The rape and murder of a medical intern at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata has once again highlighted the lurking threat of sexual violence against women at work in India. Even as corporates seek to keep their employees safe, women’s vulnerability to attacks has increased as “workplaces” now extend beyond office buildings.

Work now happens everywhere—in a coffee shop for a freelancer, on the street for a greengrocer, at client sites for IT professionals, and so on. “The boundary between public space and the workplace has disappeared. Public spaces have become workplaces for many people,” says Kalpana Viswanath, co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, a social enterprise that uses technology to make urban spaces safer for women.

With the rapid growth of gig work and hybrid work cultures, companies, regulators and civil society need to rethink the safety of working women. This is especially important because as remote work becomes more popular, companies don’t always know where their employees are working from.

Some employers may want to set up a sensible reporting mechanism to track employee locations, but not every employee may want to share that information. “There’s no easy answer to this dilemma. A company can largely provide a safe workplace. People’s homes are also generally safe. It’s that in-between where employers often struggle,” says Richard Lobo, chief human resources officer at IT firm Tech Mahindra.

A report by Women in India Inc. (WIIn), a group led by New Delhi-based Udaiti Foundation and Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Analysis and Data, found that 44% of managers see transport and safety as significant barriers to recruiting more women.

Viswanath says that when free bus travel for women was introduced in some states, many of them who were manual workers were quick to adopt the service because otherwise they would have had to walk several kilometres to get to work. It also enabled some women to take up better jobs further away from home.

Pooja Sharma Goyal, founder and CEO of Udaiti Foundation, says one of the main reasons Tamil Nadu has the highest percentage of women workers in industry in India is the creation of gender-inclusive facilities for women workers, such as hostels, toilets and childcare. Of the 1.6 million women workers in India, 0.68 million (43 per cent) work in factories in Tamil Nadu. About three-fourths of women workers in industry are employed in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, all southern states.

Several companies have adopted best practices to ensure the safety of their women employees when they travel for work or visit customer locations. DCM Shriram’s HR Director Sandeep Girotra says that a separate hostel for women has been built at their sugar mills in Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh, to enable them to work at the plant.

Similarly, at Jindal Stainless’s plant in Jajpur, Odisha, women do not work night shifts and commute to work by bus, says Sushil Baveja, the company’s director of human resources.

At Compass Group, a food and support services provider where 80 percent of its 38,000 employees are manual workers, many of whom operate from remote customer locations, unit managers are required to conduct “safety walks.” They’re a chance for employees and leaders to talk about safety or other issues, says its chief human resources officer, Manika Awasthi. She conducts 15 to 20 safety walks a year among team members. In all, company leaders conduct more than 800 safety walks a year across offices and customer sites.

SAP Labs India uses a third-party service provider that offers round-the-clock SOS support, promising to dispatch help within 5-10 minutes, explains Shweta Mohanty, head of human resources at the company.

And last year, food delivery company Zomato launched “The Shelter Project” to provide rest areas to all gig workers and delivery partners, offering clean drinking water, phone charging stations, toilets, high-speed internet, 24/7 tech support and first aid support. A Zomato spokesperson said there are now 600 such rest areas across India, set up in partnership with fuel stations and restaurants.

As corporate India does its part, the government also needs to take a critical look at urban mobility, infrastructure and public amenities from a gender perspective. “Auditing the safety of public spaces—checking whether they are well-lit, accessible to public transport and walkable—can go a long way to ensuring that women can use them without fear or uncertainty,” says Viswanath.

A 2018 study by New York University’s Rudin Center called “The Pink Tax on Transit” found that women pay an average of $26 to $50 more per month for public transit than men due to safety concerns and the abuses they face on a daily basis.

Women’s safety is not just the responsibility of the employer; civil society, government and all other stakeholders must work together to ensure women’s dignity and safety both in and out of the office.

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