Families, Firms and the Advantage of Absent Social Movements Among India's Professional Elites

• In Event: 229 - Section on Sociology of Law Paper Session. Gender and the Law

Abstract

While most professionals come from homogenous class backgrounds, women in India’s elite law firms feel the weight of their gendered career trajectories less than their professional peers. In this article, I trace one set of factors that account for this advantage - the role of families coupled with the absence of a historic social movement that targeted workplace equality. Using interview data with over 130 professionals across different kinds of firms, I reveal how the the institutional structures of new Indian law firms offer a natural advantage to women who otherwise need to drastically choose between work and motherhood. In addition to this structural set up, my data suggests that women across sites take advantage of the inherent support systems available to them – affordable household labor and the access to an extended family network – to help negotiate this balance. Together, these traditional mechanisms of support offer a new cohort of middle-class Indian women unprecedented professional success. I argue that such success, while notable, remains dependent on a rigid pre-existing hierarchy of caste and the absence of a social movement for workplace gender equality in the preceding generation.

Author

• Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, NYU Abu Dhabi