This seems rather hard to believe considering the multitude of articles written on gender discrimination against women in India. But India is a land of surprising dichotomies. On the one hand, we have the khap culture, dowry deaths, female infanticides, forced marriages….sounds familiar?
On the other hand, we also have scores of matrimonial ads-‘Tall, Fair and Slim Indian girl working for an IT firm seeking a groom working as a software engineer‘.
The mushrooming IT and ITES (IT Enabled Services) firms that form the skyline in every major city in India and some tier II cities are undoubtedly the most coveted jobs in the country, regardless of gender.
It’s ironic to think that the IT sector is actually a level-playing field for both genders in India (not withstanding pay discrepancies), whereas in the US, where the IT boom began, this sector continues to be a boys’ club. Vikram Chandra, in his book, Geek Sublime, writes about how women comprise 30% of employees in tech firms in India and only 21% in the USA. The numbers are on a rise in India, whereas the US is seeing a decline.
Ellen Pao’s (Ex-CEO, Reddit) discrimination suit and other skeletons that have tumbled out of Silicon Valley in the past couple of years are repeatedly pointing to one thing-the appalling lack of gender diversity among the tech titans of the world. Even the television series, Silicon Valley, didn’t have any women characters in their first season. But, after much brouhaha, they went on to include a few female characters in the subsequent seasons of the show.
A still from the TV series, Silicon Valley
The reason why India is better than the Silicon Valley for women is uniquely Indian.
For starters, working for an IT firm implies you hold a respectable and well-paying job that doesn’t involve any outdoor work. The flexible working hours allow women to balance life and home. Besides, bringing a meaty income to the dinner table boosts a girl’s value in the marriage market. This is a key factor in deciding careers for women in India, despite the considerable progress in women’s social conditions in metros. IT in India occupies the same position as banking did until the late 80s-of being the only respectable profession, if a woman wants to continue working, after marriage.
The other factor is that in India academically science and mathematics are not considered to be only a man’s domain, although sometimes its work applications are. Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, who works in the Department of Anthropology in San Jose State University discovered this while doing fieldwork in both India and the United States on women’s science-related academic career choices.
“The ‘math as a masculine domain’ notion, so pervasive in American theories, produced surprise, laughter, and bewilderment when I described it to Indian informants. They pointed out it was well known that girls perform extremely well in mathematics, are uniformly ‘toppers’ on state-wide exams, which ‘anyone’ could see by looking at the newspaper. They told me about famous female mathematicians in Indian history. They cited case after case of ‘brilliant’ girls in mathematics. And IIT informants argued, accurately, that a majority of students in the prestigious Masters of Science program (mathematics, physics, and chemistry) were women,” wrote Mukhopadhyay in her paper, ‘A Feminist Cognitive Anthropology: The Case of Women and Mathematics’.
A third factor in favour of women is how IT as a sector is viewed in India vis-a-vis the US. The tech field in the US leans heavily on research and new breakthroughs, which gives an impression of it being heavily dominated by geeks (male, obviously).
As Vikram Chandra points out in his book, “US programmers, like coders everywhere, work in teams, but they seem imaginatively committed to the ideal of the violent, lonely frontiersman. The frontier myth of Silicon Valley traps men in a hall of mirrors, where all they can see is go-it-alone gunslingers. The resistance to the introduction of women into the cowboy posse springs, I think, from fear that the very nature of the activity will be transformed.”
Whereas India’s IT sector has its origins in applications and operations and continues to remain that way even today. Any IT-related ventures/properties are put together purely from a marketing point of view. Research figures low on the list of priorities as does the idea of pushing boundaries and crossing new territories in the field of computers. This makes it ideal as a profession without any gender confrontations.
Ironically, the first generation of programmers in the world were women, hired during World War II to crack codes, writes Nathan Ensmenger in his book ‘Computer Boys Take Over’. Then programming was considered to be an art and therefore a domain of women.
Admiral Grace Hopper invented the Compiler in the 50s which translates English commands into computer codes
The Cold War and the race to better technology, it was decided at the 1968 NATO conference to give programming a more scientific and masculine tilt. Thus began an organised masculinisation of a profession and its transition from ‘computer programming’ to ‘computer science’ – the takeover of the computer boys. Until today, where they resist any change in the boys’ club.
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