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Gender Diversity @ Workplace Gets a Big Push
New
law mandates women on boards, while companies hire more women across
hierarchies. But there’s still a long distance to cover
Earlier this month, when finance minister P
Chidambaram rose to speak at The Economic Times Awards for Corporate
Excellence, he started off by counting out the number of women seated in
the first three rows. “I must specially thank the five women in the first
row, the two in the second row, the five in the third row and all the men
who outnumber women,” he said. He was trying to underscore the need for
gender balance in India.
At the same time, his count – which was at least a notch higher than
earlier years – also put the spotlight on the small, but significant
progress India Inc achieved in 2013 in gender diversity. The new company
law, passed in 2013, mandates a specified class of companies to have at
least one woman on the board. Since this became law in August, dozens of
companies are looking to rope in woman directors on their boards. Case in
point: Irena Vittal, a former partner at McKinsey, has joined the boards of
Axis Bank, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, Godrej Consumer Products,
Tata Global Beverages, Titan and Wipro in the past year.
With the new law, many different pieces required to foster gender diversity
are now slowly beginning to come together. For example, the Forum for Women
in Leadership is working on releasing a women director roster – a list of
150 women ready to take up board responsibilities – sometime in 2014. It
has so far mentored over 150 women, from the Aditya Birla Group, GE, KPMG,
the Mahindra Group, Microsoft and TCS, among others, and will continue till
it trains 2,000 women for board positions. Separately, a group of 24 India
Inc leaders – including M Damodaran, Deepak Parekh and GM Rao, and led by
Arun Duggal, the chairman of Shriram Capital and a veteran international
banker – are also grooming competent women for broad roles. The programme
will create 100 board-ready women by next year, with the first batch of 48
‘graduating’ by December. Women already head at least nine banks, five FMCG
companies and at least eight IT/ITeS companies. There are at least 7% of women
as board members in listed companies in India, but at least 50% of them are
family members of the owners, according to data from AVTAR Career Creators,
a firm that works in the areas of talent strategy consulting and women’s
workforce participation.
This year, SBI, the country’s largest bank, got its first woman chief in
Arundhati Bhattacharya. And the country even got a bank run exclusively by
women and for women.
Lower in the hierarchy, several companies, especially MNCs, are
aggressively pushing to improve their gender balance, not because it is
fashionable, but more because having women at all management levels makes
business sense. “We need
women for wealth creation and enterprise risk management,” says Poonam
Barua, founder-chairman of Forum for Women in Leadership and CEO of WILL
Forum India. “If you do not put women in top management, you run the risk
of not understanding the needs of customers, suppliers, investors and
stakeholders.” Saundarya Rajesh, founder-president of AVTAR Career Creators,
echoes a similar view. “Studies around the world have shown that those
companies that have a greater number of women on their senior management
are able to tap into the full spectrum of creativity and innovation,” she
says.
In 2013, AVTAR ran more than a 100 training programmes for over 3,500
second-career women, an increase of 200% from 2012. “As an organisation
focussed on increasing workforce participation of women in India, 2013 has
been a landmark year for us,” says Rajesh. “The Indian woman professional
is slowly but surely making her presence felt and having her needs
addressed.”
That’s the good news. But these feelgood headlines do not tell the complete
story. “Whatever has been happening in the year is very good, but not
sufficient,” says K Ramkumar, executive director, ICICI Bank. “We need more
women in higher education, more women joining the workforce, more women in
frontline sales and manufacturing roles, more women in leadership, and a
change in mindset at home and in society.”
Citing data from a yet-to-be-released survey by the bank, Ramkumar said the
best women-friendly workplaces in India have 35% women at the entry level,
25-30% in the first level (five years experience), 12-15% at the entry
level of mid-management (5-10 years of experience) and 5-7% in the senior
management (15-20 years of experience). “If in a workplace, senior
management has only 5-7% women, how will reservation help?” he asks. “The
day we are able to preserve that 35% of women entering the corporate
workforce, that day we will not need any reservation.”
Data from National Sample Survey Organisation shows a dip in the number of
women actively employed in full-time careers in 2013 – women workforce
participation fell by 1 percentage point since last year to 24-25%.
According to a recent WILL- KPMG report on balanced boards, 93% of all the
board seats of BSE-200 companies are occupied by men. And 93 companies in
this set don’t have any women on their boards. The survey shows that if one
woman was inducted to each of these boards, female representation will grow
to 10.9%. In contrast, developed markets like the UK, US and Europe are
aiming for 30% women board directors. “We have sown the seeds of balanced
leadership (in 2013). If you don’t water it, the seed will remain dormant,”
says Barua. “It is now up to Corporate India to water the seeds so it
blossoms into a strong and robust diversity tree. And I hope to see it
blossoming by the end of 2014.”
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