ABSTRACT
Diasporic South Asian women (which includes Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian women) are often constructed in policy documents and popular media as invisible or as an accompaniment to their husbands, fathers or sons, not as workers or community builders in their own right but more as dependent members of families, shadows of their male protectors. McDowell et al. (2012, 1) confirm this observation by saying that despite their presence in the labour market for decades, including their participation in several strikes and other industrial action in the United Kingdom, South Asian women continue to be represented in the media and in policy documents as the “exotic other and/or wives and mothers rather than workers.”
