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What Happens to Female Employees in Skewed IT Project Teams in Sri Lanka? Revisiting Kanter

Post-war Sri Lanka is heavily dependent on the promising future of the Information Technology (IT) industry to contribute considerably to the economic and social development of the country. Given the reported skill shortage and gender imbalance in the IT sector, female participation and retention is greatly advocated and promoted. In this milieu, we aim to understand what happens to female employees in male-dominant IT project teams, and the challenges and issues they face, as well as the related causes, using Kanter’s Theory of Group Proportions as the theoretical lens. Such understanding will provide a backdrop to develop ways and means of attracting and retaining females in the IT industry in Sri Lanka. Employing qualitative inquiry, we carried out in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with 14 informants—10 female team members and four male team counterparts—from six IT companies. We identified four main challenges and issues females face in working alongside males where females strive to prove their technical and leadership capabilities, gain acceptance of the dominants in the team, overcome role entrapment and gain due recognition for their hard work. In facing these challenges females use various strategies and changes of behaviour which can ultimately lead to work pressure, strained relationships and anxiety for females. While these challenges are largely comparable to the main phenomena and experiences explained by Kanter, it appeared that gender-role stereotyping and sexist attitudes prevailing in the work setting, rather than the numerical minority status of females as mentioned by Kanter, gave rise to these situations.