Abstract
Global organizations in the knowledge economy are increasingly adopting packages of “best practices” that include policies that aim to improve the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women. India’s technology industry presents a potent site at which to examine the adoption and adaptation of gender policies, since large Indian-owned companies have rapidly implemented gender inclusivity policies in the last decade. Drawing upon interviews conducted with technologists and human resource directors between 2004 and 2012, this chapter shows that the implementation of gender policies in Indian firms has been a source of conflict because it represents an adaptation of what is widely regarded as “American” norms in an area thought to be quintessentially “cultural” – the careers of women, especially mothers. This chapter argues for the importance of understanding gender policies in relation to the broader cultural, economic, and institutional contexts in which organizations operate.
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Notes
- 1.
For an exception, see Linda McDowell (1997).
- 2.
My usage of “gender diversity” policies versus “gender inclusivity” policies in this chapter varies to reflect the contexts in which they appear. In the literature on gender policies in the USA, the term “gender diversity” is predominantly used. In contrast, the literature on India refers to “gender inclusivity,” and this term was used by my informants as well. It may be that this variation reflects the type of transformations that gender policies have undergone in the Indian context described here. But this point requires further analysis and inquiry that lies outside the scope of this chapter.
- 3.
For example, Winifred Poster (2008) shows how diversity policies entered Indian firms in the 1990s. The American company introduced notions of diversity, but local firms reconfigured those ideas in ways the American firm did not necessarily expect or intend.
- 4.
Reflecting the dominant literature on gender diversity, I intentionally equate the term “gender” with “women” in this chapter, since an expansion and critique of that mainstream usage lies outside the scope of this chapter.
- 5.
Although my original large study had planned to focus on professional IT women, as the project progressed, it became clear that I needed the perspectives of men to gain a fuller picture of the gender dynamics in the workplace, as well as constructions of femininity. Of my 137 interviewees, 31 were men, so the subset used in this chapter offers roughly the same proportion of men and women as my full sample set. In this chapter, interviews with men provide insight into how higher-level managers, who were more likely to be men, perceived and dealt with gender issues in their particular companies and in their particular roles. While this chapter deals specifically with issues like maternity leave and advancement, I have written elsewhere about how men perceive mentoring relationships with women in their workplaces, and how women in their workplaces influence their ideas about the ideal partner to marry (Radhakrishnan 2011).
- 6.
Throughout this chapter, I use pseudonyms for interviewees and for the firms in which I conducted research.
- 7.
This figure is an estimate based on the 2006 report cited, which reports that 30 % of the IT workforce are women. Surprisingly, more recent reports on Indian knowledge professionals published by NASSCOM do not include statistics about gender composition of the industry, and I have been unable to locate other reliable statistical sources that update this number. The NASSCOM gender inclusivity report (2009) cited in this chapter offers an overall number of 670,984 female professionals in the industry in 2008, but does not offer enough information to calculate what proportion or what segment of the industry this comprises.
- 8.
Between 2004 and 2006, several mainstream magazine covers in the USA portrayed a technical Indian femininity as a symbol of a new economically powerful India. See, for example, the February 2004 edition of Wired magazine; the March 6, 2006, edition of Newsweek; or the June 26, 2006, cover of Time. In 2004, a series of columns by Thomas Friedman in New York Times, highlighting India’s tech boom, also focused on IT women, implying that their progress symbolized the arrival of India as a whole.
- 9.
These findings are based on observations from my research and discussion with interviewees about this topic. There is a striking lack of systematic data on these issues within the existing literature. The most recent industrywide report on gender, the NASSCOM-Mercer (2009) report on gender inclusivity, presents highly problematic data in which growing numbers of women in the industry are conflated with higher proportions overall (see p. 10), and when “percentage of women” is discussed, it refers to the distribution of all women in various organizational roles in the sector rather than being attentive to patterns of sex segregation within roles. For these reasons, I rely heavily upon my own observations in this section, which provides a crucial context for understanding the gender dynamics of the industry.
- 10.
GS is organized into vertical businesses, referred to as “verticals” that each cater to different global industries, developing specialized products and services. GS has a finance vertical, a healthcare vertical, a utilities vertical, etc.
- 11.
This justification for gender diversity (the so-called business case for gender equality), which Bagchi evokes, relies on an essentialized construction of feminine managerial capacity and is one that flows from the US corporate context (see Robin Ely and Debra Meyerson (2000), and Nanette Fondas (1997)).
- 12.
While the single women I interviewed never mentioned guilt, mothers frequently did. Padmini of Datacom also mentioned guilt as a central problem throughout her interview. When she discussed her own career when she had children, she said, “somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt guilty, which I know is not appropriate.” Later, when discussing the importance of interventions, she explained that the primary form of education that gender policies give women is that, “it is okay to go slow [when you have children]… and not to feel guilty.”
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Radhakrishnan, S. (2017). Culturalism as Resistance. In: Peterson, H. (eds) Gender in Transnational Knowledge Work. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43307-3_5
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