Women in Black: Gender Negotiation in India's New Organizations

Over the last three decades, the feminization of the legal profession has been a common feature across the globe (Michealson: 2013). However, the prime exception to this trend has been in India, where women have consistently been less than 10% of the practicing Legal Bar. It is of especial contrast then, than in two most prestigious law firms in the country, women constitute about 50% of the workforce and record similar professional rewards and advantages as their male peers. Using in-depth interviews with past and present lawyers, this research will investigate comparative frameworks to test and explain this unlikely finding about institutional change. For instance, one reason for this advantage might be that both these unique firms emerged as new “global” workspaces following, and necessarily responding to, market liberalization in the early 1990s.

 

This project is empirically significant because its dissonance is unique to the Indian context as well as everything we know about women in prestigious workforces more generally. Investigating these organizations and women is theoretically significant because it speaks to important literatures on organizational emergence (Powell and Padget: 2011), gender stratification (Ridgeway:2012) and the influence of globalization in emerging markets (Meyer & Rowan: 1977).

See more of: Gender and the Legal Professions
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