COMMENTARY

Women in Indias New Generation Jobs

Saraswati Raju

Has increased access to employment opportunities, nancial independence and educational attainments enabled women in urban India to exercise their freedom and agency? An examination of the information technology and business process outsourcing sectors shows that despite the glamour and an invoked sense of articulate modernity, women here continue to operate within a narrow paradigm. Its limits are constituted by gendered constructs that persist to encode womens primary place within domesticity even as the vocabulary undergoes some cosmetic changes.
Saraswati Raju (saraswati_raju@hotmail.com) is with the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

ne of the turning points in Indias growth has been the liberalisation of the economy in response to the neo-liberal compulsions that thrive on a free-market regime. Despite contradictory and contested views about its effect on womens participation in the labour market and recent uctuations, scholars are unanimous that the post-liberalisation period has seen womens workforce participation in the urban labour market go up. Apart from the growth of contractual and exible labour that the shift of production from an assembly-line Fordist model to a more exible regime has brought in, the past few years have also seen an impressive expansion in the outsourcing of business services from countries of the North to labour-intensive countries of the South. This has been facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). In addition to supportive political and economic changes, Indias location in an appropriate time zone and labours lower wages in general have made it a signicant player in ICT-enabled services. Its advantage also stems from its standing in the knowledge economy and competence in using the English language
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(Taylor and Bain 2010). Overall, these developments are largely based in urban India because of the required skills and better infrastructure. It is not surprising, therefore, that the urban labour markets have become very important to such enterprises, in the case of men and more so women (Sen and Raju 2012). The continuous spread of higher education among women in India is undisputed, even though several issues of concern remain (Raju 2010; Sahni and Shankar 2012). This is not to overlook the much larger share of women workers in informal sectors of the urban economy, which depends on varying demand for products and market uncertainties. This has led to the emergence of temporary and contingent workers and general erosion in job security (Mazumdar 2005: 8). Ground Reality Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom provides an account of various kinds of freedom one of them being womens freedom to participate in paid work outside their homes and its interconnectedness with other forms of freedom. The augmented access to employment oppor tunities, nancial independence and progressive educational attainments seen in India should presumably enable women to exercise their reasoned agency (Sen 1999: xii). But does it happen? Does paid employment necessarily [increase] womens freedom and agency... specially, under conditions of globalisation, as Koggel (2003: 165) asked
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almost a decade ago. I want to revisit this, but with particular reference to the ICT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors that are supposed to be creating new generation jobs (Jose 2009). The women workforce in these segments consists largely of unmarried young women who are well educated, and often technically trained. They come from urban areas, and belong to the middle class, and upper and middle castes (DMello 2006; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Upadhya 2007). This combination raises our expectations about their empowered status. Ironically, the ground reality appears to be different. Drawing on the literature in recent years, I argue that despite the glamour and an invoked sense of articulate modernity (Tara and Ilavarasan 2011), women in the information technology (IT) and BPO sectors continue to operate within a far and no further paradigm. The no further limit is (re)constituted by gendered constructs that persist to encode womens primary place within domesticity even as the conning vocabulary undergoes some cosmetic changes.1 My proposition may appear at odds with the globalising discourses on disappearing borders, a seamless world, global villages, and so on. It may perhaps be argued, as Krishna does, that presentday labour geographies need to be situated beyond the limits of the nation state instead of being bound by a selfspatialisation that names itself as a destiny, a genius, a culture, a civilisation, or homeland a contiguous and identiably discrete and separate entity (2001: 412).2 However, I maintain that viewed from womens world of labour and contextually spatialised, the meta-myth (Bradley 2000) of globalisation that Krishna advances is highly problematic in a country like India where there are irresistible ironies and resistances of a local making (Appadurai 1996: 29). In furthering my argument, I borrow from Kagitcibasis concept of the autonomous-relational self (2005). Seeing autonomy and agency being used extensively and often interchangeably, Kagitcibasi questions their separation and their intersections with relatedness. According to him, the separation between agency
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and relatedness has its roots in an EuroAmerican cultural context that has the ideological background of individualism. For him, autonomy and heteronomy are two poles of a spectrum. An individual can have an interdependent as also an independent self in dialectic mutuality or a coexistence of opposites. These selves are embedded within societally encoded gendered constructs, which are internalised during socialising processes (DMello 2006: 139). In the Indian context, very little scope for dialectic mutuality is built up in womens identities. Instead, self-efcacy and self-denition vis--vis others means an overwhelming presence of the relational self in the making of the self. On the basis of his empirical study of professionals in the eld of IT in Mumbai, DMello contends,
The autonomous-relational self...is operationalised among IT workers, in ways that are more dichotomous than dialectically mutual. The breadwinner ideology predominated as a central aspect of masculine identity constructs, while the relational self occupied centre stage in feminine identity constructs. Individual responses as well as the coping means used by women reinforce the view that the relational self was the predominant pathway [for women]. ... Negotiating for power and equality in the family system [was found to be] a challenging task, threatening disintegration of family relationships...many women [in his study thus]...compromised their own career aspirations (2006: 152).

Respectable Feminity Radhakrishnan (2009) echoes similar sentiments. She argues that the way the referent to a larger consciousness around womens place is being constructed in families in urban India is largely coincident with the emergence of a new middle class (Deshpande 2003; Rajagopal 2003 quoted in Radhakrishnan 2009). It is this class with working women in the IT sector that signals the arrival of a global nation, rather than a parochial or traditional one (2009: 197). But, withholding the global image, the nationalist culture continues to draw on the idealised construct of (Hindu) women based on a powerful dichotomy between the inner and outer, material and spiritual, and home and market that are inevitably gendered. As opposed to the earlier emphasis on spiritual, the contemporary
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construction of middle-class domesticity, according to Radhakrishnan, hinges on the notion of family (and the location of women in it). Using Bourdieus notion of symbolic capital, along with his ideas of gender and the family, she puts forward the concept of respectable femininity, the framing of women within the familial realm the family assuming perceived normalcy legitimated through middleclass status. According to her, the symbolically authoritative dominance of the middle class allows the concept of family rst to bear on the national consciousness, opening up space for grappling with the embeddedness of gender, which shapes the labour market outcomes of even those in new generation employment such as IT, withholding individual negotiations and interlinkages with the global economy. Her IT women enact highly competent professional femininity, but one which remains markedly Indian (2009: 200-201, 209).3 In a way, in her formulation, middle-class gendered sensibilities eventually get institutionalised to reect the broader Indian culture. The spatial and temporal elasticity and the contextual disconnect of events have made several scholars observe the emergence of a at world, treating call centres as disembodied entities (Taylor and Bain 2010: 439). However, such views have been disputed. The social context beyond the workplace has consequences, particularly for women, who face conicting demands between domestic responsibilities and the pressure of social mores that unsocial working hours bring. That is, socially constructed spaces create a mix of hi-tech operations and indigenous values, not the homogeneous spread of a work culture (Ong 1991). Both the theoretical propositions Kagitcibasis and Radhakrishnans hold good in various locations. As Patel and Parmentier (2005) observe on womens entry to the rapidly expanding IT workforce, Not only does womens participation fail to occur at the same speed as IT expansion, but...their participation is based on a continuation of traditional gender roles whereby technology and its development... [adapt] to the existing social structure. Further, the persistence of... gender divides perpetuate the notion of gender segregation and do not enhance
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womens socio-economic and political status, nor provide equal participation in the information economy (2005: 29; Kelkar, Shrestha and Veena 2002).4 One can go on citing examples. One can also say the persistence of a particular set of encoded behaviour is ironical because however contradictory it may seem, the earlier invisibility and the dichotomous spilt in productive and reproductive spheres and the gendered division of labour that trivialised womens contribution in the past, are now gradually disappearing (Chhachhi 1999). However, I contend that even in the contemporary context, the knowledgeable middle class does not always function as an agent of real social change when it comes to women. As a matter of fact, respectable femininity and the household domain more stringently reinforce the structural encoding on gendered behaviour. What one sees is largely a situational change, not a processive one. This may seem to underestimate the messiness of real-world struggles over workers politics (Hayter and Harvey 1993, quoted in Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2010). Yet I would like to suggest that political struggles are now the hallmark of rural India. The kind of proles in the urban market works as a deterrent to collective agency, with very little or no scope for unionisation or mass struggle. There is enough evidence to show that trade unions have become defunct in the new economic regime.5 Even otherwise, they were functioning within patriarchal paradigms, ignoring women as (equal) partners and paying attention to their gender-specic issues of concern (Roy-Chowdhury 2005: 2250). While neoliberal labour regimes privilege the educated urban masses, particularly the middle and the upper classes, the poor and subaltern in them get busy with day-to-day survival. According to Madadevia (2002), in the global environment, economic space overrides life space. Elaborating on the changing economic landscape, she charts new systems of resource mobilisation, forms of governance, policies privatising and commercialising infrastructure, and an ideological mooring that sees economic prosperity taking care of everything (2002: 4854).
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Notes
1 I am not suggesting a complete negation of womens agency. In her study of silver chain makers in Bengal, Soni-Sinha (2011: 117) talks about contestations and disruptions whereby some women used the discourse of men as breadwinners and constructed their earnings as pocket money to have control over their wages and use them for personal expenditure. But, in my view, such examples are few and far between and do not necessarily offer huge challenges to hegemonic discourses, which remain patriarchally driven. Admittedly, the concept of patriarchy as a universal construct has lost its analytical signicance; it has been variously reintroduced as a loose descriptor or under the rubric of patriarchal structures. For instance, the multiple forms and loci of masculinist domination which prevail (Qayum and Ray 2010: 112). First of all, scholars tend to be divided on the enactment of globalising processes, some calling them inevitable and irreversibly universalising, while others see them as projects both dominated by the logic of capital. Radhakrishnan brings out the tension that is generated because of long and erratic work hours in the IT sector vis--vis womens responsibilities towards their home and families. Although the divide between work and home blurs under such conditions, questions regarding priorities begin to rise. Her research suggests that women rarely privilege career aspirations over family life. The gendered segregation at the workplace because of prevailing social norms and practices is visible in engineering, which as a profession has traditionally been characterised by male dominance. Of late, womens enrolment in engineering courses has been increasing, but their employment rate has been slack. They are found to be teaching in departments of technical educational institutes (Parikh and Sukhatme 2004). There is a curious ambivalence here. On the one hand, women have been able to break away from the stereotype, but on the other, they are stuck with it. Banking is another such area where societal factors perpetuate the existing stereotypes, which ultimately harm the advancement of women in their careers, especially in management (Mirza and Jabeen 2011). Bangalore has a long tradition of trade union activism. However, given the current climate, an organisation solely concerned with workers interest (in the garment industry) had to camouage its intent by calling itself an NGO rather than a trade union (Roy-Chowdhury 2005: 2252).

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