THE GROWING LITERATURE ON GENDER and professional work affirms that despite increasing feminization across fields, stark gender inequality persists (Witz 2013), resulting in what has been termed a "stalled' gender revolution (England 2010). To explain this persistence, scholars have, beyond a range of explanatory mechanisms, made a serious cast for thinking of gender as a "background identity" (Ridgeway and Correll 2004) that creates gender-biased "ideal workers" and organizations (Acker 1990). Yet, while many of these inhibiting patterns are universal researchers investigating contexts outside of the global north have offereed points of divergence, especially concerning the insufficiency of western theories to apply across cultural contexts (e.g., Kumar 2012; Mukhopadhyay 2004).

This article uses the Indian case to offer further nuance to these narratives about the impact of global cultures on the gendered experience of professional work. I find that while gender certainly infiltrates all workspaces through the framework of a background identity, there remain occupational and organizational differences in the ways in which women experience their environments. Particularly, while Indian women lawyers overall are more disadvantaged in many ways than their international counter parts, women lawyers in very elite law firms do much better than both their local and global peers. A confluence of factors might be responsible for this unusual experience of professional work, but this article highlights the importance of one set of supply side dynamics: the variations in socializing experiences and expectations before professionals enter elite firms In doing so, it adds to the literature that suggests the importance of early training and educational socialization for gender egalitarian outcomes in the workforce (e.g., Cech 2015; Seron et al. 2016). It also lends credence to the "pipeline" fix for gender equality by highlighting the substantive influence of increased representation on the ways men and women both think about their careers. Further, it reveals the particular global stickiness of gender frameworks: all sites are gendered, but the specification of these gendered identities is impacted by their respective embedded cultural contexts.

GENDER AND PROFESSIONAL WORK: BACKGROUND FRAMEWORKS, SOCIALIZATION HURDLES, AND THE INDIAN CASE

The persistence of gender inequality across professional fields dovetails our understandings about the feminization of high-status work: the rise in female participation within any given workforce is predicated either on the relative low status of the work or its compatibility with "gender-friendly" traits (England 2010). As a result, women are concentrated in mostly female-friendly, low-status work that, in turn, cements the inequalities of their representation (Davies 1996). To explain these inequalities, most theorists converge on the idea that causal mechanisms producing gender inequality do not work in isolation. Instead, inequality within the professions is created and cemented by a recursive, self-fulfilling mechanism wherein women's entry is constantly pitted against other "ideal types" (Acker 1990; Williams 2000) and background frameworks about gender that are universally unhelpful to women (Ridgeway 2011; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). One way in which reinforcement happens is the ways in which gender socialization impacts entry and advancement of women within professional tracks even as they enter at the same rates as their male peers. It is the unpacking of this socialization, within the broader context of a persistent gender system, that offers the theoretical framework for this research.

Persistent Background Frameworks of Gender

Gender theorists (Ridgeway and Correll 2004) have argued that sticky stereotypes are pivotal mechanisms in the production of entrenched hierarchies because they stem from strong and accepted preexisting assumptions about how different actors should respond in social situations. This strain of research gives us an important, multidimensional view of how gender is "done" (West and Zimmerman 1987), because it reminds us that even though stereotypes attach at the individual level (e.g., "she is too aggressive for a woman"), they are often cemented with interactional and institutional reinforcement, forming a social structure where assumptions about gender identity are not only accepted, but also expected. As a result, social interactions are not only fraught with background assumptions; they are also feeder mechanisms into creating persistent constructs of gender-based inequality in organizations (Ridgeway 2011).

High-status workplaces are organic environments for the application of this background framework of gender because they have historically been male dominated (Charles and Grusky 2005). One reason this is problematic for new entrants like women and minorities is that when the parameters of an ideal worker are already set, all and any deviations from this construct suffer a penalty for not being "ideal" (Acker 1990). Seen from this perspective, if the ideal worker is a man without family responsibilities (Williams 2000), then organizations feel legitimate in levying a motherhood penalty (Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007) and stigmatizing women when they access "flexible" work (Williams, Blair-Loy, and Berdahl 2013).

Gendered Pathways and Educational Socialization

The wealth of empirical research on women in high-status organizations reflects strong evidence for this theoretical positioning. Studies on elite women professionals show that women are disadvantaged at entry (Gorman 2005), have less helpful career referents (Gibson and Lawrence 2010), make fewer meaningful networks (Ibarra 1997), have barriers to promotion (Dencker 2008), and are overall structurally set up against advancing within the firm (Kanter 1977). The legal profession has been a prime site for the creation and reproduction of these gendered hierarchies (Epstein 1981; Menkel-Meadow 1989; Pierce 1996; Shultz and Shaw 2003). Particularly in large law firms, research documents strong structural obstacles for women including lack of formal inclusion (Kay and Gorman 2012), limited mentorship (Mobley et al. 1994), stereotype-ridden professional ideology (Wald 2009), male-friendly partner composition (Chambliss and Uggen 2001), and a general preference for male law-firm capital (Kay and Hagan 1998). Together, these factors have resulted in wage disparities (Dinovitzer, Reichman, and Sterling 2009; Hagan and Kay 1995), missed partnership opportunities (Walsh 2012), and a host of other kinds of inequality (Sterling and Reichman 2012, 2016). Research has also begun to reveal ways in which women may adopt "coping strategies" for inclusion and validation (e.g., Hatmaker 2012), but the predominant narrative is of women responding to a biased system that is likely to reproduce unfavorable hierarchies (Witz 2013).

To explain these entry and advancement patterns, scholars have begun to pay especial attention to the role of education and socialization in reproducing gender inequality, especially, the importance of socialization in acculturating a sense of identity "fit" between the individual and organization (Cech 2015; Cech et al. 2011; Hatmaker 2012). For instance, while Cech et al. (2011) offer that the relative lack of women's "professional role confidence" within the "culture of engineering" contributes to their attrition from the field; Seron et al. (2016) offer further that professional socialization has important implications for the cultivation of this confidence. It is a similar exposition of professional socialization advantages that this article seeks to present.

Gender and Professional Work in India

Global contexts offer new ways to reflect on the implications of these studies. In the Indian context, gender differences exist in professional participation, but they are not determined by the same kinds of supply-side factors as evidenced in the West (Kumar 2012; Mukopadhyaya 2004). Simultaneously, organizational inequalities persist and women, to the extent they enter the formal workforce, continue to face strong barriers to success and advancement (e.g., Budhwar, Debi, and Bhatnagar 2005; Nath 2000; Teijesen, Sealy, and Singh 2009; Vinze 1987). In particular, the legal profession has been generally hostile to feminization. Michelson (2013), for example, suggests that while most of the world's professions have feminized over the last half a century, India still remains predominantly male with only about 5 percent women (compared to an average of about 30 percent). Unsurprisingly, this representation gets even starker at senior positions. For instance, in the over 200 senior counsels in the Mumbai High Court, only one active senior counsel is a woman (Ballakrishnen forthcoming). In contrast, women in leading law firms are at par at both entry and partnership with their male peers and often talk about gender as though it does not matter (Ballakrishnen 2013, 2017).

Ridgeway's (2011) theory might suggest that this is a function of temporality--older organizations are more set in their ways than newer organizations and, consequently, more likely to be wary of new entrants. However, even among similarly new and elite professional firms differences are stark. Particularly, my research suggests that while women in new law firms experience work environments that are relatively gender agnostic, women in consulting firms do not enjoy a similar privilege. Contrasting these two cases of novel field emergence against gendered accounts of the traditional litigation system in India (e.g., Sorabji 2010) that has stayed relatively unchanged following globalization (e.g., Mishra 2016; Rajkotia 2017), this article focuses on the relationship between institutional novelty and socialization to shed light on its implications for theorizing about professional stratification more generally.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND CONTEXT

While all professional sites are riddled with obstacles, the background framework theory offers potential for possible exceptions. Particularly, it suggests that in "sites of innovation" where the basic framework of the job is not particularly gender typed, there is a possibility for the gender frame to be more diluted (Ridgeway 2011). This categorization of new sites of innovation is useful because it gives us some hope for breakthroughs in existing hierarchies (e.g., Smith-Doerr 2004). From Mountain View to Mumbai, there are new kinds of organizations and types of professional practice that did not exist even a few decades ago, and across these sites there is innovation in the types of work and professional practice.

Although not empirically concerned with the effects of global capital and workflow, Ridgeway's (2011) constructs for evolution and change offer valuable tools to analyze new changes in global economy. Particularly, as an emerging economy, India offers a range of professional work contexts to extend and test Ridgeway's (2011) suggestion that new sites offer optimistic possibility for the renegotiation of hierarchy. Most professional practice in the country was organized around individual or family practitioners until 1991 when liberalization reforms allowing foreign direct investment exposed the historically closed market to new work, transactions, and clients. Following these new reforms, new kinds of professional services (e.g., management consulting) and multinational firms were introduced alongside older professions like law, accounting, and banking. But even among existing professions (e.g., law), liberalization brought about organizational changes and new kinds of firms and work began to emerge alongside vestigial individual practice.

Using a theoretical sampling logic (Eisenhardt 1989), the initial case variation (Yin 2003) followed the empirical advantage of variations in India's liberalization process. I chose two cases varying these dimensions of novelty--that is, the variation in organizational structure and nature of work across firms. The first was traditional litigation practice that was still organized in pre-1991 fashion, around individual practitioners or small partnerships. The second were transactional law firms that were only created postliberalization in 1991 and that worked on new kinds of work including mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and international banking. From my interviews and observations in the field, it became clear that newer firms were indeed differently impacted by globalization--a finding that others studying the professions have noted (see, generally, Wilkins, Khanna, and Trubek 2017)--and that women, in particular, experienced their careers very differently in new firms. However, when over the course of analysis, it became clear that novelty along these dimensions was not enough to explain the variation in gender experiences, I chose also to focus on a third site--management consulting firms. I theorized that if novelty of work and structure was indeed what was explaining the difference between women in older litigating practice versus new kinds of transactional law firms, then other kinds of new firms ought also to expose its inhabitants to similar surroundings. The professionals that entered these new law and consulting firms were graduates of similarly prestigious schools and were relatively homogenous at the individual level (predominantly forward caste, middle class, urban, English-speaking). As a result, these three sites were similar enough to warrant comparison in that they were all highly prestigious work sites with professional entry requirements. But their variations in emergence and organizational structure offered a design variation that was informative.

Over the course of my analysis, it became clear that novelty along one more dimension--that is, schools that socialized recruits before entry--might be useful in creating egalitarian frameworks of gender. While elite law firms recruited predominantly from new and elite National Law Schools, the hiring pool for consulting firms were graduates from elite engineering and business schools. These schools were similarly prestigious and recruited from homogenous class backgrounds, but they varied significantly in gender composition. The National Law Schools, as new schools that incidentally emerged around the same time as these new law firms, had gender equal cohorts at entry and graduation (Ballakrishnen forthcoming). In contrast, elite business and engineering schools were older, more traditional schools that had remained predominantly male even following liberalization. This variation was important, as these data reveal, but the salience of their underlying mechanisms in reproducing inequality was something that emerged from analysis, not something the research was designed to explore.

DATA AND METHODS

My data are from 139 semistructured interviews conducted between 2011 and 2015 with professionals across these three main theoretical cases in Mumbai, India (Table 1). As the financial capital of a newly emerging economy, Mumbai is home to a range of new multinational professional sites as well as an established presence of older professional firms. The ethnographic interviews focused on these professionals' personal and career histories and their organizational experiences. Initial interviews helped explore emergent themes (Spradley 1979) and subsequently became more streamlined to include, as in this case, specifics about peer interactions, experiences across organizations, as well as the ways in which gender socialization before entry into these firms shaped exchanges and experiences.

To identify respondents, I first wrote to law firm partners in the five firms in Mumbai that had been ranked consistently as the top legal firms by global ranking agencies in the preceding five years. These senior lawyers had influential internal networks that they were embedded in, which made it easier to contact both junior colleagues and peers in their own firms, as well as colleagues in the other professional sites. I spoke to women and men in each of these firms, for between 40 and 90 minutes. Although I oversampled women, the men in the sample were crucial for placing this experience in context since they provided an interactional peer perspective.

Professional organizations in neoliberal sites have received some sociological attention (e.g., Faulconbridge and Muzio 2012), but focusing on professionals, instead, gives us one way of perceiving how individuals and their actions scale up to organizational outcomes (Thorton 1999). Particularly, while other scholars have explored global gender processes in white collar work contexts (e.g., Radhakrishnan 2009), the rich literature on formal "global" work in India encapsulates a very different demographic from the elite professionals in my sample. (1) These data cannot--and do not claim to--give comprehensive detail about all the mechanisms at play in global organizations. They do, however, have rich detail about subjective meanings of organizational processes that its actors hold and the rational extensions this has for the environments they find themselves in (Morrill and Fine 1997).

FINDINGS

These data reveal two kinds of significant comparisons within these professional spaces. The first is between older and newer kinds of professional practice. In line with the other evidence, older firms were more rigid in their expectation of an ideal worker and the exclusion of women within these firms was legitimated by these constructs. Still, novelty alone was not explanation enough. The second set of comparisons--between different kinds of newer professional practice--revealed the importance of pre-entry socialization in dictating the nature of inclusion that newer firms offered. Together these findings have implications for extending other research on feminization that suggests that the gendering of organizations needs to be understood not just by blatant exclusion of women, but also by their kinds of specific inclusion (Davies 1996).

Comparison A: Traditional Litigation Practice versus Newer Kinds of Professional Work

Historically, professional stratification in India was a simple case of access to resources (Ballakrishnen forthcoming; Dezalay and Garth 2010; Gandhi 1987). With limited domestic institutions to train students, law in colonial India was reserved for those with access to closed professional networks or the capacity to travel internationally, that is, elite men (Ballakrishnen 2009; Gandhi 1987). Few women acquired legal training and even fewer joined the profession (Sorabji 2010). Recent demographic data suggest that this trend has not changed over the last three decades (Michelson 2013). One extension of this segregation is that Indian litigation practice, like other accounts in the global legal profession (e.g., Pierce 1996), is a professional site where gender impacts everyday interactions and experiences through hegemonic practices, stereotypes, and unequal interactions. Mohan, a male litigator in his 30s who was in charge of a practice that, in his own words, could have as easily been his sister's, elaborates on this gendered distinction:

   The chances of a future life are at stake when you are a rude,
   abrasive lawyer and a woman--you are setting up a foundation, at
   least that is the perception, of how you are going to be judged. My
   sister had the same opportunities of me, and she would have been a
   much better lawyer than me, but she chose not to because of this
   perception--she didn't want to be judged ... And clients have other
   perceptions too--women are unique because of this reputation that
   can be tainted. You think of women as people you want to keep safe
   and take care of--you don't want them mistreated, not overburdened
   and while you give them their respective dues and there is no
   inequality, it's still a perception

The comment that female "rude abrasive lawyers" are susceptible to judgment is interesting because Mohan mentions later in the interview that it is exactly these qualities of aggression that make male lawyers successful in courts. The differences in the pathways between Mohan and his sister highlight the importance of gendered frameworks in defining professional identities in litigation. Even as he attests that there is "no inequality" and women are treated well without being "not mistreated or overburdened," Mohan's account suggests that such treatment does not guarantee professional rewards, and that women are simultaneously likely to be judged harshly when they act in ways that might challenge that identity. In a similar description of these gendered expectations, Priya, a young litigator, revealed that judges were prone to "testing boundaries" with women, often expecting them to have emotional reactions and evaluating their seriousness in the courtroom accordingly:

   ... most judges won't yell at a woman who is making these mistakes,
   you know? [Someone] who is being an idiot--they won't yell in the
   way they might have yelled [to teach] a man: they don't give any
   woman their time. They are always afraid that the girl is going to
   break into tears ...

Alongside demographics of the field more generally, these indicative accounts from Mohan and Priya confirm that in an established professional field like litigation, the assumptive standard of an ideal worker is better met by men (e.g., men had the ability to "shout and scream in court"); women, even when they did meet it, were under constant appraisal and subject to backlash. As a result, Priya and other women like her, had to navigate a professional environment where women were seen as not being strong enough for the tasks at hands (e.g., "they are always afraid the girl is going to break into tears") and their careers, as too futile for seniors to invest in (e.g., "they don't give any woman their time"). This exclusionary setup that elite professional practice creates for women is not novel in itself. But it sets up an important comparison point for appreciating newer workplaces without similar embedded expectations.

Unlike set notions of what it meant to be a litigating lawyer, professionals in newer fields like transactional law and consulting felt differently restricted by this imagined notion of the ideal worker. In contrast to litigation, women in transactional law firms felt like gender was not a main determinant of their career trajectory and success. Lata, a senior associate at an elite law firm, describes this comparative ambivalence while describing her identity and work experience:

   People don't think of it as an issue--I get the perspective would
   have been different if I had been a litigating lawyer. For example,
   when I was interning [in a litigating office], my senior was a
   woman and I know that judges looked at a case differently when a
   male lawyer was arguing instead of a female lawyer. So if I had
   been in litigation, it would have been different. But not here, not
   at all.

Similarly, newness of work and organization helped women professionals in new kinds of consulting firms as well. As new firms with new kinds of professionals, there was similar mobility regarding the constructed identity of a "good consultant" and although this identity was negotiated along other lines of difference, gender was not an immediately discriminating factor as it was in more traditional practice. Saraswati, a fourth-year management consultant, suggested that although there was not a "single senior consultant with a child and a client-facing role," her environment was "pretty egalitarian" and that there were "very few actual situations" where gender distinctions mattered in her work. In Saraswati's words, "per se, there is no difference in our ability to do the work or in consulting ... the only difference, however, comes in getting to the higher levels."

Her account suggests that gender was still relevant to Saraswati's professional identity but, unlike for Priya, there were no defined differences in the "ability to do the work" because she was a woman. This contrast between Priya and Saraswati is useful to highlight the distinctions between older and newer sites. All work is gendered, but unlike old sites where expectations about the perfect worker were set and women had to constantly prove they were either "just like men" or "not too much like women," the notion of the ideal worker in newer sites felt a bit more diffuse. They had to contend with gendered hurdles ("... isn't a single senior consultant with a client-facing role who has a child"), but these were not because they were inherently believed to be unfit for the job by clients and peers ("... per se, there is no difference").

Comparison B: New Law versus New Consulting

To the extent they did not have to continuously prove that they were the right "fit" for the job, the accounts of Lata and Saraswati seem similar. However, while Lata and Saraswati both had the advantage of not having to compete against a fixed ideal type of a "good litigator" or "good consultant," their work environments varied drastically in gender composition. Saraswati's professional life was not as blatantly sexist as Priya's, but despite feeling like there were no "technical" differences, her caveat about more senior consultants is pertinent because it reveals the underlying inequalities in environments that look and feel egalitarian in other ways.

In contrast, Lata worked for a corporate law firm, within a team with a female partner and was herself a mid-level associate on what she felt was a clear track to partnership. In speaking about her progress and success within the firm, Lata, like many of her within-firm peers, reported gender as not being a consideration and highlighted how her advancement across different levels of the firm (i.e., both at associate and partner levels) was "on track" and at par with male colleagues of similar standing. At the same time, Lata's position did not emerge from just an idealized assumption about the firm she worked for. The year she was recruited, her firm hired more women than men--two who started at the same level at the firm as herself--and a little over half the lawyers who had been promoted to partnership that year were women. By her account, she had the same opportunities as her male peers in terms of "promotions, bonuses, or getting clients." For Lata, and other women in her firm, gender was not an explicit issue that threatened their career prospects. Research on successful professional women has offered notes of caution in interpreting overoptimistic accounts by women who downplay the role of gender (Britton 2017; Demaiter and Adams 2009). And it would be naive to assume equal representation of women meant that new elite law firms were not gendered in their own ways. But in creating environments where women felt like they were not actively disadvantaged against, new law--and not all new--firms offered a site of aberration.

Socialization Differences

One explanation for why gender was "not an issue" for Lata and her peers was the blase way in which their male peers accepted--and even expected--their successes. As lawyers trained predominantly in new domestic law schools that were gender egalitarian at intake and graduation, men and women alike were still negotiating the frameworks of what it meant to be an elite law firm lawyer. Take this explanation given by Nitin, a new partner at one of the elite law firms about why the gender difference seemed redundant to him:

   I went to law school with these [women]--many of them beat the s***
   out of me in class--why would they be different in a meeting or
   interaction here? Just because they are a woman? I'm going to say
   there is no difference--and it is not just because I can't think of
   anything. Be it competence, client facing ability, you name
   it--there is no difference. Does a team of 4 boys differ from a
   team with 2 boys and 2 girls or 4 girls? Maybe
   banter--(laughs)--but that too depending on how close they are. But
   for [the] most part--No!

In contrast, professionals in consulting firms were typically graduates of older engineering and business schools, where gendered frameworks and meanings were more strongly embedded and the demographics themselves were less gender-balanced. Most consultants--male and female alike--agreed that the "70/30 ratio" (of men and women, respectively) was ideal, but not exactly possible in more senior levels for a range of attrition reasons including incoming cohort demographics in business schools, women's "choices," and the inevitable strains of cultural assumptions about gender in India that made it hard for women to stay. Vihaan, a senior consultant, justified, like many of his peers, his firm's gender composition as a direct result of similar business-school demographics: (2)

   ... There are no women at the top, but in the mid-manager level,
   there is probably 70/30 ... yes, favoring men, but maybe I am being
   optimistic. But you cannot do anything about this. You also have to
   look at the supply side and the selection pool that feeds into this
   sector, both from engineering and business schools. [Name of Firm]
   tries very hard to pick women--I mean, not that they get
   preferential treatment or anything, but if you see, the number of
   women in the firm is a higher representation than the number of
   women in business school--it's hard to do. Besides, not all
   business schools have the same male-female mix--cities like
   Bangalore have more women than business schools in cities like
   Calcutta or worse, other B-cities ... so making that representation
   filter up is difficult.

Vihaan's reasoning is grounded in his experience. Elite business schools and engineering programs, as main feeder schools into consulting firms, were central to socializing professionals. And their gender composition impacted the choices firms made at recruitment. But alongside the skewed numbers, being socialized in environments where women were a minority had other implications for the ways in which gender played out in interactions. Farhan, another mid-level consultant, who had gone through what he called a "typical consultant" track of an elite engineering and business school education, described it as follows:

   Women have it really tough in [Consulting Firm Name]. They are
   still a minority and have very high rates of attrition. It's
   inevitable--with family and children, they just can't keep up with
   the highly competitive environment. So women typically exit after a
   child, because then they have to take six months off to have the
   child and when you are on a tenure system, six months means you are
   no longer in your cohort, so you have to necessarily compete with
   your juniors. And when that happens, women get emotional and leave.

Farhan's description that women's attrition is "inevitable" is similar to accounts that other consultants shared about these trajectories. But his explanation informs the underlying gendered constructs of this "inevitability." Women colleagues, by this description, were unlikely to be successful within a "highly competitive environment," both because of their competing personal concerns and their obvious emotional response to this call for balance--attrition. Similarly, Mihir, another consultant, who makes this connection between the elite schools he graduated from and his current work environment:

   ... There were 414 students in [Engineering School], but only 30 or
   even 22 Girls.... With a percentage like that, there are not that
   many interactions with women or that much training on how to be
   around women.... What you learn from just being in an environment
   like [Consulting Firm] you don't in [Engineering School] because it
   is not available to you. I think I got that training from [Business
   School], which had more women and also teams where you had to work
   with women in. I know it is a bad word, but this exposure to the
   opposite sex, to girls, only happened in business school, where 25,
   or sometimes as high as 35 percent were female.

Unlike Nitin, who was used to women colleagues in his own competitive environment because many of them "beat the s*** out of him" in law school, for consultants like Farhaan and Mihir, women were new and unlikely entrants into a competitive system for whom entry was an exception and attrition was "inevitable." Instead, the general consensus among consultants was that while firms were "male heavy," they were not "as bad as" the schools that they had most recently graduated from. This, as Mihir suggests below, made consulting firms much better in comparison to the schools they recruited from. And as a consequence, any lack of gender equality was seen as an individual--rather than an organizational or institutional--problem :

   [Business School] had 30% vertical reservation for women and
   [Consulting Firm] doesn't. So even though women are recruited in
   equal proportion or numbers [of the 17 in his cohort, 3 were
   women], there is no policy that forces them to stay. This is in
   spite of [Consulting Firm] not caring if women take time off,
   putting their clock on pause, etc.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Building truly innovative workspaces is difficult because, no matter how radical, old frameworks of operation and management still attach themselves to new organizational forms (Padgett and Powell 2012). But while organizational genesis certainly "does not mean virgin birth" (Padgett and Powell 2012:5), this research reminds us that new kinds of work environments have some leeway in introducing new kinds of workers who are seen as good fits for the tasks at hand. Unlike women in litigation who had to constantly counter--and fall short of--the benchmark of an ideal male professional, women in newer work environments like transactional law and management consulting felt less constrained by a predetermined idea of the perfect professional. As newly emerging professional fields, the cultural meanings of what constituted a "good corporate lawyer" or a "good consultant" was still in flux and as fields not predisposed to being gender typed, both transactional lawyers and consultants alike shared this structural advantage.

In addition, women in these new organizations were also advantaged by the idea of a global, cosmopolitan professional. As graduates from some of the country's best schools, hiring these professionals was a matter of pride for many modern organizations and reflected their ideological commitment to "meritocracy." Further, as urban professionals from English-medium schools, "fit" within organizations was equally buttressed by the advantages of class. But holding the advantage of class constant across elite workspaces, women in law firms still were able to navigate their environments with less sticky constructs than their peers in consulting.

To explain this variation, firm and work novelty, in themselves, were not enough. As new organizations with mild preexisting frameworks of reference, the structural positioning of new firms were conducive to the construction of novel gendered hierarchies. But what additionally advantaged lawyers in new transactional firms was the exposure to genderegalitarian constructs before entering these workspaces. Elite lawyers who were trained in law schools with gender-balanced entry were better equipped to unlock the advantages of "innovative" gender frameworks than elite consultants who, despite working for new organizations, still remained circumscribed by the sticky frameworks of gender that their male-heavy schools of engineering and business advanced.

This is not to suggest that elite law firms were devoid of gendered meanings and frameworks. In other work, I show that although differently valorized, there were deeply pervasive gendered meanings that permeated each of these sites (Ballakrishnen 2017). Similarly, neither is this to suggest that lawyers were advantaged because law schools were created with intention to create egalitarian workspaces. The new national law schools were hardly designed as feeder schools for law firms (Ballakrishnen forthcoming), and these schools remain gender imbalanced and unequal in other important ways (e.g., Ballakrishnen and Samuel forthcoming re: recruiting female faculty and creating feminist spaces; Basheer et al. 2017 re: caste and class inequality). Instead, the gender equal entry into these schools--and subsequent reinforcement in these firms--was predicated on other factors like a high threshold for entry that attracted the most competitive students (regardless of gender (3)), and new kinds of testing (which were not yet gender typed). Further still, it is also possible that the initial gender balance was predicated on the fact that law was not always seen as a uniformly high-status professional field and therefore attracted fewer entrants of high-status (i.e., men). But more than anything, the symbiotic co-establishment of new law schools alongside new elite law firms was happenstance. And the reinforcing pattern for gender equality that it offered between students and professionals was, even if fortuitous, accidental.

This research reinforces the persistence of gendered frameworks across organizations, even in new and modern workplaces. At the same time, it also offers some hope for the creation of more gender-egalitarian professional sites, especially through socialization offered by early gender-equal institutional structures. The law firms in this article may not be feminist firms, they might not even be equal firms. But in seeming to have parity, they are at the precipice of affording a different kind of opportunity to Indian professional women. The cultural malleability of new work is influenced heavily by its workers: the earlier professionals are socialized into frameworks of gender parity, the better prepared organizations can be for resisting the plaque of persistent gender inequality.

References

Acker, J. 1990. "Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations." Gender & Society 4(2): 139-58.

Ballakrishnen, S. 2009. "Where Did We Come From? Where Do We Go? An Enquiry into the Students and Systems of Legal Education in India." Journal of Commonwealth Law and Legal Education 7(2):133-54.

Ballakrishnen, S. 2013. "Why is Gender a Form of Diversity? Rising Advantage for Women in Global Indian Law Firms." Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 20(2):1261-89.

Ballakrishnen, S. 2017. "She Gets the Job Done: Entrenched Gender Meanings and New Returns to Essentialism in India's Elite Professional Firms." Journal of Professions and Organization 4(3):324-42.

Ballakrishnen, S. Forthcoming. "Present and Future: A Revised Sociological Portrait of the Indian Legal Profession." In Lawyers in 21st Century Society, edited by O. Hammerslev, H. Sommerlad, R. Abel and U. Shultz. London: Hart.

Ballakrishnen, S. and R. Samuel. Forthcoming. "India's Women Legal Academics: Who They Are and Where You Might Find Them." In Genders and Careers in the Legal Academy, edited by U. Shultz, G. Shaw, M. Thornton and R. Auchmuty. London: Hart.

Basheer, S., K.V. Krishnaprasad, S. Mitra and P. Mohapatra. 2017. "The Making of Legal Elites and the IDIA of Justice." Pp. 578-605 in The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and its Impact on Lawyers and Society, edited by D. Wilkins, V. Khanna and D. Trubek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Britton, D. 2017. "Beyond the Chilly Climate: The Salience of Gender in Women's Academic Careers." Gender & Society 31(1):5-27.

Budhwar, P., S. Debi and J. Bhatnagar 2005. "Women in Management in the New Economic Environment: The Case of India." Asia Pacific Business Review 11(2):179-93.

Cech, E. 2015. "Engineers and Engineeresses? Self-Conceptions and the Development of Gendered Professional Identities." Sociological Perspectives 58(1):56-77.

Cech, E., B. Rubineau, S. Silbey and C. Seron. 2011. "Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering." American Sociological Review 76(5):641-66.

Chambliss, E. and C. Uggen. 2001. "Men and Women of Elite Law Firms: Reevaluating Kanter's Legacy." Law and Social Inquiry 25(1):41-68.

Charles, M. and D. Grusky. 2005. Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Vf omen and Men. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Correll, S., S. Benard and I. Paik. 2007. "Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?" American Journal of Sociology 112(5): 1297-339.

Davies, C. 1996. "The Sociology of Professions and the Profession of Gender." Sociology 30(4):661-78.

Demaiter, E. and T. Adams. 2009. "'I Never Had a Problem with the Male-Female Thing Until ...': Women in IT Organizations." Canadian Journal of Sociology 34(1):29-51.

Dencker, J. 2008. "Corporate Restructuring and Sex Differences in Managerial Promotion." American Sociological Review 73(3):455-76.

Dezalay, Y. and B. Garth. 2010. Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Dinovitzer, R., N. Reichman and J. Sterling. 2009. "The Differential Valuation of Women's Work: A New Look at the Gender Gap in Lawyer's Incomes." Social Forces 88(2):819-64.

Eisenhardt, K. 1989. "Building Theories from Case Study Research." Academy of Management Review 14(4):532-50.

England, P. 2010. "The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled." Gender & Society 24(2):149-66. Epstein, C. 1981. Women in Law. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Faulconbridge, J. and D. Muzio. 2012. "Professions in a Globalizing World: Towards a Transnational Sociology of the Professions." International Sociology 27(l):136-52.

Gandhi, J. 1987. Sociology of Legal Profession, Law, and Legal System: The Indian Setting. Delhi: Gyan Publishing.

Gibson, D. and B. Lawrence. 2010. "Women's and Men's Career Referents: How Gender Composition and Comparison Level Shape Career Expectations." Organization Science 21(6):115975.

Gorman, E. 2005. "Gender Stereotypes, Same-Gender Preferences, and Organizational Variation in the Hiring of Women: Evidence from Law Firms." American Sociological Review 70(4):702-28.

Hagan, J. and F. Kay. 1995. Gender in Practice: A Study of Lawyers' Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hatmaker, D. 2012. "Engineering Identity: Gender and Professional Identity Negotiation among Women Engineers." Gender, Work & Organization 20(4):382-96.

Ibarra, H. 1997. "Paving an Alternative Route: Gender Differences in Managerial Networks." Social Psychology Quarterly 60(1):91-102.

Kanter, R. 1977. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books.

Kay, F. and E. Gorman. 2012. "Developmental Practices, Organizational Culture, and Minority Representation in Organizational Leadership: The Case of Partners in Large U.S. Law Firms." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1:91-113.

Kay, F. and J. Hagan. 1998. "Raising the Bar: The Gender Stratification of Law-Firm Capital." American Sociological Review 63(5):728-43.

Kumar, N., ed. 2012. Gender and Science: Studies across Cultures. Delhi: Foundation Books. Menkel-Meadow, C. 1989. "Feminization of the Legal Profession." Pp. 221-80 in Lawyers in Society: An Overview, edited by R. Abel and P. Lewis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Michelson, E. 2013. "Women in the Legal Profession, 1970-2010: A Study of the Global Supply of Lawyers." Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 20(2):1071-137.

Mishra, S. 2016. "I Was Sexually Harassed in the Corridors of the Supreme Court." The Week, November 13. Retrieved June 9, 2018 (http://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/interviewindira-jaising-senior-lawyer.html).

Mobley, M., C. Jaret, K. Marsh and Y. Lim. 1994. "Mentoring, Job Satisfaction, Gender, and the Legal Profession." Sex Roles 31(1):79-98.

Morrill, C. and G. Fine. 1997. "Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology." Sociological Methods and Research 25(4):424-51.

Mukhopadhyay, C. 2004. "A Feminist Cognitive Anthropology: The Case of Women and Mathematics." Ethos 32(4):458-92.

Nath, D. 2000. "Gently Shattering the Glass Ceiling: Experiences of Indian Women Managers." Women in Management Review 15(1):44-52.

Padgett, J. and W. Powell. 2012. The Emergence of Organization and Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pierce, J. 1996. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Radhakrishnan, S. 2009. "Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a 'New' India." Qualitative Sociology 32(2):195-212.

Rajkotia, M. 2017. Intimacy Undone: Marriage, Divorce and Family Law in India. Delhi: Speaking Tiger.

Ridgeway, C. 2011. Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ridgeway, C. and S. Correll. 2004. "Motherhood as a Status Characteristic." Journal of Social Issues 60(4):683-700.

Schultz, U. and G. Shaw. 2003. Women in the World's Legal Professions. Oxford: Hart.

Seron, C., S. Silbey, E. Cech and B. Rubineau. 2016. "Persistence is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation." Work and Occupations 43(2):178214.

Smith-Doerr, L. 2004. Women's Work: Gender Equality vs. Hierarchy in the Life Sciences. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Sorabji, R. 2010. Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Spradley, J. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston.

Sterling, J. and N. Reichman. 2012. "Navigating the Gap: Reflections on 20 Years Researching Gender Disparities in the Legal Profession." Florida International University Law Review 8(1):515-39

Sterling, J. and N. Reichman. 2016. "Overlooked and Undervalued: Women in Private Law Practice." Annual Review of Law and Social Science 12(1):373-93.

Terjesen, S., R. Sealy and V. Singh. 2009. "Women Directors on Corporate Boards: A Review and Research Agenda." Corporate Governance: An International Review 17(3):320-37.

Thornton, P. 1999. "The Sociology of Entrepreneurship." Annual Review of Sociology 25:19-46.

Vinze, M. 1987. Women Entrepreneurs in India: A Socio-Economic Study of Delhi, 1975-85. New Delhi: Mittal Publications.

Wald, E. 2009. "Glass Ceilings and Dead Ends: Professional Ideologies: Gender Stereotypes, and the Future of Women Lawyers at Large Law Firms." Fordham Law Review 78:2245.

Walsh, J. 2012. "Not Worth the Sacrifice? Women's Aspirations and Career Progression in Law Firms." Gender, Work & Organization 19(5):508-31.

West, C. and D. Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing Gender." Gender & Society 1(2):125-51.

Wilkins, D., V. Khanna and D. Trubek, eds. 2017. The Indian Legal Profession in an Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and Its Impact on Lawyers and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, J. 2000. Why Work and Family Conflict and What to do about It. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, J., M. Blair-Loy and J. Berdahl. 2013. "Cultural Schemas, Social Class, and the Flexibility Stigma." Journal of Social Issues 69(2):209-34.

Witz, A., 2013. Professions and Patriarchy. London: Routledge.

Yin, R. 2003. Applications of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

SWETHAA S. BALLAKRISHNEN

New York University Abu Dhabi

This research was made possible by the generous support of the following fellowship and grant funding sources: The Diversifying Academia by Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellowship at Stanford University, National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (SES-1423439); Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy Research (IGLP Doha Santander Grant 2014); Stanford Centre for South Asia (Summer Research Grant 2012,2013); Harvard Law School Centre on the Legal Profession (GLEE Grant 2012); International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Juan Celaya Grant 2011); and the Stanford Vice Provost for Graduate Education (Graduate Research Opportunity Award 2011, Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Funds, 2013). The author thanks Scott Cummings, Yves Dezalay, Sara Dezalay, Cynthia Epstein, Bryant Garth, David Grusky, Tomas Jimenez, Woody Powell, Nicholas Robinson, Cecilia Ridgeway, Becky Sandefur, Carroll Seron, and David Wilkins for comments, interventions, and constructive criticism on various previous iterations and drafts of this research. This manuscript also especially benefited from the critical feedback and thoughtful framing suggestions from its anonymous reviewers and the two editors of this thematic issue, Tracey Adams and Sida Liu.

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, New York University Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 903, Office A5 1205, NY, NY 10276. E-mail: swethaa@nyu.edu

(1) In some comparison, employees in elite business process outsourcing units in the information technology industry earned on average, between $4,167 and $7,700 a year. In contrast, lawyers and consultants at entry in these elite firms made, on average, between $15,500 and $24,000 a year.

(2.) Elite business schools--where consultants in these firms are hired from typically--have between 16 and 38 percent women (class of 2018) in an average batch of about 400 students a year. This gender ratio is even further skewed among schools in smaller cities and in smaller schools (less than 300 students), which have closer to 6 to 10 percent compared to schools in Mumbai (about 35 percent female). This is a jump from even a few years ago (class of 2015), when 100 women acceptances (in each school) were seen as "race that had gone too far" and "at the cost of merit." See https://insideiim.com/ indiasmost-gender-diverse-business-schools-iim-indore-xlri-lead-the-way/ and https://insideiim.com/has-therace-for-women-in-iims-gone-too-far/?src=gendiv (last accessed May 15, 2017).

(3.) Note that some schools have vertical reservation for women but they have historically never needed to be enforced because women always enter through the general category in enough numbers.

Table 1

List of All Interviews (N = 139)

Gender               Pilot (2011)    2012-2013
                      F      M      F          M

Traditional legal     4      2      10
   practice
Domestic law firm     3      1      6          4
Elite law firm        15     3      20         6
Banks and in-house                  5
   counsel
Management
   consulting
   firms
Gender totals         22     6      41         10
Other                                     3
   informant
   interviews
   (clients,
   industry
   reporters)
Total                    28              54

Gender                 2014-2015         Total
                      F         M     F         M

Traditional legal     11        2     25        4
   practice
Domestic law firm     12        3     21        8
Elite law firm        4         2     39        11
Banks and in-house    8         1     13        1
   counsel
Management            8         5     8         5
   consulting
   firms
Gender totals         43        13   106        29
Other                       1               4
   informant
   interviews
   (clients,
   industry
   reporters)
Total                      57              139