The No-Sari Zone: South Asian Women at Work

March 21, 2005

Smart but passive. Good technicians, but not likely managers. Like many others, women from India and Pakistan seem doomed to stereotypes about how they function at work. But they should resist labels and pursue the careers of their dreams, said panelists at the Conference on India and Its Neighbors at Harvard Business School.

by Martha Lagace, Senior Editor, HBS Working Knowledge

In a panel discussion on "South Asian Women in the Workplace," it was clear that women from India and Pakistan face many of the same challenges that all women do at work—but with a twist. Like women everywhere, they ask themselves, How should I get ahead? Find job satisfaction? Assert myself? Manage my home life with my career? Deal with family expectations?

As South Asians, though, they are also navigating a new set of dreams within a powerful sea of strong traditions and close-knit families, according to five women from a broad spectrum of careers. Sorting out the various pressures, they said, requires a lot of thought and care. Among the speakers was a Microsoft manager, a nuclear engineer, an editor and entrepreneur, an economist, and a Harvard academic who used to advise then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

First, there is the matter of the sari.

When Shahla Aly came to North America in 1977, she arrived with three things in hand, she told the group. "A freshly minted MBA degree from the University of Karachi, suitcases full of all my saris from my dowry, and an enormous amount of confidence—I'd almost say of naive confidence—in my ability to secure a corporate job at an entry level." For three months, she said, she proceeded through a series of dead-end interviews. No one would hire her. She was starting to get depressed and couldn't figure out what she was doing wrong.

In the fourth month, an interviewer told her, gingerly, "I think you'd be a wonderful fit for this company...but I do have one quick question to ask you, and it's rather personal."

Not feeling she had much of a choice, Aly agreed. The question was, "Do you plan to dress the way you're dressed today every day to work?"

"I thought he was complimenting me, and I said, 'Yes! I have so many saris like this.' Need I tell you that he didn't say anything back, but his eyes told me everything." As Aly noted with chagrin at HBS, his expression was an instant primer for interpreting American nonverbal cues. She went out and bought a pants suit and at the next interview she got hired. She is now a general manager at Microsoft.

"So the first lesson I learned as a South Asian woman is, I don't have to compromise my values, but I really need to understand how I articulate them," she said. "My value in this particular case was the need—my need—to dress modestly, and it does not have to be articulated in a particular dress. It can be articulated in dress that is more pervasive, especially when you're in an entry-level job. At that point I had not yet earned the right to be different."

In medicine or academia, certainly, women may wear their saris, added Meena Mutyala, vice president of engineering at Westinghouse. In business, however, there is no such luck. "If you want to make a statement for change [by your clothing], you're not going to succeed in corporate America," she told the group.

"You have to make sure also that you don't focus too much on the differences," Mutyala continued. "You can't wear this chip on your shoulder as a woman and as a South Asian woman because if you have a chip on your shoulder, it will show. Try to focus more on the similarities than the differences.

"You have to adapt: As Shahla just said, you have to figure out what you are willing to change and what you're not willing to change."

Smart, passive
South Asian women in business sometimes endure stereotypes unique to Asian women, said Aly. On the one hand, they're considered very intelligent and technically adept. But on the other, they're labeled as passive and submissive, unambitious and unassertive. In the business world at least, these perceived qualities can hinder a woman's professional growth, she said.

One personal hurdle for her was overcoming the reflexive "respect for elders" that she carried from her childhood, said Aly. Once she entered the workforce, it took her at least five years, she said, to overcome the tendency to smile and nod when people who were either older or higher up in the managerial ranks had something to say. Over time, she learned to respond more forcefully.

Added Mutyala, "There is a stereotype of South Asians that we are technically very smart. But that makes it difficult to move from the technical to the managerial ranks. The reality is that we have to work harder at it."

Mutyala began her career as a physicist and now runs Westinghouse's global engineering division, where she is in charge of 470 people. She encouraged women to reflect on how they are perceived when they are assertive. Assertive women are written off as aggressive, she said, but they should not accept that label. "If you're a man and you are assertive, then you're a good leader. As women we really need to think through this and figure out how we can be assertive in a targeted manner. How do you project yourself in the organization?" she asked rhetorically.

Gita Piramal, Managing Editor of the Mumbai-based management magazine The Smart Manager, said that one of the satisfactions of being an entrepreneur is the "freedom to choose what my personal development path will be." This freedom allows her to be responsive to opportunities that come along. Women in journalism may actually have an easier time getting substantive interviews than men, at least in India where she works, she suggested. While male interview subjects might be on guard around a male journalist, they are likely to feel disarmed by a female journalist who seems confident but relaxed and non-confrontational.

Roopa Purushothaman, a Global Economist at Goldman Sachs, said her field—research—is one where her intelligence and ideas are highly valued. "Even though I work in an investment bank, I work on the research side. It's probably more like an academic community," she said. She did not know how she'd fare if she needed to regularly assert herself as in most other business environments, but she recommended that everyone use the personal style that feels natural to them.

One of the good things about being a woman of South Asian descent in the U.S. is the strong and growing network of other women with similar backgrounds and perspectives, continued Purushothaman. The South Asian Women's Leadership Forum in New York is one example of a group of women who mentor each other very well, she said.

Families here and there
South Asian and western women face a similar tightrope if they want both a career and family, said panelists. One advantage for South Asians, however, is the abundance of capable role models back home, said Aly. Middle- and upper-class women are quite accustomed to the idea of acquiring and managing help for routine chores and even childcare.

"Some things you can't outsource," Aly added. "When the children are having a concert, you can't send your nanny. ...And remember, your children have a father. ...Find a company that is more tolerant of family-work styles, and come up with a formula that works for you."

While all speakers discussed the importance of work flexibility and of marrying a supportive spouse, Mangalam Srinivasan, moderator of the panel, good-naturedly rejected the whole concept of balance. A former scientific advisor to Indira Gandhi, she is now a Harvard scholar who studies and teaches on sciences, management, and governance.

"In the West generally, and in America in particular, children seem to demand much more time with their parents," she observed. "In India, children are happy to be away from their parents. They ask their mother, 'Don't you have to go somewhere for a marriage?' As far as children complaining if you're not a stay-at-home mother, they will complain no matter what. If you stay at home, children say you should be working like other people. If you have a career, they say you have to be at home.

"Let's accept imbalances. If today is bad, maybe tomorrow will be better," she said.

Srinivasan also suggested that Indian parents in the future might be less enthusiastic about coming over to the U.S. to assist their Americanized daughters and sons in raising the grandchildren. Older Indian women are just too busy, she said. She fondly recalled a recent visit to Denmark, where she approvingly observed Danish fathers out pushing strollers and prams in the daytime, with hardly a mother to be seen.

If the American model of working and raising a family is not satisfactory, she quipped, "Remember, there's always Denmark."

The second annual Conference on India and Its Neighbors was held at Harvard Business School on February 27, 2005. This student-run conference was organized by the Harvard Business School South Asian Business Association.