![[The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition]](print-wsjie-savin.gif)
October 30, 2000
By CHEN MAY YEE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BANGALORE, India -- As a project leader at Infosys Technologies Ltd., 28-year-old Rekha Shenoi earns more than her professor father did when he retired, holds several hundred thousand dollars in stock options and makes regular business trips to the U.S.
And when her family began scouting for a husband for her, Ms. Shenoi insisted she wasn't about to give any of that up. She rejected one suitor who said she'd have to stop traveling, another because he lived in a small town, and a third who wanted to emigrate. "I don't have to take any kind of nonsense from anybody," says Ms. Shenoi.
The technology revolution is changing the gender calculus in India, one of the world's most traditional societies. In a country where arranged marriages are standard and brides are occasionally even killed for insufficient dowries, the software boom is offering new liberties to a small but influential group of women. These women -- from programmers to project managers at top companies like Satyam Computer Services Ltd., Wipro Technologies Ltd. and NIIT Ltd. -- are deciding if and when they want to marry and whether they want to have children. And they're commanding unusual respect from family members, who grant them "male" privileges like exemption from housework and a say in household finances.
Recently at Infosys, the unthinkable happened: Two high-ranking managers took postings in the U.S., and their husbands gave up their jobs to follow them.
Peering ahead several years, this trend promises to grow even more pronounced. Software will be a whopping $87 billion-a-year -industry by 2008, up from $5.7 billion this year, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies. And women are likely to play a large part in that expansion. By the end of the decade, they will account for 45% of the tech work force in India, says software association president Dewang Mehta. That's compared with the current figure of 14%.
The pipeline is already in place. At NIIT, both a software company and the single biggest tech educator in India with almost 1,700 centers and 150,000 students, half the students are women, up from a fifth 15 years ago.
At engineering colleges as well, more women are walking the halls. In the last five years, the number of colleges has jumped to 140 from 80, doubling the annual enrollment to 40,000. At some of the schools, half the students are women, says R. Natarajan, director of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.
This is hardly the first step into the workplace for Indian women. For years, women have worked outside the home, many as teachers, nurses and civil servants. The economic liberalization of the past decade created openings at foreign multinationals, with banks seen as an especially respectable workplace for young Indian women.
But tech jobs are different. They offer big money early on, and almost always guarantee mobility. Women in their 20s are traveling around India and as far as the U.S. for software projects, providing them an eye onto the lifestyles of their opposites across the globe.
Indeed, the few women who joined the Indian software industry in its infancy sport a very different world view than their nontech compatriots. S.N. Uma, 45, gave up teaching college mathematics in the mid-1980s because she was tired of repeating the syllabus year after year. She enrolled at NIIT to study computers. Today, she oversees 120 people developing learning software at NIIT's factory in Madras. Not only does she earn 700,000 rupees ($15,555) a year, double what she would have made had she continued teaching, "culturally, I am very different," she says. "I couldn't have imagined I could travel on my own," she adds, recalling her apprehension when she first checked into a hotel, solo, four years ago. And it was because NIIT gave her a car that she learned to drive and became, as she puts it, "vehically independent."
Her businessman husband, she says, is supportive and her two school-age sons seem to like the novelty of having a high-powered career woman for a mother. Once, when she made a day trip to Delhi for a meeting, she overheard her son telling a friend on the telephone that his mother was "taking an airplane to work and back."
Aspiration or Reality?
Ms. Shenoi, too, has been very much shaped by her software experiences. Six months ago, Ms. Shenoi, who makes 49,000 rupees a month, married Vinay Shenoi, who heads the semiconductor unit of Philips Software Centre (India) Ltd. in Bangalore. (The couple's families are not related.) They share a spacious three-bedroom bungalow with his mother on the outskirts of Bangalore. In most Indian households, it's the daughter-in-law who does the cooking and cleaning and serves her husband's parents. Here, the roles are reversed: The mother-in-law "gets coffee for both of us," says Ms. Shenoi. Moreover, when her sister-in-law -- a lawyer who works with her businessman husband -- visits, it's she, not Ms. Shenoi, who is asked to pitch in with the housework.
Sitting at her cubicle at Infosys' Silicon Valley-style headquarters in Bangalore, wearing the embroidered tunic and trousers of the traditional salwar kameez, she remembers the rejected suitors and muses: "If I didn't have Infosys, I would never have the guts to say no."
At first blush, Western-style notions of individualism and self-fulfillment seem to have made deep inroads into India's big cities. In the last few years, university students in places like Delhi and Bombay have started discarding their sari and salwar kameez in favor of jeans and T-shirts. Billboards advertising "Femina," a women's magazine, spell out the apparent choices for today's Indian woman: "Jobs vs. Babies. Labour vs. Caesarian. Test tubes vs. Men."
Yet, the fashion statements and cityscape slogans are more reflective of aspiration than reality, more an aping of Western attitudes than an expression of deep shifts in gender relations, many Indians say. Some fathers and husbands "allow" women to work because it's seen as sophisticated. Even in Bombay, the most cosmopolitan of Indian cities, men and women who date keep it from their families, women actors who marry into the big industrial families give up their careers, and a woman smoking a cigarette still attracts stares.
Manoj Warrier, a 26-year-old public relations manager for the dot-com arm of a big textile company that he declines to identify, dismisses the new breed of ads targeting women as sheer bravado. Sitting in a popular Bombay nightclub and nursing a pink mocktail, Mr. Warrier likens their allure to ads for detergents that promise whiter-than-white shirts. "You know the shirts are going to turn yellow, but you still buy the detergent because it's an aspiration," he says. How far does he think Indian women have come? "On a scale of one to 10, I would say two or three," says Mr. Warrier, who admits he was initially apprehensive about accepting his current job because his immediate boss is a woman.
From Silicon Valley to Singapore, it's the technology companies that are pioneering a flatter and more forward-looking work culture. In India, it's no different. NIIT, for example, was the first Indian company to introduce paternity leave five years ago and the first to allow teleworking. At the time, NIIT didn't want to lose software developer Harita Gupta, who after 11 years with the company had decided to resign to stay home after having her second baby. It was 1995 and the Internet had just arrived in India. Sugata Mitra, head of research and development at NIIT, told her he saw no reason why she couldn't do research -- into converting text to speech -- from home. "I'll give you a computer and you'll be on the Internet," Ms. Gupta remembers Mr. Mitra saying. And with that, Ms. Gupta became India's first high-tech teleworker, taking part in company meetings via Internet chat.
"Those two years were critical. It was make or break for my career," says Ms. Gupta, now 38, and national head of an NIIT unit that develops software training packages for corporations. Today, seven or eight women in middle management at NIIT work from home and the trend has spread beyond the software industry to a few advertising and consultancy firms.
Technology companies hold an exalted place in India. Though only a sliver of the country's population works in the sector -- 340,000 people out of one billion -- Indians watch it avidly for trends, financial and social. There may be only five computers for every 1,000 Indians, but even those who don't understand what the Internet is all about know that software programmers work in air-conditioned offices for companies with soaring share prices. These days, the many marital ads for men and women in Sunday newspapers list software employment alongside more traditional criteria such as fair skin or a respectable family.
That cachet is what tipped the scales for Anitha R. Pai's parents -- and enabled her to wrest control of her personal life.
Salvation in Technology
Over the years, Ms. Pai watched apprehensively as her three sisters -- each one armed with a college degree, in one case a master's -- entered into arranged marriages within their close-knit Konkan Brahmin community. Ms. Pai sought salvation in technology. After studying economics at the same all-women's college her sisters attended, she ditched plans to get a Ph.D. and instead enrolled in NIIT Ltd. to study computing. She went on to teach there, later moving to a technical-support job working with the company's clients. "I come from a family where they never send a girl out alone," she says. Suddenly, she was traveling by herself on buses and trains around Tamil Nadu state, in southeast India. In Madras, she'd work into the night.
She also began seeing a man she'd met at NIIT. C. Krishnamohan, a year older than Ms. Pai, wasn't a Konkan; he was a Telugu Hindu and a non-Brahmin to boot. Her unpredictable work schedule allowed them to meet over meals three or four times a week without arousing her parents' suspicions, and they dated secretly for three years.
"It was a strange feeling" and "not Indian custom" to have a daughter who worked so hard and chose her own partner, says Ms. Pai's mother, Vijayalakshmi R. Pai, a retired civil servant. Their house in a Madras suburb is decorated with pictures of Hindu deities and photographs of the local swamis. Ms. Pai's grandmother, Arundhati Shenoi, a sari-clad, white-haired woman who was so respectful of her late husband that she never addressed him by name, still exclaims in surprise every time Ms. Pai turns up at the house in a T-shirt and jeans.
But as the software industry took off, the Pais began to rethink their position. Ms. Pai's father, R. Ramachandran Pai, saw the changes in the newspapers -- the stories about soaring stock prices of Indian companies, the tales of Indian entrepreneurs who had struck it rich in Silicon Valley. These days, he proudly proclaims to friends that his daughter works for NIIT, and they congratulate him on having such a "talented girl." Ms. Pai's husband's family did not ask for a dowry. "Many families are not particular if they can get a good girl earning well in IT," she says.
As a project coordinator at NIIT, Ms. Pai earns 25,000 rupees a month, almost double what her husband makes as Madras branch manager at a bill-collection company. He says he has "no problem" with the income gap. Does the young couple plan to have children? "Maybe in another year," says Mr. Krishnamohan, glancing at his wife. Ms. Pai has other ideas: "I'm not prepared for it," she says.
Ms. Shenoi, the Infosys manager, describes the shift this way: Previously, "a lot of men gave women freedom out of a sense of benevolence," she notes. Today, women like her "claim it."