Liberal gender equality and social difference: an institutional ethnography Raghunandan Reddy Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the workplace experiences of women employees during maternity and post-maternity periods to reveal the institutional order that coordinated the social relations and shaped their experiences through local and extra-local texts. Design/methodology/approach – The institutional ethnography research framework allowed for mapping of workplace experiences of women employees during their maternity and post-maternity periods in their local context, connecting them to the invisible extra-local social relations. Findings – The research study explored the disjuncture between the gender diversity initiatives that aimed at the inclusion of women employees and the workplace experiences of women employees in terms of work disengagement and work role degradation, including career discontinuity. Practical implications – The gender diversity and inclusion initiatives of an organization need to examine the local and extra-local institutional texts that govern their context and coordinate social relations, such that there is no inconsistency between the intentions, implementation and outcomes. Social implications – The state needs to revisit the maternity benefit act to provide additional measures to protect the career continuity of women, who choose maternity at some point in their work lives. Originality/value – The paper explored the institutional order that influences the career continuity of women employees during maternity and post-maternity periods using institutional ethnography research framework in an information technology services organization in India. No such research study has even been attempted. Keywords Equal opportunities, Gender diversity, Gender differences, Institutional ethnography, Maternity, Gender diversity and inclusion Paper type Research paper Introduction Organizations are increasingly focusing on equality of opportunity, in terms of increasing the proportion of women employees in their organizations. They attempt this through affirmative actions that aim to develop women employees for career growth and by creating differential employment conditions for women that improve their work‒life balance (Barak, 2013; Cox and Blake, 1991; Jayne and Dipboye, 2004; Mithaug, 1996; Wolff, 2007). However, the persistence of low representation of women in leadership positions and in certain categories of jobs, along with persisting sex differentials in income points to the fact that the world of work is still a man’s world (Schneidhofer et al., 2011; Van Echtelt et al., 2009). The discourses and practices of liberal equality and social difference continue to disadvantage women in the workplace. The gender diversity and inclusion initiatives focus merely on increasing numerical equality without any attention to the generative mechanisms that sustain exclusion of women who are historically marginalized or occupy class position different from those leading such liberal projects (Klemm Verbos and Humphries, 2012). Such initiatives are agnostic about the field of competitive struggles among various actors and institutions, and they ignore the collective by privileging the individual as well as the dimension of class (whether economic, social or occupational) (Özbilgin and Tatli, 2011). In addition, the question of which category of women’s interests do such initiatives address is difficult to answer (Nicholson, 1994), whether in the public International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 39 No. 9/10, 2019 pp. 680-694 © Emerald Publishing Limited 0144-333X DOI 10.1108/IJSSP-06-2019-0114 Received 8 June 2019 Revised 21 July 2019 Accepted 22 July 2019 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0144-333X.htm 680 IJSSP 39,9/10