Untangling Culture from Culture: Exploring the Experiences of Women Tech Entrepreneurs in India

Bengaluru is known as the Indian Silicon Valley and boasts an entrepreneurial fever that is producing unicorn tech companies with increasing global import. Unlike the United States, India is a country that champions the development of STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) skills in its children early in their educational development. Girls as well as boys are encouraged to be computer scientists and engineers, with little sense that these professions are more aligned cognitively or socially to either gender. 

Yet, despite these cultural supports, India has produced very few female tech entrepreneurs or tech leaders to date. This research seeks to explore the social construction of tech entrepreneurship in India, specifically how this construction is held together by a variety of cultural and organizational norms and practices and how this reality translates to the on-the-ground experiences of Indian female entrepreneurs, both in India as well as in other areas of the world. 

Ingrid Erickson is an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Her current research focuses on the future of work, particularly the human qualities and capacities that may be required (or are becoming revalued) in the increasingly automated future. In 2022-23, she spent five months as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), where she began a new research project about the experiences of Indian women in their roles as tech entrepreneurs.