Sunrita Dhar-Bhattacharjee

The Covid pandemic has caused a significant shift in the education sector, pushing for
rapid integration of technology in education worldwide. This has resulted in a move
from traditional classroom learning to online and blended modes of learning, which
is likely to continue. Though access to technology is crucial for driving innovation and
equity in education, regional disparities have been widely pervasive, affecting overall
educational governance at national, regional, and local levels. This paper delves into
the problem of equity in online learning in Delhi and Varanasi, with a total of 2,563
responses and data analysis based on regression charts identifying key trends and
patterns affecting equity in learning. Our findings show that students enrolled in private
schools had better access to online education in both cities. The study also revealed the
significance of cultural inclusivity in online learning. The diversity of students’ cultural
backgrounds affects the process and outcomes of online learning. The findings from this
research can serve as valuable guidance to enhance pedagogical designs that adapt
better to online learning practices for school students during the COVID-19 pandemic
or any future unexpected crises. We provide recommendations for policymakers and
educators to promote inclusivity in online education.

The paper investigates the experiences of women IT professionals in India from two groups: the first group comprises women experiencing differences in work-life balance (WLB), inequalities and challenges of equal rights when they are working on different IT projects with a Swedish or US client. The second group of women comprising activists who have initiated to set up solidarity network groups on social media to ensure better WLB and equal rights. An interpretive research approach with 150 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals and an inductive analysis was adopted for this study. Findings highlight how equality, diversity and inclusion policies from the West are transformed in the Indian context, and how this has implications for women's WLB and retention in transnational organizations in India. The importance of women's activism in IT is highlighted as it contributes to creating solidarity networks providing unique bonding space and comfort for women IT professionals.

Total Place - A whole area approach to public services ................................................................... 7 ... Concerns and issues that arose from the pilots: ....................................................................... 19 ... Future work for University of Salford ..................................................................................... ...

In England’s North West, engineering continues to be a major industry: employing 90,000 workers, accounting for around a quarter of jobs in the region, and generating £13 billion of the North West’s £44 billion total Gross Domestic Product. However, despite this growth and over 30 years of equality legislation, women in engineering careers in the region remain an insignificant statistical category. Whilst initiatives aimed at increasing female recruitment to the industry have had some, albeit limited effect, retention of female engineers is falling, suggesting that female encounters with organisational cultures in engineering firms may be less than encouraging. The WEWIN project team examined, analysed and contrasted the experiences of men and women working in engineering occupations in the North West, over a period of 12 months. Using participant observation, focus groups, questionnaires and in-depth interviews with engineers, technical directors and HR professionals, the research ...

A “good cultural match”, referring to compatible ways of working, cultural norms of social behaviour, attitudes towards authority and language, has been described as important in determining the success of outsourcing information technology (IT) production and services (Krishna et al. 2004; Lacity et al. 2009). Dealing with cross-cultural barriers between client and supplier is highly relevant for the Indian software industry, which is built on transnational customer-provider relationships and to a high degree conducted by multi-national companies with headquarters outside India. This chapter argues that some difficulties and ”cultural clashes” between onsite and offshore in software development can be understood and at least partly explained by the diverging ideas about which qualities characterize ideal employees. Although highly relevant, gender has mostly been left unexplored in previous research on these cross-cultural issues in global IT offshoring. In this chapter we investig...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situation of women working as information technology (IT) professionals in different regions of India within multi-national enterprises (MNEs). The research is part of a cross-national study that compared gendered relations in the UK and Indian IT sectors. The complex roles that region, class and caste and gendered values and norms have in shaping women’s work and lives in India are discussed. Design/methodology/approach The cross-national research assumed common themes as part of a programme of in-depth interviewing and observations during site visits. The “safari method” was adopted with research conducted by a sole fieldworker with intimate knowledge of the languages and cultures of both India and the UK. The research considered intersectionality and difference and aimed to understand material structures and cultural meanings evident from the research process. Findings There are significant differences in organisational cult...

In this chapter, Joan Acker’s concept of gendered work ideals is used to understand the cultural clashes in transnational collaboration between Swedish and Indian firms. Interviews in two firms show that Indian employees collaborating with Sweden meet with conflicting ideals which they find difficult to realize, because of the differences between the prevalent organizational cultures in the different national contexts, India being more Tayloristic and Sweden being more entrepreneurial. The gendered work ideals also differ. The Indian ideal worker is extremely difficult for women to realize, due to societal expectations, which effectively prevents them from fulfilling the organizational expectations. Acker’s description of the gendered work ideal proves to be insufficient in this cultural context, where the differences between the societal gender roles of women and men are built in the organizational culture and women’s societal role as mothers overrides their role as employees in ways not covered in Acker’s presumptions.

Whilst evidence presented in recent scholarship suggests initiatives aimed at increasing female recruitment to the industry may be proving somewhat effective, retention of female engineers is falling, and there has been minimal progress on breaking down vertical segregation in the engineering workplace. In this chapter the authors explore the situation of women engineers in the UK; they examine, using qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, whether women in engineering do indeed suffer from the application of descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes in the workplace, and how they are able to circumvent them. In particular, the authors instigate the factors, such as self-promotion and confidence, which may aid or hinder the progression of women’s careers. They urge educational institution and engineering industries and organisations to nurture such qualities. Their findings indicate that confidence and self-promotion should be high on the agenda of women engineers to su...

Gender segregation in science, engineering, construction, technology (SECT) is a persistent feature, both in India and the UK. Although culturally the two countries differ, under-representation of women in SECT is widespread and a cause for general apprehension, and in recent years, this has gained recognition in the study of gender, work, and family. In this paper, the authors discuss findings of a comparative study undertaken between India and Britain in the ICT sector. Using 27 interviews with ICT professionals in the two countries, the authors discuss views on ICT education, recruitment, and employment practices, work-life balance, changing gender relations, opportunities for progression, and retention in the two countries. The authors take into consideration women’s role in power and politics and how the “public” and “private” patriarchy shapes women’s position in the labour market, with an essential backdrop of “patrifocality” in the Indian context.

1 The Organisational Culture of NW Engineering Workplaces: The Influence on Women Engineers Natalie Sappleton, Haifa Takruri-Rizk, Sunrita Dhar-Bhattacharjee, Rae Bezer School of Computing, Science and Engineering, the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, ...

This article investigates the experiences of employees and managers in Swedish companies that offshore IT services to India, focusing on how implementation of offshoring is changing the work organization and working conditions for software developers onsite. Our analysis highlights the fact that the working conditions have been significantly redesigned in several different ways because of offshoring, most obviously due to the need for knowledge transfer between the onshore and the offshore working sites. The study illustrates how employees and managers onsite utilized different strategies for knowledge transfer and how these strategies were more or less successful, sometimes due to resistance from employees. The article concludes that, although offshoring contributed to a separation of conception from execution in these companies, there were few signs of routinization of daily work tasks for onsite employees. Instead, it was the routinized and noncore tasks that were offshored while...