Gendered housing struggles and the construction of single women as risky tenants in urban India
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Despite financial solvency and professional success single women are popularly known to face discrimination in India’s rental housing markets. Yet, the issue remains understudied in the literature. Drawing on 28 semi-structured interviews, we ask: How does gender shape housing access for unmarried female young professionals in Bengaluru? Our findings reveal that single women encounter barriers at every stage of the housing search—not due to economic marginalization, but through their construction as ‘risky tenants’ who threaten established social norms. We introduce the concept of ‘social risk’ to explain how landlords fearing single female tenants’ transgressions renders them a liability to be managed. As single women resist their discrimination through strategic performances of respectability, they meet landlords’ attempts to assess and mitigate social risk as active agents in the construction of the housing search. Applying gender as an analytical lens, we reveal rental markets as critical sites of struggle for urban citizenship. As the global affordability crisis continues to concentrate power in the hands of landlords, understanding how social constructions of risk exclude marginalized groups becomes critical for understanding exclusion in growing cities everywhere.
Source: Housing Studies
Authors: Julia Gabriele Harten, Meghna Mohandas
Institution: University of British Columbia
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7154140308