As women in India enter the rapidly expanding Information Technology (IT) workforce, it could be predicted that their active participation in this sector will change their socio-economic status within the employing organization and the communities in which they reside. It is often expected that women's participation in the professional realm will contribute to a breakdown of traditional gender roles. And indeed, the data illustrate that women are working in the IT sector in India in increasing

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... umbers. However, data collected in 1992 and again in 2002 by the Indian Institute of Technology suggest that not only does women's participation fail to occur at the same speed as IT expansion, but that their participation is based on a continuation of traditional gender roles, which places women on the periphery of an employing organization. Questioning the paradigm of technological determinism, this paper examines how technology and its development can adapt to the existing social structure. The persistence of such gender divides perpetuate the notion of gender segregation and do not enhance women's socio-economic and political status, nor provide equal participation in the information economy. The Western paradigm of development and modernization suggests that as rational processes and bureaucratic functions overtake traditional forms of social organization, gender inequities will disappear, along with other forms of social closure based on differentiation, such as religion and ethnicity. Similarly, the concept of the information technology revolution implies equal access to all. Of course, this is recognized as far from reality, and the digital divide has become part of the popular lexicon to describe the division between those with access to information technology (IT) and those without. Yet this distinction further seems to imply that, once one is across this divide, social exclusion and barriers to equal participation are no longer signiªcant. While the digital divide increases the disparity between the rich and poor, with notable patterns occurring along gender, ethnic, and socio-economic divisions, there is the popular contention that technology, once accessed, is an agent for advancing the status of women. This advancement implies a change in gender relations. Peter Drucker (2001) , for example, has called technology the "great equalizer" as it can be used on an equal basis by both men and women. Kelkar and Nathan (2002) expand upon this by stating that IT serves as a