Me? A Secretary? The Moderations of Class and Gender in India's Elite Law Firms

Following market liberalization in 1991, the Indian legal profession has had more demands for cross-national legal services than ever before. One of the ways in which the country has responded to this global work and clientele, is by reorganizing its professional spaces in new, competitive ways. On the one hand, there has been a burgeoning of new, elite law schools that train young lawyers in comparative, cross-national law and include rigorous clinical curriculum. At the same time, there have emerged, especially over the last decade, a set of big law firms that are, in the Indian context, relatively new legal organizations that deal primarily with transactional corporate work for large global and domestic corporate clients. These firms have expanded and grown institutionally in many unprecedented ways, but a striking feature of their emergence—especially among the largest and most prestigious firms in the country—has been the growth and success of their women lawyers. Preliminary interviews suggest that women in these big law firms are not discriminated against or disadvantaged as compared to their male peers in that they receive similar organizational rewards (pay, promotion, client attention) and interactional status among clients, peers and superiors alike. This is an intriguing finding in that it does not correspond to mostly gender-disadvantageous accounts of women in high status professions universally. We know that critical stratification scholars have long credited the unique power of intersectionality in understanding disadvantage and discrimination. I offer that a similar extension of this framework is useful in understanding the success of these big law firm women lawyers. My research probes the ability of class to moderate the impact of gender within high status professional organizations. Put simply, it asks: is this unique “gender-neutral” advantage (to the extent it exists) limited to certain kinds of women?