Stacy Blake-Beard - Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India
Home Institution: Simmons College
Host Institution: Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
Field: Business Administration
Dates: January - April 2011
Stacy Blake-Beard in India
From the Foreign to the Familiar …and Back Again
One of the most important aspects of being in India was trying to pay attention to what translates, what makes sense to me and what is totally foreign. The familiar provides a sense of comfort. The foreign provides an opportunity to learn and expand my boundaries. Both types of experiences are invaluable.
I reflected on what brought me to this “foreign” land in the first place as a Fulbright Scholar. Having taught a class on Gender and Leadership at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad over the past three years through short visits of two and half weeks each, I knew India but had wanted to get a deeper sense. During the short visits, I had started conversing about the impact of mentoring with the women whom I was teaching, as my research in the U.S. focuses on women’s professional mentoring experiences. I wanted more time, however, to have deeper exchanges. I wanted to know more about how these women experience mentoring and how it differed and was the same as the experiences of professional women in the U.S. to expand my mentoring research. The Fulbright grant was therefore a blessing because it provided that extended time. I looked forward to having more time to talk with professional Indian women across the country, to talking with women who were further along in their careers than the MBA students I had been interviewing, and to having more time to explore parts of the country that I had not yet seen. I was hosted again by ISB in Hyderabad.
On my Fulbright, the interviews became a place where the blend of familiar and foreign lived. I conducted interviews with women at Infosys, a large, multinational, technology services corporation based in India, and at the Indian offices of the American information storage company EMC, among other organizations.
Certain themes kept coming up in the interviews. I heard some familiar issues from the Indian women that mirrored my research on American women. The women with whom I spoke had the same passionate belief that mentoring is an important developmental relationship. They spoke about the critical importance of having help in their careers. I hear this same passion about the topic from women in the U.S.
But I also heard the foreign in my interviews. There are several cultural expectations about Indian women’s workforce participation that are different from those that American women face and that have implications for their mentoring relationships. One expectation of Indian women was the decision to stay in the workforce after getting married and, even more critically, after having a child. They talked about immense pressure to stay at home once they had children and about the negative perceptions that they had to counter if they chose to stay in the workforce after having children. A second expectation was the acceptance of having close relationships with men who are not family members. Because most of these women reported that their mentoring relationships were predominantly with men, they were keenly aware of the need to manage perceptions of their relationships with men from outside of their family circle. They talked about a level of societal discomfort with women having close relationships with male colleagues. Both of these expectations have an impact on women’s ability and ease in forming deep substantive relationships with male advocates. The decision about how long to be in the workforce and the boundaries that surround the formation and development of interpersonal interactions across gender are both critical factors that could impact mentoring relationships.
During my interviews, I learned to ask different questions and to listen for different cues. In the U.S., women never mention their mother-in-law as a factor in their mentoring experiences. In India, however, I quickly learned that I had to gain some sense of the women’s relationships with their mothers-in-law. Was their mother in law a source of support? Had she worked—so that her son had models of women working? Another issue that kept emerging was the nature of how these women had met and joined their husbands. I was not familiar with the term “love marriage” but more than 75% of my sample indicated that they had met their husbands on their own and not through the typical arranged marriage format that is common all over India. Over and over, the women talked about the importance of having a strong support structure at home to help navigate their career. They realized that they needed to be present enough in the workforce to attract the support and guidance of a mentor. If their mothers-in-law protested that they spent too much time outside of the household or their husbands opposed women working, these women’s participation in the workforce would have been severely limited.
A final issue that kept popping up in the interviews that surprised me was the mention of dust. The first time I heard it in an interview, I didn’t really pay it much attention. This woman talked about how much dust there is in India and that, as a result, you really need a whole support system to care for the home. When I heard dust mentioned over and over again in my interviews, however, I began to listen more intently. I came to think of dust as a metaphor of sorts—a symbol of a pervasive, seemingly microscopic barrier that demanded inordinate attention and management from the women. My respondents talked about having an army of support—the cleaners, the cook, the driver, the nanny, the gardener, the repairman. They indicated that they literally would not be able to do their jobs if they did not have this phalanx of relatively invisible household help to “battle the dust.”
In return for the interviews given, I agreed to do workshops on mentoring for both EMC and Infosys. My sessions for EMC and Infosys allowed me to see if my consulting and teaching work in the U.S. could be translated to an Indian context – how my familiarity with a topic would translate in a foreign context. The success of my class at ISB has given me a good indication that I am able to take concepts and ensure that they translate to professional Indians. It was so nice to see the familiar stance of learning and insight development hopscotch across the faces of participants in both corporations. Each session drew about 50 employees, and each one of them got something from my workshop. So I am happy that I and my work did translate to an Indian context.
There are some mannerisms and habits of mine and of theirs that are still very much foreign: Saying “thank you” to small deeds, which Indians see as just a constant stream of relatively useless platitudes, for instance, or putting my “dirty” walking sandals in my bag next to books, which are considered sacred. Fortunately, I have several people whom I can ask for assistance in helping me figure out what the cultural signs and appropriate actions and reactions are.
It is strange to be back home in Boston. I miss the many friends with whom I have developed and/or deepened my relationship during my Fulbright experience—it was so lovely having people who have become like family. I will keep all of their spirits and encouragement with me. I look forward to the opportunity to share what I have learned, through journal articles, a book and presentations at various professional conferences. I have so much work to do to translate what I have learned from my experiences and my research…my own journey to appreciate the familiar, to understand the foreign and to be a bridge that goes between the two.
To the U.S.-India Fulbright Program