A discussion from our Warp & Weft group on Linkedin

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A long way to go for the Indian woman to shatter the glass ceiling in the corporate world re-iterates the recent article in the Times of India. Extensive surveys and research in the report indicate that the percentage of women in corporate boards or executive boards is a mere six percent. This is at least ten times lower than the percentage found in our global counterparts.

This survey raises very vital questions some of them being:
1.       Is having a handful of women at the top like Chanda Kocchar (Head of ICICI Bank), Vinita Bali (CEO of Britannia) and a few others, enough to represent the power of Indian women.
2.       What happens to the several women graduates who pass out each year?

The Mc. Kinsey survey reports that at least 45% of Indian women leave the workforce each year citing needs of wanting a better work life balance or quoting family problems. Many women succumb to the pressure of juggling the priorities of work and family and tend to quit their jobs or stick to entry level or mid-managerial roles. The survey put out these facts and numbers painting a very bleak picture for Indian women in the corporate sector. Makes one wonder if the Indian woman is being punished for nurturing or taking the role of primary role giver in the family too seriously. These facts also reflect poorly on the dynamics of the society. Questions that arise from this survey are worth a thought and will make a lot of difference to our approach to a mutually inclusive society at the workplace

1.       Is this imbalance in numbers a good example for our little girls? Are we depriving them of role models? Are we teaching them that it is a norm to give up their career or ambitions of being gainfully occupied to bring up a family?

2.       Why is care-giving or looking after a family so gender specific? Why is society imposing such biased stereotypes? How do we change the cultural influence and the traditional mindset?

3.       How can we empower women to stay on in the corporate world and excel in their chosen profession? How do we feed the corporate pipeline with more women leaders who are happy individuals with happy families?

Join our discussion group, Warp & Weft: Threads of Diversity & Inclusion in India on Linkedin and share your thoughts.

Interweave in news: Knowledge @ Wharton

A Bullish Outlook for India’s Female Entrepreneurs

Nirmala Menon, founder and CEO of Interweave Consulting, a Bangalore-based firm that focuses on diversity management and inclusiveness in the workplace, points out that there is a lot of visibility and acknowledgement of women entrepreneurs as reliable partners and vendors. “Some organizations are encouraging them as part of their corporate supplier diversity programs. This is spurring other women to enter the space as well.”

Menon adds that Indian women inherently have an important entrepreneurial trait — resilience. “Women in India have had to traditionally manage with limited resources and that native intelligence helps them manage creatively with frugal resources available,” she notes. “They reuse, save, negotiate, find alternatives — all of which contributes to their success as an entrepreneur.”

But what are some of the challenges that they face?

Menon suggests that women find it more cumbersome than men to navigate the regulatory and procedural complexities. She attributes this to “a fairly complex process managed mostly by men.” Menon adds that while women entrepreneurs have domain expertise, they often lack profit and loss experience and by consequence could struggle with the “business-side” of an enterprise. However, the biggest challenge for women entrepreneurs in India, she says, is coping with societal expectations. “These are changing, but still have some way to go.”

Read full article at http://knowledgetoday.wharton.upenn.edu/2012/06/a-bullish-outlook-for-indias-female-entrepreneurs/



Interweave in the news: Desi Cos Help Women at Work

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Legal/Moral?

“A pregnant employee who was fired from her retail job after giving her supervisors a doctor’s note requesting she be allowed to refrain from heavy lifting and climbing ladders during the month and a half before her maternity leave: That’s what happened to Patricia Leahy. In 2008 a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that her firing was fair because her employers were not obligated to accommodate her needs……... It happens every day to pregnant women in the United States, and it happens thanks to a gap between discrimination laws and disability laws. 

Federal and state laws ban discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. And amendments to the Americans With Disabilities Act require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled employees (including most employees with medical complications arising from pregnancies) who need them to do their jobs. But because pregnancy itself is not considered a disability, employers are not obligated to accommodate most pregnant workers in any way.” – Deccan Herald, 2 Feb 2012. 

Where do we draw the line between what’s legal and what’s right? If an employer is not held legally accountable for firing a woman who was pretty much fired for being pregnant, do you think that would affect the company? Is there a solution to this sort of thinking by the employer?

Why Are Indian Women So Stressed Out? Interweave in an 'Knowledge @ Wharton' article

Women in urban India have easy access to domestic help: A full-time maid, cook or driver are not uncommon in their households. Of course, these are luxuries that most working women in the rest of the world can only dream about.

But a recent survey by global research firm Nielsen illuminates another picture. Covering 6,500 women across 21 developed and developing countries, the study’s results show that women in India are the most stressed out. Of the respondents in India, 87% said they felt stressed most of the time. They are followed by women in Mexico (74%), Russia (69%), Spain (66%), France (65%) and Italy (64%). In the U.S., the number is at 53%.

What exactly is weighing on women in one of the fastest growing economies in the world? The Nielsen survey’s respondents point to the requirement of managing multiple roles.

One could well argue that this particular condition exists for women across the globe: Juggling roles at home and work are a given. There is a difference in India, however, says Nirmala Menon, founder and CEO of Interweave Consulting, a Bangalore-based firm that focuses on diversity management and inclusiveness in the workplace. Menon notes that even as career opportunities for women in India are on the upswing, the support structure and social mores have not kept pace. “Nor has the internal psyche of the Indian woman,” adds Menon. “Despite ‘modern’ times, traditional expectations of women are still conveyed in subtle but consistent ways. The Indian woman has far more familial interfaces to manage than her western counterpart.”

According to Hema Ravichandar, human resources advisor and formerly the global head of HR at IT firm Infosys: “Regressive mindsets in society and the workplace; a culture that rewards performance based on effort — with the number of hours spent [working] as proxy indicator — rather than result; rigid work policies which do not factor in the need to spend extra time at home during critical phases like childbirth, adoption, etc., are unique to India.”

There are other reasons, too. Technical infrastructure support and enablers are at a nascent stage in the country as compared to the developed economies. Options like working from home, flex-time, telecommuting and so on have arrived only in the recent past in new industries and are still evolving. “Even in companies which have these facilities, it is not construed as the right thing to do if you are serious about going up the corporate ladder,” says Ravichandar.

A lack of women in executive roles mirrors this. A report by Standard Chartered Bank points out that women constitute only 5.3% of the total number of board members in the top 100 Indian companies by market capitalization on the Bombay Stock Exchange. This is much lower than in other countries, including Australia (8.3%), Hong Kong (8.9%), the U.K. (12.2%), the U.S. (14.5%) and Canada (15.0%). The number of Indian women in middle and senior management roles is not much higher.

Meanwhile, the latest employment data show that worker participation (the ratio of workers to population) fell to 39.2% in 2009-2010 from 42% in 2004-2005. While the decline is marginal for men — from 55.9% to 55% — it is significant in the case of women — from 29.4% to 23.3%. Analysts say that one reason for this is that as men in the family start earning more, women, especially in the lower middle class, opt out of the work force for reasons of social status. In his column in the daily newspaper Times of India, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyer noted: “Social mores, especially in the lower middle class, give superior social status to households where women don’t work. When a family with rising income decides to keep females at home, it literally buys social status with the income foregone.”

But the survey’s implications go beyond individuals or families. All of this has wide ramifications for India’s continued economic growth. If the support structure and attitudes towards women, both in the workplace and in society at large, don’t change, women will either simply opt out of the workforce or — faced with endless stress — be far less productive than their true potential. This will result in a sharp blow to the country’s demographic dividend, which though touted as a key factor in India’s growth, is under its own stress. The window for growth is small and, as Ravichandar points out: “Having women as part of your workforce is no longer a nice-to-do but a must-do.”


Source: http://knowledgetoday.wharton.upenn.edu/2011/07/why-are-indian-women-so-stressed-out/

She is worth the wait!

Women form a significant part of the workforce today, bringing into focus the need to manage unique issues such as pregnancy and post-maternity, a business priority. 

Issues facing the post-maternity women workforce need to be addressed because when inadvertent discrimination occurs, not only do companies lose out on trained and existing talent, but they also face the costs of replacing staff and hampering a productive work environment.

A recent report by NASSCOM estimated that companies can generate a return of around 8 per cent by adopting family friendly policies. As talent becomes scarce across all levels in the organisation—women power if leveraged, can bring significant benefits to all stakeholders.

At Interweave, we recommend that organisations:

• Addressing the needs of the post-maternity employee, begin by acknowledging her contribution and empathising with her new roles.
• Formulate comprehensive maternity policies as well as build support systems to help her stay connected with the organisation during the period of maternity. Women should be allowed to return to work when they are ready and when adequate child-care arrangements are in place.
• Formulate empathetic and inclusive policies such as gradual transition into workload, staggered working hours, working from home, and child care to help your employees work and perform better.
• Enable the women to have their work life balance by providing the appropriate support systems and permit women to have flexible schedules that will help them remain productive.
• Create a clear productivity measurement model, amenable for women to work from outside the office. Women friendly policies have to be deployed in a fair and transparent way, resulting in neither misuse nor discrimination. 
• Companies can invest in technology infrastructure so that women can work from home or from satellite offices when needed, operate on flexible work schedules especially during the pre- and post-natal periods. 
• Remember to check frequently to re-assess the employee’s readiness and work satisfaction levels. Employees who feel supported through personal milestones are likely to be more productive and efficient.

At Interweave, we take pride in assisting organisations to invest more time and resources in helping women employees develop, participate, and contribute fairly and equitably. We recently helped a large global MNC launch a series of handbooks for their managers and employees to understand and work with maternity better. The request for this had specifically been generated when Business Units internally noticed that managers needed support to work around expecting mothers. Companies that take efforts to develop and retain competent women benefit immensely, not just through home-groomed talent but by being able to attract fresh talent as well. 

Not only does an inclusive work environment spell wonder for your company’s branding (yes, go ahead and ask the happiest women employees you see and you’ll see that their workplace boasts of rich women-oriented policies) but research has indicated that diverse and inclusive organisations show characteristics of improved problem solving, creativity and innovation.

Working Moms!

Becoming a mother means changes in various aspects of a woman's life - from physical to emotional to her work life. How does a woman, coping with these various changes, make a smooth and professional transition back to work?  DNA covered Nirmala Menon of Interweave on her take at managing motherhood at work. Click on the image below to read through the article.

Interweave has been working in this area creating solutions for managers and women employees to manage maternity at work efficiently.

We would love to hear your ideas and suggestions that could help working mothers everywhere.