South Asian Women at Work
Smart but passive. Good technicians, but not likely managers. Women from India and Pakistan frequently must combat stereotypes about how they function at work. But they should resist labels and pursue the careers of their dreams, said panelists in a discussion on women in the workplace at the Conference on India and Its Neighbors, a student-organized gathering held on the HBS campus in February and sponsored by the HBS South Asian Business Association.
Shahla Aly, now a general manager at Microsoft, came to North America in 1977 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. She was starting to get depressed and couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong.
Then an interviewer told her, “I think you’d be a wonderful fit for this company…but I do have one quick question to ask you: Do you plan to dress the way you’re dressed today every day to work?”
Thinking that the interviewer was complimenting her sari, Aly responded with a “yes.” The interviewer’s expression said it all. She went shopping, bought a pantsuit, and was hired at her next interview.
“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 need to dress modestly can be articulated in dress that is more pervasive. At that point I had not yet earned the right to be different.”
“You have to figure out what you are willing to change and what you are not willing to change,” agreed Meena Mutyala, VP of engineering at Westinghouse. “There is a stereotype of South Asians that we are technically very smart,” said Mutyala, who began her career as a physicist. “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.”
For a full report on this and other student conferences, visit the “HBS Conference Coverage” section of HBS Working Knowledge at www.workingknowledge.hbs.edu.
