The Social Production of Career Anxiety: Gendered Aspirations in Urban India

Abstract

This study examines career anxiety among young urban Indian women as a psychosocial phenomenon produced at the connection of gender norms, familial collectivism, institutional cultures, and neoliberal precarity. Drawing on Charmaz's (2014) constructivist grounded theory, ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with postgraduate women across psychology, policy, and research disciplines. Analysis revealed three entangled themes: financial independence as moral duty, anxiety as inhibiting and motivating, and self-care as a privatised response to structural conditions. Findings demonstrate that career anxiety is as a constitutive texture of everyday aspiration and reveal career formation as a negotiated agency. The findings call for institutional frameworks that move beyond models of individual adaptation toward redistributive accounts of care, ambition, and recognition.