The Invisible Workload: Occupational Stress, Burnout, and Coping Among Women in Academia

The book opens by situating occupational stress within the wider "double burden" carried by working women in India: the expectation that women perform as fully committed professionals while retaining full responsibility for domestic and caregiving work. Female academics occupy a particularly acute version of this position. Among the most highly educated women in the country, they nonetheless face continuous pressure from research output, teaching, administration, and academic-calendar workload surges, layered on top of unchanged domestic expectations.Grounding this in theory, the book surveys the major frameworks of stress and burnout, from Cannon's fight-or-flight response and Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome through Lazarus's cognitive appraisal model, the Job Demand-Control model, Effort-Reward Imbalance theory, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory, before turning to Shelley Taylor's "tend-and-befriend" model, which the book argues is especially relevant to how women regulate stress through social connection.