Negotiating professional and leader identities in interviews with female Indian professionals

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India and discuss how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as "a man's domain".

Abstract: Abstract Existing research on women’s construction of professional identities and, more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to embrace. The paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as “a man’s domain”. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or — as is the case in one interview — carefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India.

Summary

1. Introduction

• Thus, in any given interaction, individuals may draw on any of the different aspects of their social identity, which are potentially relevant anytime and anywhere (Zimmerman 1988: 426), and they often do so in highly fluid ways, swiftly shifting from making relevant one facet of their social identity to the next.
• Leadership is regarded here also from a social constructionist perspective.

2. Women in the workplace in India

• That a woman’s economic situation influences her empowerment and her status in the society is no hidden truth.
• Females constitute only 31.6% of the total workforce in India out of which a major proportion of females (87.3%) are working as cultivators, agricultural laborers and laborers in household industries.
• At this point, it remains unsure whether the work environment in India has become favorable for women after decades of attempts to break through the glass ceiling, during which, as Nath (2000: 50) mentions, “women were unequivocal in wanting to be evaluated on their performance and did not want any special treatment”.
• As mentioned by Singh and Hoge (2010: 1) “though women are contributing enormously to the social and economic product at national and global levels, they remain at the bottom in the hierarchy of power and rewards in the workplace”.
• Next to this, a dualism is expected from them in terms of managing the household and their children, which is considered to be their sole responsibility in addition to their job outside the house.

3. Research focus and data

• And discuss their life and more specifically professional experiences during research interviews.the authors.
• For the purpose of this study, more than ten women working in the corporate sector in three cities of India were approached for interviews.
• Only four women gave their consent to audio-tape the interviews, which were then transcribed by the researchers.
• She has more than thirty years of experience of working in the corporate sector in a northern Indian metro city.

4. Analyses

• The authors will first discuss how two interviewees clearly co-constructed their professional identities as leaders, and in particular as mentors, with the interviewer.
• Then the authors shift to interview 2, in which the interviewee’s workplace is clearly defined as a very masculine community of practice, and how this affects the way the interviewee constructs her professional identity.

4.1 Negotiating leader identities

• In interview 1, the interviewer explicitly projects the categorization of ‘the boss’ upon the interviewee in her question (line 74), while opposing this to a ‘group’ (hence the plural references in lines 73-75) of ‘subordinates’ and ‘juniors’.
• The interviewee answers this question by saying that she never had any problems with the juniors, but receives a lot of respect from them (line 222-223: ‘There are people who respect you, they respect your knowledge’).

4.2 Women in an explicitly ‘masculine’ community of practice

• In the second interview, there is not much talk about leadership styles.
• The discussion focuses more on the interviewee’s career in sales and her choice to change careers even though she was rising on the corporate ladder.
• A crucial observation regarding this fragment, and its relation to how this interviewee positions herself as a professional in the workplace, is that she does not criticize the potentially sexist nature of this recruitment process, but she actually aligns with it by emphasizing aggressiveness as the most important criterion for her selection.
• Both interlocutors do not question the legitimacy of these norms, but rather, they align with them and the interviewee’s performance of masculine traits is thus used as an important explanatory factor for her success in this domain.

4.3 Female leadership in a male dominated environment

• This is further elaborated upon in the next two lines, in which this ‘militant mood’ is made more concrete by framing it in war-terms, in which one party is trying to attack the other (line 106).
• On the other hand, the interviewee also makes her gender relevant as being marked in other settings, as such characterizing these also as male dominated environments.
• After a brief pause, the interviewee disambiguates the reason why she adds this gendered self-categorization to the story evaluation by reformulating it (line 189: ‘rather’) by means of an interpretation of female empowerment.

5. Discussion and conclusions

• In this article three interviews with women who have – or had – leading positions in workplaces in India were analyzed.
• Interviewee 1, on the other hand, also constructs her leader identity as a mentor and explicitly highlights the feminine nature of her approach, as well as her identity as ‘a lady’ in male dominated communities of practice.
• Secondly, leadership is explicitly constructed and framed in these interviews as an interactional accomplishment, which is in line with the view of leadership as the collaborative construction of meaning (Smircich and Morgan 1982).
• Finally, it is clear that the importance of the norms of the particular community of practice in which these women operate should not be underestimated.
• So there are many different angles that call for scientific attention, especially regarding the way Indian societal views, as represented in dominant discourses, interact with how professional and gender identities are constructed and perceived both by men and women in, and beyond, the workplace.

Full text

THIS IS THE FINAL VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE
NEGOTIATING PROFESSIONAL AND LEADER
IDENTITIES IN INTERVIEWS WITH FEMALE INDIAN
PROFESSIONALS
PRACHEE SEHGAL (INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT
INDORE), DORIEN VAN DE MIEROOP (UNIVERSITY OF
LEUVEN) AND ABHA CHATTERJEE (INDIAN INSTITUTE OF
MANAGEMENT INDORE)
Abstract
Existing research on women’s construction of professional identities and,
more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally
focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus
by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do
this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with
women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these
analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges
that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially
when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the
collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female
behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to
embrace. This paper discusses how these female professionals mainly
construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as
aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed
as ‘a man’s domain’. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these
professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or, – as is the case in one
interview – carefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India.
Keywords
gender, identity, leadership, workplace, interviews, India.

1. Introduction
In discourse studies, it is widely accepted to take a social-constructionist approach,
looking at “communication as a process that is instrumental in the creation of our
social worlds, rather than simply an activity that we do within them” (Holmes,
Marra and Vine 2011: 21). From this anti-essentialist perspective, then, and
“directly contrary to what appears to be its settled semantic career” (Hall 2000:
17), the concept of identity does not refer to a stable core of the self (Hall 2000:
17), but it emphasizes “the constantly changing and developing nature of social
identities” (Holmes, Marra and Vine 2011: 21). So this means that people construct
several – “more or less compatible” – identities that “intersect and/or contrast with
each other in different ways and in accordance with changing social circumstances
and interlocutors” (De Fina 2006: 353). Hence, it is the researcher’s aim to look
into this dynamic process of interlocutors moving in and out of different identities
as they are “performed, enacted and embodied through a variety of linguistic and
non-linguistic means” in discourse (De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006: 3).
Thus, in any given interaction, individuals may draw on any of the different
aspects of their social identity, which are potentially relevant anytime and
anywhere (Zimmerman 1988: 426), and they often do so in highly fluid ways,
swiftly shifting from making relevant one facet of their social identity to the next.
Furthermore, if one of these facets is interactively highlighted, this does not happen
in a categorical way either, since “we may act more or less middle-class, more or
less female, and so on, depending on what we are doing and with whom” (Schiffrin
1996: 199). Since one of an individual’s important pastimes in life is his or her
professional activities, it is thus not surprising that a person, both when he or she is
at the workplace and elsewhere, draws on these activities as a resource for identity
work, for example by highlighting one’s membership of an organization (Van De
Mieroop 2005) or one’s professional status (Holmes, Stubbe and Vine 1999),
possibly as a leader.
Leadership is regarded here also from a social constructionist perspective. It is
considered as a “dynamic, transformational process or activity that draws on a
range of discursive strategies in order to integrate different aspects of effective
communication in everyday interaction” (Holmes, Marra and Vine 2011: 7). As
such, the importance of language in the fluid process of doing leadership is
strongly emphasized, and thus the term discursive leadership is often used. This
can be characterized as an approach that views leadership as “a language game in
which meaning is managed” (Clifton 2012: 149) and this management of meaning
is done interactionally, in constant negotiation with the other interlocutors present
in the interaction (see also Smircich and Morgan 1982). This, of course, also
implies that the identity of leader is not established in any pre-discursive way,
“attributed to the hierarchically established superior” (Clifton 2006: 209), or that it

is the “property” of a person, rather “it can be distributed and it is open to
challenge” (Clifton 2012: 150). Many studies, for example focusing particularly on
co-leadership (Schnurr and Chan, 2011) or distributed leadership in leaderless
teams (Choi and Schnurr forthcoming), have demonstrated the locally negotiated
and extremely fluid nature of leadership and leader identities.
Also in the workplace, these professional and/or leader identities interact with
other facets of an individual’s social identity, as for example with gender (Holmes
and Schnurr 2006) and/or ethnic identities (Van De Mieroop and Clifton 2012a),
thus again resulting in a highly complex myriad of intersecting resources an
individual can draw on, both in and outside of the workplace. Especially regarding
leadership, gender and leader identities are closely intertwined, since much
research on leadership traditionally took “an authoritarian and ‘masculine’
perspective on the way it is accomplished”, a tendency which feminist analysts
have summarized as: “Think leader, think male” (Holmes 2005: 1780-81). It has
been argued that this masculine perspective on “what defines an effective leader”
has lead to the fact that a woman is “less likely […] perceived as potential leader”
(Holmes 2005: 1781). So on the one hand, there is a “masculine bias of the concept
of leadership” (Schnurr 2009a: 129) and an interrelatedness of “doing leadership”
and “doing gender” (Schnurr 2009a: 128), while on the other hand, many studies
have also emphasized the importance of relating leadership and gender to the
discursive norms of the particular working group under study, or, in Wenger’s
terms, the community of practice (Wenger 1988). These norms may be related to
specific “gendered speech styles” and they may invite the members of a particular
community of practice to “display discursive behaviors indexed for masculinity or
femininity” (Schnurr 2009a: 129) regardless of their own gender. Studies about
workplaces around the world have demonstrated, to a greater or lesser extent, that
both – traditionally named – feminine, more indirect and relationally oriented, as
well as masculine, more authoritative, interactional styles are drawn upon by male
leaders, as well as by female leaders (see e.g. Holmes 2005; Ladegaard 2011; Saito
2011; Takano 2005; Troemel-Ploetz 1994 for diverging studies on this issue). As
such, gender is sometimes, but not always, made relevant. However, in spite of
these similar styles, Ladegaard found that female leaders are challenged more often
and that their authority is questioned more frequently by their male colleagues
(Ladegaard 2011). This shows that gender is a differential in the orientations of the
other interlocutors to their leaders in the workplace. So, even when interlocutors do
not make a certain facet of their social identity, such as gender, relevant in an
interaction, it may be interactively made relevant in implicit or explicit ways by the
other participants. So gender and professional identities, and in particular leader
identities, often prove to be interrelated and this results in a complex myriad of
identity claims that are constantly negotiated among interlocutors in the workplace.

2. Women in the workplace in India
That a woman’s economic situation influences her empowerment and her status in
the society is no hidden truth. Equal access to education and to opportunities for
employment is necessary for women to live with self esteem in today’s competitive
world. However, the statistics of India do not seem to be favorable for women.
India is still pretty much struggling to grapple with challenges of social evils
against women, like female feticide and an increase of crimes against women.
1
The
sex ratio in some of the states of India is as low as 618 (per thousand males)
2
and
the sex differential between the number of male and female workers in India in the
total workforce is huge. Females constitute only 31.6% of the total workforce in
India
out of which a major proportion of females (87.3%) are working as
cultivators, agricultural laborers and laborers in household industries. As per the
latest data released by the National Sample Survey Organization
3
, the labor force
participation rate (LFPR) is significantly lower for females than for males in both
rural and urban areas: while this LFPR is 56% for rural and urban males, it is only
27% for rural females and 15% for urban females.
4
If more and more women are
brought into the mainstream occupations of India, it is expected that the gross
domestic product of India would rise steeply. Based on data from 2000-2004, the
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP)
estimates that if India’s female labour force participation reached parity with that
of the United States (86%), its gross domestic product (GDP) would increase by
4.2% a year and a growth rate of 1.08% representing an annual gain of $19 billion
(Lahoti and Swaminathan 2013). With this broader picture of the social and
economic reality of women and the labour force in India in mind, the discussion
now proceeds to focus on the issues faced by women at the Indian workplace.
At this point, it remains unsure whether the work environment in India has
become favorable for women after decades of attempts to break through the glass
ceiling, during which, as Nath (2000: 50) mentions, “women were unequivocal in
wanting to be evaluated on their performance and did not want any special
treatment”. Studies about the current situation of women in the workplace show
mixed evidence. As mentioned by Singh and Hoge (2010: 1) “though women are
contributing enormously to the social and economic product at national and global
levels, they remain at the bottom in the hierarchy of power and rewards in the
workplace”. According to People Matters-TCS Gender Inclusion Survey (2010),
which collected data from 116 companies in India belonging to the IT-ITes sector,
finance and manufacturing sector, there is an under-representation of women at
senior management positions and at corporate board level. A patriarchal corporate
culture as well as lack of flexible work solutions, of work-life balance policies, of
re-entry opportunities, of parental leave and of benefits were cited as some of the

major barriers to the career progression of women in the workplace which has lead
to a concentration of women at entry-level positions.
Furthermore, according to a study done by Gupta, Koshal and Koshal (1998) on
162 managers (63% male and 37% female) from the service and manufacturing
sector in India, only about one third of male and female managers felt that their
organizations were making efforts to increase the number of females in the senior
management positions. Their survey also showed that women perceived that they
had to work much harder than men and prove their mettle all the time. They were
expected to acquire management styles which were more comfortable to their male
colleagues and yet, they were paid less compared to their male counterparts despite
doing the same work and possessing equal qualifications. So discrimination against
women in the workplace has not vanished, but has only taken ‘subtle’ forms
(Klenke 1996). Finally, in their study on women in management in India,
Budhwar, Saini & Bhatnagar (2011) argue that after overcoming the traditional and
cultural inhibitions which parents and society create for women, they also have to
face gender and role stereotyping whereby women are considered fit only for softer
roles and occupations like human resources or personnel relations. Next to this, a
dualism is expected from them in terms of managing the household and their
children, which is considered to be their sole responsibility in addition to their job
outside the house. This orientation to family and the household is in line with the
findings by Naqvi (2011) on women managers in the public sector: family support
is first on the list of competencies women found necessary as an external factor for
performing successfully at work. So it is between a tussle of these multiple forces,
that women in India try to carve out their position in the workplace, while facing a
number of, sometimes conflicting, identity challenges.
3. Research focus and data
In this article we investigate the ways in which the Indian women in our case study
construct their professional – and possibly leader – identities in the workplace
when they take a step back from the daily routine of everyday life, and discuss
their life and more specifically professional experiences during research
interviews. As such, the focus is shifted away from the interactional negotiation of
professional or leader identities on the spot, so to say, but rather, a more reflexive
dataset is obtained, characterized by a greater amount of distance between the
interviewee, as the narrator of the story, on the one hand, and the – usually morally
acceptable – version of him/herself, as the protagonist, that is constructed in the
story on the other hand (Linde 1993). Because of this high degree of reflexivity,
life stories are often criticized as the object of analyses, since they are said to
contain a less dynamically shifting myriad of identities (see e.g. Georgakopoulou

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Female indian professionals" ?

This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. The authors do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. This paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as ‘ a man ’ s domain ’. 

Q2. Why are life stories often criticized as the object of analyses?

Because of this high degree of reflexivity, life stories are often criticized as the object of analyses, since they are said to contain a less dynamically shifting myriad of identities (see e.g. Georgakopoulou2006). 

Q3. What are the main barriers to the career progression of women in the workplace?

A patriarchal corporate culture as well as lack of flexible work solutions, of work-life balance policies, of re-entry opportunities, of parental leave and of benefits were cited as some of themajor barriers to the career progression of women in the workplace which has lead to a concentration of women at entry-level positions. 

Q4. What did the authors find interesting about the women in the study?

For the purpose of this study, more than ten women working in the corporate sector in three cities of India were approached for interviews. 

Q5. What is the key observation regarding this fragment?

A crucial observation regarding this fragment, and its relation to how this interviewee positions herself as a professional in the workplace, is that she does not criticize the potentially sexist nature of this recruitment process, but she actually aligns with it by emphasizing aggressiveness as the most important criterion for her selection. 

Q6. What is the importance of gender in the workplace?

This seems especially crucial in the Indian context, in which women are only gradually gaining an important role in the workplace, both from a quantitative (in terms of absolute numbers) and a qualitative (in terms of the types of hierarchical positions they have) perspective. 

Q7. What could be interpreted as a mitigation of the challenging nature of the incident?

This could be interpreted as a mitigation of the challenging nature of the incident, since it could be seen as difficult for the interviewee only because she is a woman, and it would have been less challenging for men. 

Q8. What is the meaning of the term discursive leadership?

As such, the importance of language in the fluid process of doing leadership is strongly emphasized, and thus the term discursive leadership is often used. 

Q9. Did they give consent to audiotape their interview?

Some women agreed to talk to the researchers though, but they did not give consent to audiotape their interview and since this kind of analysis requires support of recorded conversations, the authors did not include these interviews in any of the analyses.