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE AMONG URBAN WORKING WOMEN: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Abstract

The relationship between women's paid work and their authority over money has rarely been examined as a single, connected process in the Indian urban context. This study treats the transformation of gender roles and the growth of financial independence as two faces of the same shift, and investigates how the former feeds the latter among 540 urban working women across four cities of Rajasthan — Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, and Udaipur — using a structured questionnaire supplemented by twenty-four in-depth interviews. Six dimensions of gender-role change were measured — shared household responsibility, professional identity, participation in decision-making, career aspiration, work-life negotiation, and the loosening of traditional norms — alongside financial independence expressed through income control, savings behaviour, investment participation, financial planning, and contribution to household financial decisions. Findings show that role change is well advanced in the symbolic and aspirational register — 79.6% endorse the legitimacy of working women and 74.2% treat their career as central to identity — yet thins out in the domestic and authority register, where shared housework (68.5%) and joint financial decision-making (61.3%) lag, and where 38.4% report active resistance to changing norms within the family. Financial independence is correspondingly partial: 47.1% of respondents fall in the high or very-high band of a constructed Financial Independence Index, but a large moderate-to-low majority retains constrained authority over investment and long-horizon planning. A chi-square test confirmed a significant association between the degree of gender-role transformation and the level of financial independence (chi-square = 64.82, p < 0.001). Pearson correlation showed decision-making autonomy positively associated with financial independence (r = 0.62, p < 0.01), while a traditional household structure was negatively associated with it (r = -0.47, p < 0.01). Multiple regression established that, controlling for age, income, and education, role-transformation variables explain a substantial share of the variance in financial independence, with decision-making autonomy the strongest single predictor (beta = 0.39). One-way ANOVA confirmed significant differences in financial independence across education, occupation, and family-structure groups. The paper consolidates these results into the Gender Role Transformation and Financial Empowerment Framework for Urban Working Women (GRTFEF-UWW) and offers recommendations for educators, employers, policymakers, and families.