Sheba Tejani, a doctoral student in the department of Economics at The New School for Social Research and a Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis research assistant, has been awarded the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF). This program, administered by the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, assists graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to formulate research proposals for their doctoral dissertations.

Sheba plans to study the particular confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that enable the systematic reproduction of sex segregation in the information technology industry of India. Sheba’s research will highlight how the IT industry in India, which is the biggest foreign exchange earner in the country and known to be internationally competitive, perpetuates gender inequality within its structures. She will conduct a qualitative study on-site in the western region of India, interviewing employers as well as employees to understand why women are crowded into particular professions within the IT sector, such as tele-work at call centers and low-level software coding.