We all assume that employment is the ultimate key for women to escape misogyny and patriarchy. While that is somewhat true, being employed or financially independent doesn’t make life as easy for women as we’d like to believe. In fact, sometimes, it makes things worse. Research shows working women in India face more domestic violence, not less. It means in many households, a woman’s income changes the family budget, but not the family dynamics.

The link between work and domestic violence in India

One of the most recent peer-reviewed studies, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in 2025, analysed data from India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5). The researchers found that working women had higher odds of experiencing intimate partner violence than non-working women. To understand this gap, the researchers used a method called Fairlie decomposition. Here, researchers try to figure out what factors are widening and which are narrowing the gap between two groups. Applied here, two factors stood out: a husband’s controlling behaviour, and his drinking. This means that how some men react when a woman starts earning, especially men who already drink heavily or already try to control her, influences the rate of violence.

The second study, published in July 2026, narrowed the question further, to violence during pregnancy specifically. The researchers looked at data on nearly 59,000 women who had ever been pregnant, and split them into two groups: those who’d worked in the past year, and those who hadn’t. Among working women, 4.14 per cent said they’d been physically hurt by a partner at some point during a pregnancy. Among non-working women, that figure was 2.01 per cent.

Before treating that as proof of anything, the researchers had to rule out an obvious alternative explanation. Perhaps women already stuck in violent marriages take up work precisely to build an escape route, which would mean violence is causing employment, not the other way round. So the researchers used a statistical technique built specifically to rule that out. When they reran the numbers this way, the gap didn’t shrink, as you might expect if reverse causality were the real story. Working women turned out to be 3.3 percentage points more likely to report violence during pregnancy, even after this correction.

The authors call this the “withdrawal paradox.” In many Indian households, a pregnant woman is expected to slow down, stay home, and lean on her in-laws. A woman who keeps working through her pregnancy is, often without meaning to, pushing back against that expectation. And in enough homes, that pushback is met with violence rather than support.

Why “get a job” isn’t the fix everyone hoped

For the longest time, we all have leaned on the idea that a woman gains leverage with an income; she can walk away, so her partner has more reason to behave. It’s called the bargaining power model, and it holds up reasonably well in wealthier, more individualistic societies.

But it doesn’t work in India. The reason, researchers increasingly argue, is “male backlash”. In societies where men have traditionally been seen as the primary breadwinner, a woman’s income can sometimes be perceived as a challenge to that role. When a woman starts earning, some partners may feel their authority is being questioned. Instead of adapting to a more equal relationship, they may respond with attempts to regain control through intimidation, emotional abuse, or physical violence. 

There’s another reason why employment alone cannot empower women. Having a salary doesn’t always mean having freedom. Many women hand over their earnings to other family members, have little say over household spending or require permission for major financial decisions.

Research consistently shows that employment without decision-making power does not automatically reduce vulnerability to domestic violence. Empowerment depends on whether women can actually control their resources, make choices, and negotiate within the relationship. A pay cheque alone cannot undo unequal power dynamics.

Some women are finally able to report abuse

Some researchers, including the authors of the pregnancy study, flag an alternative explanation: working women might not be experiencing more violence; they might simply be more willing to talk about it. A woman with her own income, her own colleagues, her own reasons to leave the house, has more people to tell and less to fear from telling them. A woman with none of that has fewer places to turn, and often, less language for what’s happening to her.

Even the most careful of these studies can’t fully separate “more violence” from “more willingness to report it.” But we know now that a job alone cannot shield a woman from domestic violence. 

What can actually help?

Going to work can provide confidence, friendships, and financial security. It doesn’t automatically make home safer. Across both new studies and the NFHS-based research, a few protective factors keep showing up. A wife who has a real say in household decisions like healthcare, big purchases, and visiting her own family reports less violence. Household wealth helps, but only past a certain point; richer households are protective, middle-income ones less so. A husband’s alcohol use is one of the single strongest predictors of violence, working woman or not. And a woman who didn’t grow up watching her own father hit her mother is meaningfully less likely to end up in a violent marriage herself, regardless of her job.

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