Women at Workplace – Right Representation is a Necessity!

As the Companies Act, 2013, makes it mandatory to have at least one woman on the board, in India, there has been an increase in representation of women on the board. But are they translating into leadership positions? Most of them aren’t. Just for the sake of sticking to the regulations in India, we now have more female directors than ever. To actually get the real benefits of diversity at the workplace, their presence must be made important.

Being a woman, a parent, and a single mother, I can talk about this at length. Though I have been fortunate enough to have got understanding bosses, a great team to work with, any of this didn’t come easily. I did face many challenges while climbing up the corporate ladder. Now that I have reached a comfortable enough position to talk about why we need more women in the workforce; what is that we are doing wrong, and what is it that we have to do to make sure we can have a diverse workplace – here are few thoughts around it.

It is getting harder and harder for women to go higher because of how lonely it is there at the top. In most cases, they’ll be the only woman on the board, or the representation would be so low that their voice isn’t taken into consideration as strongly as they would have taken from a male counterpart.

Society plays a major role in restricting women from reaching higher positions. Being majorly a patriarchal society, most people, even in the families that run huge companies, end up raising sons as the successors and daughters as someone belonging to the home. This resonates with the way the corporates work in India too. Subconsciously, women are kept aside as we are consistently made to think that they don’t stay long with a company because of how they may have to leave the workplace due to responsibilities of either raising a child or taking care of the family. Though many women, including myself, have raised children, taken care of the family, and have risen in our careers, we still haven’t been able to break that age-old thought process.

Male leaders who are decisive are applauded, but women leaders with the same quality are seen as arrogant. These kinds of issues make it much harder for women to break the glass ceiling and enter top-level management.

Research says that 85% of the consumers are women making a considerable representation of women in the higher positions, a logical move. They bring in perspectives that are quite new and unique when compared to an all-men group. Research also shows that companies having a considerable amount of women representation, not only, just for the sake of compliance with regulations but also because it is in their culture, have grown and finically performed well when compared to their counterparts having an all men leadership group.

Not only financially but also if you consider non-financial indicators, these companies have performed better as they have shown more inclusiveness, compassion, and created safer workplaces for everyone by providing power to communicate and flexibility at work.

So, how do you include more women in the workforce? You start by accepting that it is a necessity. Though in India, 23% of large companies have at least three women on their board, 20% of those female directors are on multiple boards. This talks a lot about how we are just looking to have women on board, just for the sake of regulations. If we really want to have more women in the leadership positions, we must look outside of that 20% and try to commit to replacing an outgoing male board member with a female board member.

This can also be achieved by increasing the size of the board and offering more seats on the board to women. That isn’t enough though. We must recruit women to leadership positions, give them a voice on the board. This is the only way to actually make use of the diversity that exists.

We must also educate male counterparts about the gender disparity that exists in the industry and the need for more women in the workforce. Creating a culture where everyone not only understands the need for diversity but also wholeheartedly accepts that it is the way to go is required. All of this starts by hiring the right kind of people. Companies should train hiring professions to ask tougher questions, questions that lead to understanding whether the individuals are in line with the culture the company is planning to create. Sustaining that culture within the organization is also important. This can be done by increasing transparency and giving access to everyone to come out and speak. We also must make sure, we are giving freedom to the team members to have a dialogue among themselves around these topics.

By understanding and offering flexibility to women at work, you are gaining their confidence. It can be achieved by offering paid menstrual leave, or by offering work-from-home opportunities whenever necessary.

It is just not the leaders sitting at the top that needs to think about creating a more inclusive workplace, but each individual, no matter at what position they are working, need to make conscious efforts in realizing the importance of diversity at workplace and what it can do to their own career in terms of the learning and the growth they’ll have as an individual.

We have come a long way. From not even considering any of these as issues and not discussing them to reaching a point where we can freely raise a voice for everyone, we indeed came a long way. But we still have a long journey to cover. A day where we don’t see any gender disparity in the leadership positions at the top, a day where we would be able to confidently say women can climb up the ladder without any biases towards them is the day we have truly achieved something as a society.

For such brighter days ahead!

Meena Chabbria.