Global circuits of gender: women and high-tech work in India and the United States

This article addresses the experiences of women in engineering and technology careers in an increasingly transnational era. It draws from an interview study, conducted during the early stages of the global high-tech industry, with over 180 women and men IT personnel in three organizational settings: a major Silicon Valley computer firm, its multinational subsidiary in India, and a local Indian IT firm. The IT industry, I find, has created new avenues of employment for women transnationally, but with variable trade-offs. Surprisingly, the masculine “cultures of engineering” often noted in the US literature are weaker in the Indian cases. These women face less questioning of their technical competence and gain greater access to jobs such as engineering. In the US case, however, women workers are more likely to become IT managers and receive comparable wages to their male colleagues. I situate these findings in the contextual politics of information technology in Indian and US societies, and their contradictory effects in both drawing women into the IT workforce and excluding them from organizational power. Furthermore, I use the multinational case to explore what happens in the global circuits between these sites, and if they undermine or exacerbate various hostile environments for women