Ambition is never a crime, but for women, it is treated like one. Within India’s patriarchal society, where a young athlete was shot dead because her success wasn’t palatable, many independent women are belittled by the men they help, and society at large
Anjali Rane (left) and Manasi Rane (right), have both survived financial and domestic oppression and now run salons of their own, living life on their own terms. PIC/M FAHIM
On July 10, 2025, a chilling incident from Haryana made national headlines when a father fatally shot his own daughter, an accomplished athlete, allegedly because he could not bear seeing her success. Radhika Yadav, a 25-year-old tennis player, was shot in the back three times by her father, Deepak, 49, who was reportedly unhappy that she was running her own tennis academy.
The case, while extreme, is not isolated. Across India, women who shoulder the financial burden of their households often face resentment, ridicule, and emotional abuse from the very families they support. Success, when it wears a woman’s face, continues to challenge deeply ingrained patriarchal norms that view men as providers and women as dependants.
Radhika Yadav, a 25-year-old tennis player, was shot three times by her father, Deepak, 49, who was reportedly unhappy with her success and could not bear to see it. PIC/X@Logiclitlatte
In the past decade, the Labour Force Participation Rate for women has significantly improved, with a notable increase from 49.8% in 2017-18 to 60.1% in 2023-24. But there is a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work in a woman’s lot: Indian women spend seven to ten times more hours than men on household tasks. India’s 2020 Time Use Survey reveals the scale. 81.2 per cent of Indian women perform unpaid domestic services, compared to 26.1 per cent of men. These numbers reflect the lived realities of countless women, as the following stories reveal.
For Nidhi Sharma (name changed), every day begins with a familiar cycle of exhaustion. She wakes up at sunrise, gets her children ready for school, prepares meals, and then plunges into a demanding job that pays for the entire household’s needs from rent and utilities to groceries and school fees. Yet, she returns home not to appreciation or support, but to silence, criticism, and emotional detachment.
“My husband doesn’t lift a finger. Not with the kids, not in the kitchen, not even emotionally,” she says, her voice barely masking the fatigue. “Worse, he mocks my work, tells me I am not earning enough and that my career growth is slow.” Despite being the family’s sole breadwinner, Sharma is made to feel like an intruder in her own home. Her husband of for 19 years subtly but persistently invalidates her through taunts about her job, no help with childcare, and passive-aggressive remarks about household duties — all the while being completely financially reliant on her.
Being suffocated constantly, she voices how hollow she feels on the inside. Her emotions are a constant whirlwind of exhaustion and defeat due to the lack of appreciation and warmth in her life. “There are days I feel like I don’t exist,” she says. “But the bills have to be paid, and the kids have to eat.” The psychological toll is immense with burnout, anxiety, and the constant weight of being everything for everyone — except herself.
Mitali Nikore, founder of Nikore Associates and a senior economist who studies gender and economic structures in India, says such experiences are deeply rooted in patriarchal expectations. “Indian patriarchy doesn’t just control women’s bodies. It tries to control their aspirations too. A woman earning money disrupts the established power dynamic. Men like Sharma’s husband feel emasculated, so they resort to emotional withdrawal or passive-aggressive sabotage to reassert control.”
Mitali Nikore, senior economist and founder of Nikore Associates. Pic courtesy/Mitali Nikore
For women like Sharma, independence has come at the cost of freedom from financial dependence, but not from domestic oppression. “Across socio-economic classes, I’ve seen women who provide for their families still treated as secondary citizens in their own homes,” Nikore highlights. “Society rewards women for sacrifice, not ambition.”
Nikore describes a pattern she’s observed repeatedly: when women start earning more, or become the sole breadwinners, their financial success is quietly resented, even by those directly benefiting from it as seen in Sharma’s case. “It’s a deeply gendered response to insecurity. It’s not just one woman’s experience,” Nikore adds. “It’s the invisible cost women pay for stepping out of line even when they’re the only ones keeping the house running.” But not every household is hostile. Some women do find support at home only to face resistance from the world outside.
At 33, Gloria Pereira has carved out a unique space for herself as both a provider and a professional. After losing her job during the lockdown, she pivoted into education tech, training global student batches in digital marketing and coding while also running an events business on the side. Now, she is the primary breadwinner for her retired father and younger brother, with the latter just starting his career. “My dad and brother are incredibly supportive,” she says. “They do the cooking, cleaning, whatever is needed. There’s no ego in my home.” But that sense of ease ends at her front door.
While her family is supportive, Gloria Pereira often faces workplace discrimination for being the sole breadwinner of the house. PIC/NIMESH DAVE
Despite her professional competence and five years of successfully sustaining her own business, Pereira has faced blatant resistance and micro-aggressions in the workplace and from extended family. “I got married at an early age and then divorced which my relatives definitely frowned upon. My relatives have shown my Instagram photos around like it’s some sort of scandal,” she says. “Because I host events, wear what I want, and stay ambitious after my mom passed away, it is somehow offensive to them.”
At work, too, her financial role became a liability. “I was once asked if I was the only one supporting my family because that apparently meant I’d ask for a raise.” Another employer illegally terminated her when she refused to work on Sundays. “They saw me as a woman with ‘too many conditions’,” she recalls. Even with her stability today, Pereira says the emotional load is constant for her but also for her family. “My father has received flak from people now that the roles are reversed and it’s my turn to take care of things.”
For others, this opposition begins within the family, following them across generations. When Anjali Rane lost her husband to a brain haemorrhage in 2016, she was left to raise her two daughters alone, without any familial support. Living in a small home in Lonavala’s Thungarli village, she started a beauty salon and did everything she could to make ends meet. “I was determined to raise them well,” she says. “My in-laws snatched my husband’s part of the business away after his death and provided no child support. That pushdown from them only made me emerge stronger.”
The judgment never ceased. Whether it was working too much, travelling alone, or sending her daughters to college, Anjali’s resilience was constantly interpreted as rebellion. “They called me characterless just because I stepped out of the house,” she recalls. “They said I was being ‘too independent’ for doing what every man does, which is providing for my family.”
Her daughter, Manasi Rane, 24, was shaped by that atmosphere. She moved to Mumbai for work and became her family’s main provider. But in 2020, just weeks after her marriage, the cycle repeated — only with her in the centre. Working as a hair and makeup artist, she was earning more than her husband which was not appreciated. Soon she found her husband in an extra-marital affair.
“I caught my husband cheating 20 days after we married. This happened eleven times in the eleven months of our marriage with the same woman,” Manasi says. Instead of support, she was blamed for being “too busy” at work, for “wearing jeans” at home, for “not adjusting.” Her in-laws locked her indoors for three months, forbidding her from working or stepping out, calling her ambition “shameful.” She was told by her mother-in-law that they simply wanted an educated woman in the house to appear presentable to the society. However, they did not expect Manasi to continue working, especially with her leading financially. A breakdown soon followed. “I overdosed on sleeping pills. I wanted to end it,” she says. “But my mother saved me.”
Once again, the family’s emotional and financial burden fell on Anjali, this time with the added weight of her daughter’s trauma. “Society accepts a successful woman only if her success is invisible or sacrificial,” explains Nikore. “Once she gains agency, financial or emotional, it disrupts the patriarchal contract. That disruption is often punished.”
Whether working behind a salon chair or in front of a camera, this punishment of visible ambition takes many forms. Shivani Kapila, 36, is a lively, effervescent content creator but behind her joyful persona lies a long trail of backlash and resilience. In 2017, while still working at Google, she became the primary earner in her family. “I felt empowered, but also like I couldn’t afford softness any more,” she says.
As a content creator and the main financial support for her family, Shivani Kapila continues hearing misogynist remarks about her age and career. PIC COURTESY/SHIVANI KAPILA
The shift to content creation in 2018 brought financial independence, but also heavy judgment. “Everyone thought it was a joke. People called my in-laws to stop me! They said I was lowering my standards.”
The criticism only deepened when she out-earned her earlier Google salary. “Someone close said I should focus on the home, let the man earn. I was told to do jhaadu-pocha.” What kept her grounded was her husband’s support. “He stood me in front of a mirror when I couldn’t and said, ‘Look at yourself, say you’re enough.’” With one person rooting for her, she has been able to filter out everything else.
This is the quiet violence that women breadwinners endure. The psychological labour of constantly justifying their success becomes a crime in a world where ambition is tolerated only when it stays out of sight. Manasi Rane’s story circles back to the devastating Haryana case — a society so deeply threatened by female autonomy that it would rather destroy a woman than live in her debt. Her pain, like her mother Anjali’s endurance, was made invisible by a culture that cannot tolerate female agency without exacting a moral cost.
Yet, despite everything, women like Shivani Kapila and Nidhi Sharma hold on to their hard-earned self-worth. Both, in separate conversations, spoke the same truth: “I am proud of myself. I know I am enough and can stand on my own feet. I don’t need a third person to tell me that. My efforts are visible and known to me.”
Why do men feel threatened by women?
Dr Kedar Tilwe, consultant psychiatrist at Hiranandani Fortis Hospital, explains the psychological aspect of the power struggle between men and the women who are the financial head. “Conventionally as a society the demarcation of roles and responsibilities are considered clear and rigid,” he says.
Dr Kedar Tilwe. Pic courtesy/Fortis Hospital
However, why do men feel threatened when they see a female member in the house faring better than them? To this Dr Tilwe responds, “We have societal and cultural norms where traditionally the male member is looked up to as the breadwinner of the family. They are trained and brought up this way. The sudden perceived change in power dynamics scares them as it causes a blow to their self-esteem which gets fuelled by the type of support system or family around them.”
A couple or a family can navigate through this crisis situation by having a proper conversation with each other. “For a couple, having 15 minutes of conversation every day will help them understand whether they are on the same page or not,” Dr Tilwe suggests. “Realising your differences helps you avoid the surprise element from any situation.”
Are we still Savitris?
In 1969, Hindi playwright Mohan Rakesh wrote Aadhe Adhure (Halfway House in English). In the play, traditional gender roles are reversed, with the mother, Savitri, being the primary breadwinner while the father, Mahendranath, is unemployed. There are also two unhappy daughters and one lazy son. Savitri is often disillusioned by her life, and is seen a woman who pays for her trying to escape her circumstances by being ambitious, in life and love. She is constantly judged by her family, for trying to find happiness outside the family unit, and at work. Her ambition, while initially a force for change, becomes a source of her suffering as she realises that neither she nor the men in her life can fulfill her desires for a complete and meaningful existence.
39.2%
Bank accounts belong to women in the country
Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
17,405
Number of start-ups with at least one woman director in 2024
Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
One
Woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their intimate partner or family member
Source: Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides by UN Women and UNODC
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