Paradigms of Gender Issues in Indian Organizations

In this century of women’s emancipation, the socio-cultural world is called upon to address the issues of gender. The culture, society, religion and family, the four core coordinates of human existence have located women and men in specific social contexts, defined their roles, designed their activities and created processes of centrality – marginalisation, visibility – invisibility and rooting – uprooting and rerooting. This location of women, men and institution in the context of structural, critical and role hierarchy is so deeply embedded in the psyche that any redefining, redesigning, realignment and recaliberations have been most difficult. This frozen and deeply embedded state of role psyche in the collective psyche of the socio-cultural context meant that finding autonomy is a very difficult task for women, men and the insitution. This paper is based on the discussions with women, men and senior managers of ten organisations. The scope of this paper is to: 1. To assess how women experience their entry in various organisation. 2. How women visualise their career path in their expectations, ambitions and aspirations in organisations. 3. Women’s interface with both women and men superiors, colleagues and subordinates. 4. Appraisal of women’s managerial roles, tasks and performance by seniors in the organisations. 5. Organisational policies and facilities to address specific issues of women such as motherhood and break in career. 6. Women’s management of work and hope space. 7. Women’s long term role and career path in organisations. This paper explores woman’s entry into organizations, task allocation, task relationships, organizational culture, men managers and working wives, organization policies regarding women and dilemmas confronted by women. This paper is also talks about the directions and choices for women, men and organisations to create a new organization culture and new paradigms of work and relationships at work.