In a panel discussion at CNBC-TV18’s Future Female Forward initiative, she stressed that companies must guarantee returning mothers a role of equal or greater stature to encourage long-term career growth.
Additionally, Narasimhan highlighted the need for a merit-based hiring approach that ensures women are given equal opportunity to enter the interview process, stating, “We need to give women the opportunity to come for an interview and then choose the best candidate based on meritocracy.”
Companies Falling Short on Gender Parity Goals
Ashish Dhawan, CEO of The Convergence Foundation, pointed out that despite discussions on gender diversity, many companies are not making enough effort to achieve gender parity. “Companies are not working hard enough to achieve gender parity,” Dhawan stated, urging business leaders to take concrete steps toward inclusivity.
With India’s top 2,000 companies currently employing only 18% women, Dhawan believes significant progress is possible if leadership is committed. “We can easily get to 40% women workforce if we work hard towards it,” he asserted, citing examples of outliers in banking and pharma that have already crossed 40% representation.
Gender Parity Now a Business Imperative
Hitendra Dave, CEO of HSBC India, underscored that diversity and inclusion have become critical business discussions, rather than optional policies. “It is very difficult to run a reasonable size of business and not talk about gender parity,” he said, emphasising that leadership teams must actively engage in these conversations.
Dave also called for greater visibility of women leaders’ experiences to inspire the next generation. “We need to listen to stories of women leaders to inspire the younger generation,” he noted, adding that real-life success stories help shift gender inclusion from an agenda item to an intrinsic part of corporate strategy.
Vartika Shukla, CMD of Engineers India, addressed the gender gap in engineering, calling for increased efforts to attract women into the field. “The engineering sector needs to attract more women,” she remarked, acknowledging that while some industries like medicine and finance have achieved parity, engineering still lags.
Shukla noted that the public sector is actively implementing policies to elevate women into leadership positions. “The public sector is bringing many enablers in terms of policies to have more women in leadership roles,” she explained, adding that conscious policy creation, continuous monitoring, and leadership commitment are essential to driving change.
Meanwhile, Rajesh Jejurikar, ED & CEO of Auto & Farm at Mahindra & Mahindra, stated that increasing women’s participation in manufacturing is a top priority for the company. “Getting women in manufacturing is of high priority for us,” he affirmed, outlining initiatives such as all-women paint shops and assembly lines with 40%-50% female representation.
A safe workplace is critical in attracting women to manufacturing roles, Jejurikar noted. “Ensuring a safe workplace and providing them with transportation support is a key enabler,” he said, emphasising that Mahindra has implemented safety measures, including transport tracking and security cameras, to create a work environment that encourages female participation.
Below are the excerpts of the discussion.
Q. Future Female Forward started as a conversation that Hitendra Dave and I had on a flight. Today, three years on, it has become a movement. As you look at where we are today, while we have mainstreamed the conversation and progress has been made in some areas, there is a long road to cover. From the experience you have had so far with the movement, as well as with HSBC, what’s next?
Dave: What’s next is data. You can argue with everything except facts. So, once the facts start to show that this conversation is beginning to have an impact, we should be proportional in our expectations. I don’t expect 10,000 companies in India to look at this programme and say, “We need to change our diversity, hiring or inclusion policies.” But it is very difficult today to be running a reasonably sized business and not be having this conversation.
I cannot believe any board, executive committee, or top management team that doesn’t talk about this. I think the question is how to go about it. Should we have hard numbers? At HSBC’s board, 50% of the board is women. And that was not done consciously; it just so happened that 50% of the directors the bank was looking for were very brilliant women.
Similarly, our CFO is not just a woman, but possibly the senior-most Indian woman in the banking industry. And she is from India; she has not grown up abroad. So, we have many stories to tell.
But to answer your question, we need the real leaders, particularly women leaders, their insights, their stories, what it took them, whether it was a significant sacrifice, how they managed it. So, we need young girls and women in schools and colleges to be inspired. That would be next – where it moves from being an agenda to just being natural. It’s like product innovation or customer centricity.
When boards and executive management teams get to the point where they talk about diversity and inclusion in the same vein as customer focus or similar priorities, I think that would be a good strategy.
Q: Let’s talk about the public sector’s involvement as well. I want to understand from you, through your own journey and the arc that you’ve been able to make, what you believe has changed, but what do you believe needs to change from here on?
Shukla:
We talked about pay parity to begin the conversation about how to bring equality in the workplace for both men and women. In the public sector space, one thing is very clear: everybody gets the same pay and the same race. So, that settles one part of the issue, and it is an important issue.
In fact, I was reading Sheryl Sandberg, and it’s a big issue in terms of even negotiations, which women have to navigate in spaces to actually achieve and get what they truly deserve.
Going back to the point of where we are and what needs to be done: I think there are many disciplines where parity has already been achieved. If you look at medical sciences, the legal space, the financial space, and the IT space, there are good areas where we have equal representation at all levels.
But particularly in the engineering space, I think we need to attract a lot more talent. We need to plug leaky pipelines as women progress along their career journeys. Public sector organisations are putting in a lot of enablers in terms of policy. We’ve heard about the allocation of a percentage of the budget into women’s development through various programmes from different ministries, but to enable that, to put it into action, requires commitment at the leadership level, which is there.
I’ll give you some examples. There are companies in the public sector space that have all-male process plants, while now we have women in construction, which is not an easy space to be in. So, looking at all these aspects, creating conscious policies, continuously monitoring progress, and ensuring that we grow the percentage of women in leadership positions step by step, I think that would, in a holistic way, move the needle towards steering their careers into higher decision-making processes.
Q: India perhaps has some of the most progressive policies when we talk about women in the workforce, whether it’s maternity leave, maternity benefits, or gender budgeting, as was just discussed. So, capital is relatively less of a constraint today. Why do you believe then that we’re still at that 18% number as opposed to the aspirational 30% number that we’re hoping to get to by 2030?
Dhawan: I think a lot of it has to do with the mindset of our leadership. The data is very clear that 18% of the 12 million employees in the top 2,000 companies are women. So, it’s only 2 million women. I think we have to make a pledge that the top 2,000 will probably have 18 million employees by 2030, and if we can get to 30%, that’s 5.5 million women. That would be a dramatic change – almost 3x in terms of the number of women, and these are some of the best jobs. These are the largest companies in India.
I think that even though companies pay lip service to this, I don’t think they work hard enough on this issue. In every sector, we see outliers, but we don’t see companies making the effort to achieve what’s already been achieved by outliers in India. For example, in the banking sector, 26% of the workforce are women, but there are two banks in India that have already crossed 40%, while others are stuck at 10%. Our neighbouring Sri Lanka is at 45%, Vietnam is at 68%, and I think we can easily get to 40% as a sector if the leadership is committed to it and really wants to make it happen. There are often excuses about women working in branches or being on the front line, but there are banks that have shown it’s possible to make it happen.
Similarly, in the pharmaceutical sector, it’s only 11% women, but there are pharma companies at 25% and others at just 2%. Companies can actually speak to their peers; these champions at 25% are more than happy to share what they’ve done.
So, what we need is leadership to commit to concrete targets for 2030. For example, if Company X is at 25%, they could commit to reaching 35% or 40%, share this with the board, and have an action plan that’s disclosed publicly. I think that’s what will get us there eventually.
Q: There’s this talk about the tyranny of diversity and inclusion. Do you worry that we’re likely to see a pullback, a retreat from some of these issues that require urgent intervention and action?
Narasimhan: The minute you combine diversity and inclusion, I think the likelihood of a pullback is very, very low, because what that says is that we’re going to bring in people from different genders and make sure that they feel included in an organisation enough to be able to stay and progress. So, I’m really glad that you combined the two words together because the concern about setting targets is that it signals a willingness to compromise on meritocracy. And I don’t think there is any woman in this room or anywhere else who wants to suggest that there is a willingness to compromise on meritocracy.
I think the answer to the question is that, as you bring them in for interviews and discussions, the slate should be balanced, and then let the best person win the job. And if I may say to the women in this room and beyond, there are many jobs that we’ve traditionally thought are not ideal for women. And coming from an FMCG background, sales is one of them. Attracting women into sales is actually very, very difficult, because, all said and done, it is a tough job, but honestly, it is fantastic learning. And if you put yourself out there, the rewards it gives you are tremendous. So, if I could just urge the women in this room to take on these challenges and take some of these leaps, it would really help as well.
Q: You talked about the challenges of drawing women into sales, but not just drawing women into the workforce in different functions, but keeping them there. Give me the two or three practical things that have worked and the things that you believe we need to focus on?
Narasimhan: I think a couple of things that have worked are the obvious ones. One is to guarantee that you will have a job and a job of equal stature or better than the one you left when you went on maternity leave or take a break to have a child. The second is to aid with childcare, whether it’s a crèche or support for a crèche — those are the really obvious ones. But I think the one thing we perhaps need to think about as we do this is making parenting an equal opportunity.
Whenever we talk about parenting, we tend to focus on what the woman will do, how much leave she can take, and what she can do. And I know there are many men out there who would dearly love the same opportunity to be fathers to their children. Yet, maybe either the sanction isn’t there or the policies are not in place. We’ve tried to make a move. We’ve started three months of paternity leave, up from the two weeks, encouraging men to actually take time off when they have children. Because, after a while, you can certainly do pretty much everything that the mum could do, and maybe that will help as well. But I do think that’s an area where we could make even more progress than we’ve made so far.
Q: This is something that Mahindra and Mahindra has decided to prioritise. I know thar right at the leadership level, from Anish Shah to you, you are championing the idea of making the workforce much more diverse and inclusive. Explain to me, what you’ve done that’s working, are you setting targets for yourself for instance? What are you going about addressing by way of culture to ensure that this changes?
Jejurikar: Targets is something we’ve debated at every level, including at our board, and taken a very conscious call that we will not have targets. We actually consulted with many women leaders in the organisation, and every one of them felt that that’s the worst thing we can do, because no women wants to feel that they made it because there was a target or a quota. So, every woman wants to get there on merit.
It’s the role of the organisation to create enablers and facilitate the process. And that’s, I think, is the key leadership role.
When we talk about overall numbers as a nation, by way of contribution of women to the workforce, getting women in manufacturing, which is really the core of our business, is a very high priority, and that’s where we are putting most of our focus on. So, in manufacturing lines, we are creating, concept like paint shop will have only women. And some of the assembly lines, we’ve identified, sales will have 40%-50% women. The critical thing here, firstly, is reaching out to villages around the plant and creating a perception of it being a safe workplace, because that is very important in the society in which they live. The ability to transport them in and back – when women go back late at night, we have a system by which the HR gets a message that they’ve got dropped home safely. So, there are multiple things – cameras around the plant. So, creating a very positive word of mouth that it’s safe for women to be here, so that we think is a key enabler.
The other one is working closely with the training institutes like ITI and many others for skill building. So firstly, how do you create the desire? Then the education, and then, of course, the retention. So that’s at the entry level. As we go up the rest of the leadership hierarchy, I think the key challenge has been women dropping out of workplace, and which is where you spoke about the maternity policy. So, we’ve introduced a maternity policy a year back which gives a lot of flexibility to women, supports them with allowances during that period of time. But really what they need is the time flexibility, and we give almost a window of three years with complete flexibility on timing.
And the other program, we’ve launched, something we call Soar, we have just started it, which is to attract women back who’ve taken a gap in their work careers and then run a mentorship and training program to help them get back. So, we’re starting with 25 women who have had five years’ experience and taken a break of 18 months to three years, and then want to come back. So, I think we’ve got to address this at multiple levels, starting from the entry level. We often try to solve for this in industries at the leadership level, and I think that’s not the right place to start. The leadership has to focus on how to make it happen.
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