Aspirations, Expectations and Realities to Gain 'Access to Work': Insights from Women's Narratives

Abstract

The phenomenon of workplace gender diversity has become a reality today across nations and organizations. More and more organizations have been arguing to have created diverse structures and practices to provide an inclusive space to all. However, in this drive to be diversity friendly what most them have missed to understand is need for them to modify underlying notions that have made them rigid vis-a-vis gendered cultures and structures. These existing workplace gendered realities creates experiences of exclusion and lack of receptivity for women at work triggering dilemmas related to their working. This has resulted in increasing concerns about gender blind nature of employment relations and human resource development systems and processes. It is in this context that this paper discusses the experiences of gender dilemmas in person-workplace interface and interactions by engaging with ordinary working women and listening to their narratives in contemporary Indian context. These experiences have been captured through an intense interview engagement based ethnographic research approach that was used to study multiple realities of person-workplace interface and interaction experiences of women in India.