Negotiating professional and leader identities in interviews with female Indian professionals

Abstract

Existing research on women's construction of professional identities and, more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to embrace. This paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as 'a man's domain'. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or,as is the case in one interviewcarefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India.

Mobilizing master narratives through categorical narratives and categorical statements when default identities are at stake

“…The interviewee was in her 40s and she had worked at various (quasi-)governmental institutions before joining a high status educational institute where she held a senior position in administration. This is quite exceptional for a woman, as the workforce in India for high-skilled jobs is still strongly male dominated (for more details, see Chatterjee and Van De Mieroop, 2017; Sehgal et al, 2013). Importantly, the interviewee relates that she had to resign from one of her earlier jobs because she was verbally harassed after she had refused to comply with her male boss’s orders.…”