Liberalization since the early 1980s has placed the big urban agglomerations at the centre of the global economy. The bigger cities have become a place for privileged interactions and exchanges, thus emerging as important actors in this new economic system.1 This is as true for India as it is elsewhere in the world. An enquiry into such urban agglomerations is important, as it leads one to understand the vital contemporary social, economic and political processes in society. To decode the city is to decode the wider and underlying social structures. These cities have restructured themselves as prominent participants or leaders in the sectoral shift…to service production, leading to tertiarization of the labour market. This shift has a direct effect on women’s work and lives. It is often argued that it has resulted in the greater feminization of the urban labour market and increased fragmentation of women’s work.2 In India too, with the development of this sector, the cities have shown tendencies for employment generation and individual prosperity. Evidently women’s participation in work is highly dependent on factors that vary from one country to another or from one city to another. In this paper a general picture of the share of women and men workers in the service sector of Delhi and Kolkata has been analyzed as these two citieshave different.