Same Same But Different: Unintended Gender Parity and Speculative Isomorphism in India’s Elite Professions

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 21. Gender and Work II

Abstract

Across the globe, elite professional work has been predominantly male-dominated and even committed organizational interventions have been unsuccessful in maintaining completely egalitarian workspaces. In this context, the case of elite law firms in India poses a puzzle. In the country’s most prestigious firms, women are about one half the population, even at senior levels of partnership. This is at odds both with scholarship on women in high status professions as well as the more particular research on India. Using in-depth interviews with 130 elite professionals across different organizational sites, this research adopts comparative frameworks to reveal the organizational mechanisms underlying this unlikely gender parity. Unlike Indian banking and consulting firms that are local offices of elite global conglomerates, elite Indian law firms struggle with issues of organizational legitimacy and feel the need to aggressively differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers. At the same time, as institutions trying to mimic global firms without actual scripts to do so, these firms engage in a form of speculative isomorphism that has unlikely advantages for its actors. These data suggest that equal gender representation is one such mechanism by which these new, elite firms signal meritocracy and modernity to their global audience.

Author

• Swethaa S Ballakrishnen, Stanford University