Indian students might be quick in aping Western trends, but this isn’t helping them in their lives in India.
LawSikho CEO Ramanuj Mukherjee has said that removing the ‘she/her’ pronouns from a student’s bio helped her find jobs. “I had a student, quite impressive, but struggling to land interviews,” he wrote on X. “She brought her CV to me to take a look, in the hope that I could suggest something. I suggested her to remove her pronouns and try again (and these were she/her, not they/them pronouns),” he continued.
Mukherjee said that the student began receiving responses from companies after removing the she/her pronouns from her resume. “She was shocked to get responses from places where she was earlier overlooked. She was not even woke, she was just influenced by some of her teachers,” he added.
“Be careful about political virtue signalling, a lot of people will read those signals very differently,” Mukherjee told people on X. “Who knows what else you will bring to the workplace apart from pronouns? Maybe you support “stop oil”. Maybe Greta Thunberg is your idol. Maybe you want degrowth. Maybe you will start identity politics in our workplace. Maybe you support Hamas too. Who wants to take the risk? I have no problem in hiring a trans person, but I would be worried about hiring a woke activist There is no such dearth of talent that we have to hire political activists hell bent on destruction of human society as we know it,” he added.
Law Sikho was founded in 2018 by Ramanuj Mukherjee and others. It is an education company that offers advanced and practical courses catering to lawyers, businesses, universities, and professionals from various fields. The company had listed on the stock markets in January 2024.
Mukherjee’s comments come after Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal had taken exception to LinkedIn’s AI referring to him as ‘they/them’ instead of the more conventional ‘him’ in an answer. Aggarwal said that this ‘pronoun illness’ was an example of how western companies were imposing their political ideology on unsuspecting Indians. But the matter didn’t end there — LinkedIn took down Aggawal’s post saying it went against its Community Standards. Aggarwal again posted on LinkedIn, complaining how his post had been taken down, but this post too was deleted by Microsoft-owned LinkedIn without an explanation.
This experience had prompted Bhavish Aggarwal to declare that Ola would stop using Microsoft’s Azure cloud for its applications. Aggarwal had also said that he would help develop an open-source social network, along the lines of UPI and ONDC, whose only community guidelines were Indian laws and posts aren’t deleted for speaking up against woke ideas.
Now Law Sikho’s CEO has echoed similar sentiments, and recounted a case in which a student managed to find jobs after removing pronouns from her resume. There’s been a movement in recent times to keep politics out of the workplace — just last month, Google had fired 28 employees in the US who’d staged a sit-in in its office over its dealings with Israel. And as the student’s example shows, professing to an ideology that openly hates capitalism by including pronouns in your resume might not be the smartest idea while applying to work at capitalist organizations.