Paycheck India, a research project run by Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, in collaboration with AILS University of Amsterdam and Wage Indicator Foundation, collects salary data from the public with the help of an online survey. Similar surveys are run in forty five countries. Paycheck website's objective is to provide the web visitor (mainly employees, employers, trade unions and NGOs) with information related to salary, working conditions, minimum wages and other work-related issues.

The concept of WageIndicator originated in the year 2000 in the Netherlands with the aim to study gender pay gap. After the success of the first pay survey in the Netherlands, a "salary checker" tool was developed in the website which provides free information on occupation-specific salary. The foundation has websites in 45 countries and plans to spread the WageIndicator network to 75 countries in coming years. Each country website has the salary checker tool which answers one of the deepest secrets in the labor market: "who earns what".

With working women being a special target group of the project, a dedicated website for women has been launched in the partner countries (Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain and UK). Paycheck India would soon be launching a dedicated website for women workforce that would cater to the demand and other work related issues surfacing in the market for the female workforce.

In December 2008, a new project 'Decisions for Life' was initiated which targets adolescent female workers and job seekers in the service industry. The project's main objective is to raise awareness amongst the young female workforce about their future employment opportunities and career possibilities, family building and the work-family balance. This project, spanning 14 countries is sponsored by ITUC, Belgium.

Decisions for Life project aims to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG3) - "Promoting Gender Equality and Empower Women" by means of awareness raising amongst women in the target group and focus specifically on the empowerment of women. The main activities of the project would be to raise gender awareness through academic inputs, trade union campaigns (main target being young women trade union leaders and workers in various sectors), workshops, seminars, conferences, etc.

This project attempts at identifying, factors that enable greater participation of women in IT and ITES sector and identifying organizational and personal inhibiting and facilitating factors that play a role in the advancement of women to Organizational Leadership Positions.

To accelerate the growth of IT and ITES Industry in foreseeable future it has become imperative to leverage the potential that its women participants possess. Women it is said are life long learners, and intrinsically possess leadership qualities. Thus, focus needs to be brought on revamping the organizational climate so as to make it relatively more gender conducive and inclusive. It also is important for us to examine the experiences of those women employees who have entered this field and excelled in reaching high levels of responsibility. The challenges of Indian IT and ITES are unique because in these company's owing to the socio-cultural background women tend to get objectified faster then men and this study will support us in looking into the gender dimension of these issues. It will also help us in understanding the role played by women employees in the company's growth and will assist in identifying the inhibiting and facilitating factors that "Enable Women advancement to leadership in IT and ITES". This particular research will help to capture the women's perspective of the issue. However, to get a more holistic picture there is a need to study the viewpoint of men as well. The objectives are:

• To understand the processes, practices, policies and procedures being followed and examine if they differentially facilitate capability augmentation, growth and career prospects for women.
• To solicit participants' views on, "The myth of being stereotyped in IT and ITES".
• To identify factors inhibiting women advancement to senior management positions: both personal and work place related.
• To enumerate facilitators that enable in mentoring women’s advancement to leadership positions so as to benchmark the best practices being followed.
• To illustrate the stories of successful women in senior management positions with a view to solicit advice for new women entrants in this field.