Women in Kolkata’s IT Sector

Book excerpt: Based on a survey of women workers in Kolkata’s IT sector, this book argues that growth of the IT sector has created a demand for skilled professionals. This has provided scope for highly educated urban women to create a space of self-expression and enjoy enhanced status and prestige within their families. These women workers carefully plan their career and daily activities, keeping in mind the need to balance diverse and conflicting needs of work and home. This kind of decision-making occurs outside the utilitarian framework and is better framed in terms of Herbert Simon’s ‘satisficing’ approach, which takes into account the bounded rationality of agents. Written in lucid, non-technical language, the book will be an invaluable addition to existing works on gender and labour studies and will be of interest to social scientists undertaking research on gender, labour and the IT sector.