Abstract
The purpose of this study is to understand the lived experiences of well-educated women professionals in India and their views on the national government policy of women’s led empowerment. By integrating Kabeer’s (1999) resources-agency-achievement (RAA) model with Acker’s (2006) inequality regimes, we show limitations of state rhetoric and chronic discrimination amongst the most privileged yet marginalised women at the intersection of gender, age, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic and marital status. The study illustrates the importance of a multi-level approach to understanding employee empowerment from macro-, meso-, and micro-level perspectives. It shows how entrepreneurship, activism, sport, and the creative arts compensate for corporate disempowerment. Paradoxically, despite state legislation to protect women’s rights, these are subverted within organisations and highly educated professional women instead rely on self-empowerment, their own resources and agency to achieve subjective success on their own terms. This paper extends the RAA framework from development to organisational studies and combines state and institutional perspectives in a Global South context where formal labour market opportunities are limited. Our empirical study reveals that even the most socio-economically privileged and educated women are caught between entrenched masculine norms and state ambitions for developed country status. Finally, we recommend the importance of professional volunteering and entrepreneurship education as well as valuing personal and professional interests beyond corporate markets and STEM disciplines for fulfilling working lives in precarious emerging markets.