Exploring the Influence of Traditional Gender Roles on the Personal and Professional Lives of Young Indian Adults in a Modernising Society

This project was built around primary data, where I designed and ran a survey of 25 young Indian adults to understand how traditional gender roles still shape career choices, marriage decisions, household responsibilities, and workplace experiences, even as India modernises rapidly. I wanted to ask whether the tension between “tradition” and “progress” was actually showing up in real decisions people were making, not just in abstract debate. The hypothesis I worked from was that traditional gender roles and expectations continue to impact both the personal and professional lives of young Indian adults, despite increasing modernisation, and I wanted my own data to test that rather than just argue it.

I started by building out the historical and structural context — tracing gender roles in India from the matriarchal Indus Valley period through the Vedic shift toward patriarchy, colonial influence, and the women’s and men’s rights movements that followed, including more recent shifts like #MeToo and #MenToo. I also mapped how media specifically — Bollywood, soap operas, advertising, social media, literature, and gaming — reinforces or occasionally challenges these roles, and built a comparative breakdown of how caste, class, and the urban-rural divide change the picture for different women.

For the primary research itself, I worked through the different methodologies available to me — interviews, surveys, observation, focus groups, experiments — weighing the pros and cons of each before settling on a structured survey as the most realistic method given my access and timeline.

I designed the questionnaire around my three research questions (career choices, personal decision-making, workplace challenges), ran it, and then moved into data representation and analysis, breaking down responses by gender across career influence, household division of labour, and workplace bias. I was upfront in the methodology section about the limitation that most of my respondents were urban, which I flagged as shaping what the data could and couldn’t tell me.

The conclusion I reached was that traditional gender roles haven’t disappeared with modernisation, they’ve just gotten more contradictory. Women in the survey were still disproportionately handling domestic responsibilities even while building careers, and were facing real biases around being seen as less committed once marriage or family entered the picture.

But what struck me was that men weren’t simply on the “advantaged” side of this either — they reported real pressure to be providers, to suppress vulnerability in leadership roles, and to avoid careers seen as unmasculine, which often meant abandoning what they were actually interested in. Writing the conclusion made me realise the project wasn’t really about proving gender roles still exist, but rather it was about showing how unevenly and specifically they constrain people on both sides, and how family expectations operate almost like a third invisible variable sitting on top of the two genders. The limitation around my urban-skewed sample also stayed with me afterwards — I was aware the whole time that I was capturing one slice of a much larger, more rural reality, and that gap felt like the most honest thing I could name about the project’s scope.