High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration

by Amy Bhatt

Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States.

Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women's experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves "housewives" stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women's labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Sociology, Politics, Business

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2018

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This academic monograph made me aware of a group I had little previous knowledge about: the transmigrant Indian women and men working in the tech industry or as housewives to tech workers. As a whole they generally feel neither here nor there in regards to “homeland” due to the dynamics of the tech industry. What I really appreciated is the author’s emphasis on the importance of the housewives to tech workers and what they contribute to make high-tech workers function in the capacity that they do.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 / 5.0

A little dry. Interesting sympathetic take on challenges faced by South Asian women as high tech immigrants. I think she does not quite make a case for anything except that work life family balance is a challenge. Informative and well written.

[John Bosco · Rating 2 out of 5]

Largely anecdotes from the authors friends and their friends, and not a great historical outlook on the subject with greater research.

[Sudha Karthik · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thorough research and insightful interviews are eye opening. The narrative arc is compelling even though it’s a very academic read.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a truly phenomenal book that looks at the multitude of ethnographic perspectives of transmigrants from India. You need to read this IMMEDIATELY