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Magazine
THE OTHER HALF
Dressing down at work
KALPANA SHARMA
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It’s not easy for women to work even in new industries because old attitudes are still entrenched.
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Photo: N. Bashkaran
Demanding work hours: At a BPO.
The crowd was utterly conformist. Row upon row of neatly turned out women, the majority of them in subdued colours, mostly wearing salwar kameez, a few wearing saris and even fewer in trousers. The meeting was be
ing held in Technopark, the area marked out for the IT sector just outside the Kerala capital of Thiruvananthapuram. Here, fairly ugly and unimaginative six to seven storey buildings punctuate acres of greenery. But step inside one of them and you enter a different world.
On each floor, you find young men and women working intensely and quietly in front of individual computers or crowded around a table in glass-fronted room listening in to a conference call as they deal with the demands of clients sitting in another part of the world. The only way you know you’re in Kerala and not in Mumbai or Delhi is the way the women dress. Conformity is the norm. Rarely does a woman stick out as being different.
Why then have some IT companies introduced a dress code for their employees? The reasons given are that bright clothing, or plunging necklines in women, or short skirts, or tight tee shirts and jeans are a “distraction” — for the men, one presumes. So should the person who is “distracted” be told to concentrate, or should the person who is ostensibly responsible for the distraction be ticked off?
Women know that they don’t need to dress any particular way to be accused of “distracting” men. You only have to be a woman. You need not be a beauty queen. You can be dressed in the dowdiest of clothes. But as far as the average male is concerned, particularly in some parts of India, you are fair game for unwanted remarks, stares and touch.
Rules for women
So then, what is so special about the workplace? Why, once again, are women being asked to behave in a certain way in order not to distract men? What about the men distracting them with the standard “male gaze” that cannot tear itself away from a particular part of a woman’s body, or by unsolicited emails or by sly remarks about their looks or what they are wearing?
I had a peek into the IT workplace when I met the women in Technopark recently. In Kerala’s context, these women have chosen a career that is not the norm — teaching and nursing are still the preferred options for women. Furthermore, the type of work they do requires not just a different set of skills but a different way of working.
Unlike in other professions, in the IT industry individual brilliance is not as important as the ability to work with a team. Teams of men and women are assigned tasks. They have common deadlines to meet and each person has to perform for the team to meet the deadline. It is the sum of their individual competence that results in the job being done.
Another factor that sets this sector apart is the fact that their client is based in a different continent, working in a different time zone. The women I spoke to worked for an American company. They were producing software for clients that ranged from chain grocery stores to airlines. Every day and several times in the day they had to communicate with the client. This meant being on the phone, on conference calls, at times when you normally knock off work here.
None of this is impossible. But when you are a woman, it becomes a challenge. For, in addition to having chosen a profession that is relatively new, you are expected to be on call simultaneously to people on the other side of the world and people on this side of the world, that is your family.
In conservative Kerala, where women’s roles are clearly defined in the family, a professional woman has little room to negotiate unless she is married to someone who backs her, or if she lives in a nuclear family. While the younger women complained that they were constantly reminded that they had to get married, the older women had to balance children, looking after the home and being available at all hours for their work. And all this happened at a point in their careers when they were making progress.
The result is that although women enter in large numbers into the IT profession, an equally large number drop out after the first five or six years because they get married and have children. After that, their ability to continue depends entirely on their marital situation.
High drop-out rate
Not surprisingly, the number of women in top management in IT companies is still relatively low. The situation is beginning to change as some companies become proactive about creating work conditions that help retain their women staff. Flexible working hours is one facility. The senior women said that they realised that they needed the courage to lay down norms that suited them. For instance, one senior woman manager said she had told people that there were certain hours when she would not take phone calls. So if they needed to speak to her, they would have to wait. She had realised that trying to deal with children and home and being on the phone all the time served no one’s interest, neither that of her family nor her clients.
Given these challenges that women employees face, is a dress code needed? Does it not exist in any case? Why would any woman, working in an industry where you have to subsume your individuality for team effort, do anything to attract unnecessary attention to herself?
Perhaps managements of companies concerned about “distracted” employees are missing the real point. Dig a little deeper to find out why some people complain. The problem, they might discover, has nothing to do with the way people dress. Instead, it is the inability of men and women to respect each other and work as equals. A new industry like the IT sector still has to work in a society where old attitudes remain firmly entrenched.
Email the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com
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