Can Career-Minded Young Women Reverse Gender Discrimination? A View from Bangalore’s High-Tech Sector

Abstract

Women’s 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 India’s 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 women’s empowerment.