The law, the market, the gendered subject: workplace sexual harassment in Chennai’s information technology industry

Abstract

The Indian information technology (IT) industry has, in recent years, been plagued by reports of workplace sexual harassment, disrupting the narrative of empowerment disseminated by an industry that projects itself as a pioneer in the area of gender equality. This has been further complicated by the passage of domestic legislation in 2013 mandating companies to form internal committees that will address complaints of workplace sexual harassment. This article, which has emerged out of nine months of ethnographic research on the IT industry in the South Indian city of Chennai, uses a socio-legal approach to unpack the processes and practices through which the law has been interpreted and executed, while also interrogating the law itself as a mechanism for social justice. As I argue in this article, policies for promoting diversity and inclusion in the urban Indian workplace, placed in the context of corporate adherence to the law, can themselves function as significant sites of tension in middle-class women’s undertaking of paid employment.

Keywords:

• Chennai
• gender violence
• India
• information technology
• legal ethnography
• Sexual harassment

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Atreyee Sen, Raminder Kaur and Emilija Zabiliute for putting together this special issue. I would also like to thank the other participants of the Asian Dynamics Initiative annual conference at the University of Copenhagen for their feedback on an early version of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for their detailed and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributor

S. Shakthi is an independent researcher. She has recently completed a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.