Can Career-Minded Young Women Reverse Gender Discrimination? A View from Bangalore’s High-Tech Sector
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Alice W. Clark; T. V. Sekher
- Source
- Gender, Technology and Development. 11:285-319
- Subject
- Daughter
Economic growth
education.field_of_study
business.industry
050204 development studies
media_common.quotation_subject
05 social sciences
Population
Devaluation
Developing country
Development
Social issues
High tech
Gender Studies
0502 economics and business
050202 agricultural economics & policy
Sociology
education
Empowerment
Human resources
business
media_common
- Language
- ISSN
- 0973-0656
0971-8524
Womens status in India is mixed with many positive and negative indicators. The devaluation of daughters leads parents to resort to sex-selective abortions and infanticide- practices currently spreading to previously unaffected areas. In relation to this negative picture interviews with women employed in the Information Technology (IT) sector in Bangalore suggest its opposite: a partial reversal of daughter devaluation is currently emerging in the families of young women in Indias high-tech sector. Studies on employment in the IT sector in India have not adequately considered important long-term intergenerational impacts of this new development on the whole culture of daughter devaluation. This article strives to fill this gap by illustrating that when young women find opportunities to improve their financial autonomy mobility and social acceptance in a male-dominated society there are far-reaching implications for social demographic change and also for gender equality through the evolution of the two-income family model departing from the concept of the male breadwinner. This change may have wider social repercussions upgrading the image of daughters in the minds of their parents creating a different family model with important demographic implications and outcomes. All these feed into a current debate about the role of labor force participation in womens empowerment. (authors)