Fishermen live by the sea, and many a people lead their life around them.  Not many people are aware of the really staggering number of people building their liver around fishermen.  These related activities include net making, auctioning off the catch, vending the catch and processing the fish where the women play a major role than the men.  There has been a paradigm shift in the falsehood that women are ignorant and less skilled and therefore can only perform household chores.  Women first entered the field through retail selling of fish and indigenous food processing and then widened their field of play with the emergence of modern fish processing units.  With the expert potential, the employment opportunities for women increased even more.  However Gender discrimination still prevails in the work place and even at home.  Man’s own misconception of his superiority as well as the inferiority complex that many a women suffer from makes ‘equal rights for the women’ a far-away dream.  This is appositely echoed in the commonly used expression of ‘weaker sex’ while denoting women.  Challenges faced in work places includes sexual as well as mental exploitation, long working hours, tedious efforts of vending and processing etc.  Even if they manage to surpass these obstacles and hurdles of stressful long working hours, the fact that they get cheated out of their earning still looms large.  In this back drop, this paper tries to analyses the various challenges faced by the fisherwomen.

KEYWORDS: Gender discrimination, vending sector and fish processing.