There was a time in the Indian social setting when a working woman was looked down upon. It took numerous assiduous efforts of social reformers and educators to elevate the status of women in India. Where the household was historically considered the mainstay of her existence, today’s Indian woman is empowered and prepared to achieve the heights of professional success. Various governmental schemes, programs, regulations, and laws have come to the rescue of those fighting the ghosts of the bygone era. There is hardly any profession that has not been adopted by the contemporary Indian woman.
Information Technology (IT), with its fat remunerations, has roped in the best brains the world over. Indian women, too, have joined the IT brigade in large numbers. They fill various positions on the corporate ladder. The status of India as a “developing nation” has aided the women professionals in many ways, including preventing the glass-ceiling effect prevalent in developed nations. Instead, Indian women working in IT have come to occupy niche positions in their organizations.
The IT industry is known to remain forever in flux. Rapidly evolving tools and technologies, time-synchronized global projects, erratic work schedules, and stringent deadlines create high-stress conditions that demand compromise of personal time and space. In Indian society, caring for the young and the old, as well as most household duties, is still mainly the responsibility of women, regardless of their professional commitments.
In Indian society, married women—many of whom happen to be the first generation of working women—bear the greatest burden. The patriarchal diktats pull the strings from one side, while the promise of wider horizons beckons on the other. The melee of societal pressures, familial responsibilities, and personal ambitions and desires mould them to become skilled jugglers of the various roles they are made to occupy simultaneously throughout the day.
The Study
Though hard-pressed for personal time and space, female Indian IT professionals find ways to remain in touch with their family and other contacts. The general belief that women in IT are relatively more techno-savvy and spend more time at their workplace than Indian women working in other fields formed the basis of a doctoral study undertaken in 2009 at CEPT University, Ahmedabad (India), under the guidance of Dr. Binod Agrawal, the director of TALEEM Research Foundation in India. This study explored how social networking tools aid these IT professionals in all spheres of their activities, and how they interact with each other and their family and friends using online social networks.
The survey was administered (using the snowball technique of sampling) to 318 married women of Indian origin, aged twenty-one to forty-five years, working in the field of IT in different industries in different countries of the world. Online and face-to-face interactions were used to solicit responses from the subjects. A response rate of 20.44 percent was achieved. This is in sync with various studies which observe that 20 percent is the expected response when dealing with top managers or professionals. When compared with the global picture, there is a lot of commonality in usage of online social networks by female professionals; however, some findings have been distinct for women of Indian origin working in IT.
Professional Women vs. Official Aloofness
It is widely accepted that women have been at a professional loss because of the impregnable nature of male-dominated workplace social networks. No matter how hard they tried to fit in, women sometimes found that male colleagues simply refused to interact socially with them. Information that flows across the informal smoke breaks or beer evenings provides an insider’s view of organizational events, promotions, and policies. Female professionals, especially those that are married, are almost completely bereft of this information channel.
The study found that in order to overcome the loneliness created by male-dominated workplaces, women are creating and joining smaller women-only groups. Even employers have begun acknowledging the need of women to network amongst each other for various personal and professional reasons. The organizational networks bestow a sense of security to women in their different phases of life, like marriage and child birth, by providing in-house training to keep them up-to-date with the latest technologies, hiring counselors to give suggestions on work-life balance, organizing informal get-togethers for women employees, and so on.
Though the initial seeding of such networks in India was done by multinational companies, the domestic players have also recognized and acknowledged the importance of these networks. A few prominent IT companies that offer online and offline networks for their women employees in India are Accenture, Microsoft, IBM, Infosys, MindTree Consulting, and HCL. Some of the gender-inclusive initiatives undertaken by these companies include facility to telecommute, restrooms, pick-up/drop-off facilities, in-house daycare for young children, and maternity leave.
Harnessing the Power of Online Social Networks
Indian women are increasingly making use of these networks—online and offline, official and unofficial—to interact with their colleagues, friends, and family. The respondents to this study mentioned using instant messenger services (IM), email, official online social networks, and public social networking sites, though the last option was used nearly exclusively by the younger age group. Most of the women in the forty-to-forty-five age group preferred using email.
Subjects discussed various professional topics ranging from exchange of technical knowledge, career-related discussions, industry-related matters, and better networking with their professional contacts. Their reasons to network professionally outweighed the personal, with only
41 percent saying they had networked for personal reasons. This reflects the psyche of Indian women who still hold their personal life in great privacy. Although they have become more vocal about their personal desires and ambitions, this is only a change relative to previous generations. Online personal networking is done essentially with people known from the physical world.
The topics of personal interactions ranged from seeking opinions in matters relating to the household, relationships, leisure activities, stress-busting, and similar topics, to a small number also taking financial opinions from their personal contacts. Among working mothers, the discussions revolved around children and their well-being. However, fewer mothers expressed satisfaction on using social networks for discussing matters relating to children, since most of their contacts did not have children. This can be correlated to the fact that women with children belonged to the age group thirty and above, which wasn’t very active in the online social networks.
The Respondents
None of the surveyed women had more than two children, reinforcing the view that keeping a small family is directly related to the education and outlook of women.
A little less than half of the respondents were married to partners in the same profession. These respondents expressed that their husbands somewhat understood their need to network online even at odd hours from home. Husbands from different professions were not so considerate in acknowledging this professional requirement.
Resistance to seeing the women go online came from family members other than the husbands. More couples with young children are beginning to live with their parents so that their children are well taken care of in their absence. This puts constraints on the working woman in many different ways, but she is willing to accept (with a pinch of salt) the benefits of such an arrangement.
Interestingly, there was a segment of female IT professionals (21 percent) who felt that because they interacted online, they didn’t feel the need to meet their contacts in person; they felt there was nothing new to discuss or talk about. However, a large number of women (68 percent) felt that online social networking facilitated their offline interactions, especially so when these contacts lived in far-off lands.
Parting Words
Ways and styles in which Indian women in IT are making use of social networks are largely in sync with the global scenario, such that women are becoming more vocal on various issues and are focusing on being an active member of more women-only social networks. Indian women, however, spend less time online, access social networks primarily from the workplace, and typically limit their online contacts to people they know in the physical world—all while keeping the interests of the family tightly balanced with professional requirements, even when that calls for a personal compromise.无处不在的技术已经接管了人类通信的方方面面。世界已经从很少有家庭拥有黑白电视机、大型收音机或简单的食指拨号固定电话，发展到几乎家家都拥有拇指即可拨号的手机、支持高速网络摄像头的家用个人电脑、笔记本电脑、掌上电脑、iPod、网络电视和其他类型的小物件。生活产品越前卫，人们似乎就越沉迷其中，而花在这些小物件以外的时间却大大减少了。将工作时间与在家时间分开的界线也正在消失，因为无处不在的技术侵蚀着正迅速减少的家庭空间和时间。
快速融合的世界几乎没有为往昔沉浸于家庭的习惯留有余地。今天，闲暇时与家人和朋友在一起，脑子里不想迫在眉睫的最后交付期限，这样的时光几乎是一去不复返了。在印度这个注重人与人之间关系的社会环境中，人们非常重视定期与家人和朋友进行沟通，在线社交网络拯救了这个时间不够用的国度。社交网络为当代印度职业女性，特别是从事信息技术 (IT) 工作的女性提供了许多好处。
最近进行了一项调查，目的在于了解从事 IT 工作的印度已婚女性访问在线网络的模式、方式和原因。这项调查表明，即使感觉时间捉襟见肘，这些女性也会访问在线社交网络与同事、家人和朋友保持联络。虽然网络技术的原因胜过个人原因，但调查中收集的数据显示了随着印度新女性形象的出现，这种情况可能很快就会发生改变。
文章全文为英文版あらゆる場所で広がっていくテクノロジーはヒューマンコミュニケーションの全ての側面を支配している。世界は、白黒テレビ、巨大なラジオ、人差し指でダイヤルを回して掛ける有線電話のある世帯が珍しかった時代から、親指で操作する携帯電話、ウェブカム付きのハイスピードなホームPC、ノートパソコン、小型パソコン、iPod、ウェブテレビ、またはその他の目新しい小型機器がない世帯が珍しい時代へと変容を遂げた。ライフスタイル製品がアバンギャルドであるほど人々を虜にするようで、それらウィジェットなしで過ごす時間が短縮されている。蔓延するテクノロジーによって家族の空間や時間が削られ、わずかに残っていた家庭の時間と仕事の時間の区別も消滅しつつある。
急速に収束している世界では、一昔前の家族を中心とした娯楽はほとんど注目されない。間近に迫った締切のことを気にせず、家族や友人とゆったり過ごす時間のことなどは近頃ほとんど耳にしない。社会構成が親密なインドでは、家族や友人間での定期的なコミュニケーションは非常に大切なものと捉えられており、オンラインのソーシャルネットワーキングは、時間に追われるこの種族を救う役割を担っている。ソーシャルネットワーキングは、現代の働くインド人女性、特に情報技術（IT）の分野で働く女性たちに多くの利益をもたらしている。
IT分野で働く既婚のインド人女性を対象として、オンラインネットワークへアクセスするパターンやスタイル、その理由を理解するために最近行われた調査では、時間に追われている場合でも、彼女たちはオンラインのソーシャルネットワークにアクセスし、同僚、家族、友人たちと連絡を取り合っていることが分かった。個人的な理由ではなく技術的な理由で連絡を取り合うことが多いものの、調査で回収されたデータは新しいインド人女性像の出現により、このシナリオが近い将来変化するかもしれないことを指摘している。
