Women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles in Indian BPO industry

This thesis examines why women remain underrepresented in senior leadership roles within the Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, despite the sector’s reputation as a meritocratic, progressive, and high female workforce employer. While women constitute a significant proportion of entry and middle management-level employees in the industry, their representation declines sharply at senior managerial levels. Existing research within Indian context has frequently explained this disparity to life-stage factors such as marriage, motherhood, women’s personal choices and ambitions. While these factors remain important, they do not fully explain the persistence of gender inequality within an industry that is widely perceived as supportive of women.

Drawing on fifty-one semi-structured interviews with men and women employed across
managerial levels in the Indian BPO industry, this thesis adopts an interpretivist approach
informed by feminist organisational scholarship. It draws primarily on Acker's (1990; 2006) concepts of gendered organisations and inequality regimes to examine how organisational processes, workplace cultures, informal relationships, and everyday interactions shape women's leadership trajectories. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify patterns across participants' accounts while remaining attentive to context, meaning, and interpretation.

The findings demonstrate that gender inequality is reproduced not only through organisational structures and practices, but also through the ways these practices are
understood and explained by organisational actors. The thesis makes three principal
contributions. First, it extends Acker's concept of inequality regimes by demonstrating how organisational processes are shaped by the interaction of workplace practices and wider socio-cultural expectations concerning caregiving, family responsibility, respectability, and professional conduct within the Indian BPO context. Second, it identifies a set of context specific organisational mechanisms through which inequality is reproduced, including networking stigma, reputational regulation, POSH-mediated avoidance, and disembodied expectations of professionalism. These mechanisms shape access to networking, sponsorship, mentoring, visibility, and leadership opportunities despite formal commitments to equality and inclusion. Third, the thesis develops the concept of gender disavowal, defined as a process through which gender inequalities are acknowledged in outcome yet individualised, normalised, or displaced in explanation. Gender disavowal helps explain how inequalities remain difficult to recognise and challenge even within organisations that genuinely view themselves as meritocratic and supportive of women.

The thesis contributes to feminist organisational scholarship by providing a contextually
grounded account of how gender inequality is produced, interpreted, and sustained within India's globalised service economy, offering a more comprehensive explanation for the continued underrepresentation of women in leadership within the Indian BPO sector.