Same same (but different) [electronic resource] : accidental feminism and unintended parity in India's professional firms
Keywords: Sociology.

This dissertation explores one set of recent changes in the structure of global gender inequality by studying the case of Indian professional women who have been at the forefront of unprecedented career success. While India as a country has been rife with less than optimal gender updates, women in a little known enclave of recently established corporate law firms seem to have leveraged a sweet spot within this grander mosaic of inequality. For women attorneys in these elite firms, gender doesn't relay traditional workplace disadvantages: they are promoted at the same rate as men, paid the same salaries and become partners at roughly the same rate. This is not just at odds with the broader literature on women in the workforce but also empirically peculiar for the Indian context. To unpack the various mechanisms and structural conditions that result in this positive -- but unusual - empirical context, my project employs an embedded, multi-case study drawing on fieldwork between 2011-2014 and the analysis of over 135 in-depth interviews with elite law, banking and consulting professionals in Mumbai, India. In the recent decades following international market liberalization in 1991, Indian professional service firms have had to contend with new kinds of work, environments and management. One key change brought about by this exposure to foreign markets and investment has been the exposure to new kinds of global actors and audiences and the growing commitment to global norms of meritocracy. Leveraging the value of this comparative contrast, I highlight the ways in which the same exposure has had very different kinds of gender outcomes in different kinds of firms and unpack the structural mechanisms that engender this variance in internal stratification. Gender equality and parity are often thought of as the hard-earned rewards of long and agentic social movements. Here, I unpack a scenario in which a set of firms backed into a position of producing parity. Specifically, over the course of this dissertation, I unpack four specific structural conditions that play off each other to create this surprising result -- Frames, Firms, Facings and Families. I argue from the perspective of each of these factors that the creation of egalitarian outcomes is not intentional, but, instead, accidental and at the cost of other existing inequalities. In the first empirical chapter "Frames" (Ch. 3), I focus on the framework of an ideal worker (Acker: 1990) and the advantage of new institutions to challenge and reorganize these expectations. I argue that as new firms doing new work, elite law firms are advantaged in being able to escape strong background frameworks (Ridgeway: 2012). But as firms recruiting from a new neo-liberal workforce that is committed to meritocracy, women in these firms are doubly advantaged to sidestep steep gendered assumptions. I show how meritocracy (and education as a new arbiter of such "merit") has, without especial intention, offered a new window of gender blind opportunity to a select set of professional women. In the second empirical chapter "Firms" (Ch. 4), I set up how as domestic firms struggling to be legitimate in a global market for legal services, Indian law firms are structurally positioned in ways that advantages their female professionals. By assuming global firms to be deeply committed to meritocracy but at the same time not being tied to them in any substantive way, elite law firms mimic imagined and idealized scripts to be more "global". In doing so, their commitment to inclusion and meritocracy is used both as a tool to differentiate themselves in a market ripe with traditional assumptions about gender; as well as a way of signaling like-mindedness with their global peers. Unlike other neoliberal professional service firms are products of domestic emergence and management, I show how this domestic emergence then sets up a kind of speculative isomorphism that advantages women within these elite legal firms. In the third empirical chapter "Facings" (Ch. 5), I argue that although supportive peer interactions are necessary to create an environment of parity, women in elite law firms are also especially backed by an important external audience that do not activity discriminate on the basis of gender -- their clients. As firms that retained recurring international clients, these firms exposed their lawyers to a selection of sophisticated clients who were both unlikely to prime disadvantageous gendered expectations in interactions. What was more, the nature of the work valorizes positively otherwise "feminine" qualities like attention to detail and soft negotiation skills. Together, this set up of being domestically managed but international-client facing, makes women in elite law firms leverage advantages that women in other kinds of firms (that were internationally managed but domestic-client facing) don't enjoy. In the final empirical chapter "Families" (Ch. 6), I trace the role of families and temporality in determining this unlikely gender outcome in these elite law firms. I show that, as one would expect, the origin families that most professionals come from is deeply homogenous (middle class, high caste, urban) but that similar class and caste advantages did not transfer gender-blind outcomes in other professional careers. I show how the temporality of the elite law firm careers were specifically crucial to enabling parity for law firm women in India. In doing so, I highlight two more structural features that engender this accidental parity -- a ready, caste dependent labor force that supplies housework support and childcare and a penultimate generation of close female family members who are not in the workforce and available to provide free and ready household support. Together, the convergence of these four structural conditions have come together to produce gender parity in ways that other, more targeted endeavors have failed to produce. The overarching finding in this dissertation is that gender egalitarian outcomes can be created and supported without intention and that these forms of unintended parity are often buttressed by other inequalities and mechanisms of stratification. In my final chapter (Ch. 7), I consider the futures of these accidental mechanisms to sustain the parity outcomes they have managed to create in these small enclaves -- what do the futures of these institutions look like? I explore whether this is a short-term advantage for one particular cohort of women who are at the receiving end of structural, accidental advantages -- or if these patterns in early institutional emergence can be capitalized on to build sustainable and egalitarian organizations. The unlikely case of the elite Indian law firm shows us how gender egalitarian change is not just accidental or unintended, but also that it can flow out of a conjuncture of seemingly minor and inconsequential institutional characteristics. Paying attention to this butterfly effect that transcends the sum of its narrow-gauge parts is at the root of this dissertation.