‘Race’ and ‘culture’ in the gendering of labour markets: South Asian young Muslim women and the labour market

Abstract This article attempts to develop an analytical framework for understanding the racialised gendering of labour markets. It is offered as part of an effort to theorise more adequately the place of paid work in the lives of Asian young Muslim women in Britain. Based upon in‐depth interviews with individual young Muslim women of Pakistani origin as well as group interviews it addresses their narratives as social biographies embedded within changing economic poitical and cultural conditions of present‐day Britain. Arguing against a general theory of gender that could then be applied to analysing specific instances of paid work the framework proposed highlights the importance of studying the intersections between gender, class, ethnicity, racism, religion and other axes of differentiations empiricallly and historically as contingent relationships. The young Muslim's women's narratives demonstrate the contradictory interplay of these articulations in their lives. Whilst the majority of women favour women’ rights to paid employment there is no simple one‐to‐one correspondence between this and how they perceive their own situation, or negotiate the outcomes they desire. Overall the research shows women's position in the labour market to be inscribed by a multiplicity of factors including the impact of global and the national economy on the local labour markets, cultural ideologies about women and paid work, role of education in mediating job aspirations, and racism.