‘She gets the job done’: Entrenched gender meanings and new returns to essentialism in India’s elite professional firms

Abstract

Using the case of elite Indian professionals, this article offers a contrast to the robust literature suggesting collinearity between gender essentialism and inequality in organizational settings. Analyzing 139 interviews with professionals in India’s elite litigation, transactional law, and consulting firms, it reveals that while gendered meanings and hierarchies certainly infiltrate all workspaces, not all trajectories for Indian women in high-status work are prematurely disadvantaged. Particularly, it suggests an unlikely positive valorization in the case of women working in new and elite law firms doing global transactional work. While other female professionals were dismissed or overlooked for not performing maleness in an organizational setting, it was the reverse for transactional lawyers who were regarded positively for similar traits. Instead of being passed over for opportunities or dismissed by their clients, many of these women were seen as best suited for handling the important, global work they were entrusted with and often requested on transactions. The limited case of these professionals reveals how in some new contexts, gendered assumptions about work can further rather than inhibit egalitarian outcomes. However, even as the theoretical extensions in highlighting this mechanism helps add nuance to our understandings of essentialism, it does so while confirming that even in moments of departure, equality is accessed within strictly patriarchal scripts in elite organizations.