Decoding Social Norms for Equitable Skilling

Author: Anukriti Kotwal, Team SA-SNALC ________________________________________________________________ “Can we truly achieve equitable skilling if we focus only on training, curricula, employability, and placement without addressing the deep-rooted social norms that shape...

Author: Anukriti Kotwal, Team SA-SNALC

________________________________________________________________

“Can we truly achieve equitable skilling if we focus only on training, curricula, employability, and placement without addressing the deep-rooted social norms that shape aspirations, choices, opportunities, and long-term participation in the workforce?”

-Ritu Kharayat, PCI India

Marking UNESCO’s World Youth Skills Day, on 15th July 2026 South Asia Social Norms Agency Learning Collaborative (SA-SNALC) hosted its webinar, “Norm Shifting as a Pathway for Equitable Skilling.” Moderated by Ms. Shahnoor Akter Chowdhury; a feminist scholar-practitioner, senior gender expert, and anthropologist with over 20+ years of experience, the panel brought together key voices from the domain of skilling and social norms, Ishanee Bhattacharyya from Quest Alliance, Shreya Agarwal from Pratham, and Sruthi Niveditha Kande from PCI India.

While standard skilling discourse centers on the number of training programs conducted, youth enrolled and certified, placement rates, admissions, and overall employment outcomes. This session shifted the attention to a deeper, more fundamental question: “Who gets to choose their future in the first place, and how are those choices shaped?” Do social norms and normative factors influence or shape these choices in deciding who can access, complete, and benefit from the skilling opportunities? Social norms are the unwritten rules that stand unimposed but long before a young person steps into real life, their career path has already been filtered through what their community considers typical and appropriate.

How do Social Norms Puppeteer Behavior
Descriptive norms, injunctive norms, reference groups and sanctions

Our expert panel highlighted some barriers and gatekeepers, mentioned below:

• The way young people think of their skilling and livelihood trajectories is shaped by what family permits and then the larger social acceptability. When it comes to pursuing non-traditional career paths, the fear of change and moving away from community norms is a major fear for families to withhold approval.
• Women’s mobility is often constrained by social norms surrounding their public image, safety, and perceived risk of exploitation once they leave their households or communities. These norms restrict young women’s ability to access skilling opportunities, apprenticeships, and jobs beyond their immediate surroundings, limiting their economic participation. 
• There is a mismatch between the aspirations of the youth and the opportunities available for them. This is mainly due to the societal expectations that typecast certain people into a set of trades “fit” for them. Like men are discouraged from pursuing healthcare and domestic roles, whereas women are discouraged from working in heavy labour and technical roles.
• Peers from similar reference groups succeeding in non-traditional fields set examples to challenge social norms. The absence of relatable role models in aspirational and non-traditional fields further limits young people’s confidence and ability to pursue their career aspirations. 
• Many trades have very visible gendered archetypes. A woman in a technical trade or a man in an early-childhood care setting directly challenges established gender aesthetic norms, which is met with resistance from the social circle one belongs to.

One key learning is that centers like Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) also fall within the ambit of societal norms. These norms do not end at the entry gates of these learning centers, they are carried by the students, the trainers, and the counselors in various ways. Counselling for women may be targeted towards certain career choices that are seen to be “fit” based on their gender identity. These biases snowball and get perpetuated from that point onwards into professional lives as well. These influences are captured well by the theory of planned behaviour given by Icek Ajzen (1985) (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Skilling as a planned behaviour, Icek Ajzen (1985)

Source: Presentation by Vineha Tatkar, SA-SNALC on 21st July, 2026 in ‘Norms Shifting as a Pathway for Skilling’

Strategies to Shift Restrictions Posed by Social Norms for Equitable Skilling:

In order to shift social norms, it is important to work across individual, interpersonal, organisational and community levels, working with individuals and reference groups to ensure that key influencers support change and a new norm is created in the space of skilling of youth. 

• Individual/Intrapersonal: Building agency and self-sufficiency.
• Interpersonal: Influences key decision makers like family and peers.
• Organisational: Removing bias from institutions and workplaces.
• Community: Reducing sanctions and bringing a shift in collective expectations.
• Public Policy: Enabling policies that facilitate behavioral change.

The panelists shared real life, field-tested solutions that aim at breaking restrictive patterns in youth skilling and employability caused by social norms. These can be described mainly in three ways:

• Pratham Skilling- Continuous reinforcement is crucial to shift norm based expectations through career centers that provide support, mobilization to placement and aid in developing a strong employer network, post placement to provide training and placement support.
• PCI India- Employers become major enforcers of workplace norms, there is an active need to reduce bias in hiring practices and encourage recruitment that is focused on aptitude instead of gender stereotypes. This fosters social behavior change.
• Quest Alliance- While institutions alone cannot shift social and gender norms, they have the potential to become strong catalysts for change, for which Quest Alliance has established an institutional-level task force to work on assumptions and biases in workplaces.

Rigid definitions of traditional vs non-traditional work can be highly restrictive for individual freedom of choosing their career pathways and economic empowerment. Choice gets compromised when societal expectations force the youth to pick from predefined options. The Q&A session was resonant with this idea. Equitable skilling is not only about filling seats in training centres and expanding the reach in the number of courses available, but it is also about agency in the choice of careers, quality training, and balancing the aspirations of the youth with the opportunities available; these are the goals that must be forefronted instead of predefined skilling programs and placements based on prevalent social and gender norms.

Watch the full webinar here: https://socialnormscollaborative.net/events/webinar/norms-shifting-as-a-pathway-for-equitable-skilling/

Featured Image Creator: C.V.Subrahmanyam | Credit: THG Publishing Private Limited