India's Working Women and Career Discourses

This study investigates Indian working women's sense of the discourses surrounding work and careers. In interviews conducted with seventy-seven women across socioeconomic statuses, castes, classes, and occupational and generational categories in the city of Pune, India, women express how feeling bound by tradition confronts excitement about ongoing changes in the country. The work lives of these women are influenced symbiotically by India's sociocultural practices and the contemporary phenomenon of globalization. Using feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical lens, Suchitra Shenoy-Packer explores how women deconstruct, coconstruct, and reconstruct systems of knowledge about their worlds of work as embedded within and influenced by the intersections of society, socialization, and individual agency. The meanings that Indian women associate with their work as well as their definition of a career in twenty-first-century India will be of interest to students and scholars of feminist theory, women's studies, globalization, Asian studies, and labor studies.

Suchitra Shenoy-Packer offers a rich examination of the complex forces that shape the working lives of Indian women.  Through detailed exploration of multiple social factors, Shenoy-Packer illustrates the gendered nature of cultural expectations that frame everyday life in contemporary India., Passionately presented and theoretically sound, with India’s Working Women and Career Discourses Suchitra Shenoy-Packer contributes greatly to our understanding of the working lives of Indian women in the 21st century. This text reveals rich historic and ethnographic data collection and discusses the discourses of caste and class; family and career socialization; innovation, agency and tradition; and the various meanings women in India assign to their work. Unpacking the long-held—often misguided—perceptions about Indian politics and “the Indian woman” Suchitra Shenoy-Packer offers a fresh view of India’s globalizing political economy through the lives of Indian women across socio-economic status, age and income., Amidst a contemporary discourse that celebrates the modernizing of the Indian woman through a post-2000s wave of globalization and open economy climate, Suchitra Shenoy-Packer’s close examination of this context is very much needed. Shenoy-Packer has examined the context for the contemporary Indian professional woman in context by layering various intersecting influences historically, socio-culturally as she navigates the global economic shifts. The interweaving of class, caste, and regional shaping of workplace cultures and the ways in which these shape the contemporary professional Indian woman allow the reader to get a clearer understanding of the complex issues around women who work in both formal and informal sectors. There is very little scholarly work that takes on such a close look at the professional Indian woman in the field of communication studies.

Suchitra Shenoy-Packer is assistant professor of organizational and multicultural communication at DePaul University.