Women are breaking into core sectors, but how fast can their numbers rise?

For Sanyal, putting together a brand management team at Tata Steel has been one of the high points. Equally satisfying is how Tata Steel has more women leaders or just more women in the workforce—the number was 1,800 in 2015 and has grown to twice as much since. “When I moved to HR, I wanted to transform the workplace with a big focus on diversity,” she says. By then, the steel giant had already taken a few big steps like flexi working hours or menstrual leave. Since then, there has been a marked change in mindset about women working in the core sectors, which shows that change is well and truly underway.

Making a Mark

The increase in women’s representation across core sectors has been a slow but encouraging story. Data put out by the government shows there are more women in manufacturing in urban India (see graphic ‘Women on the Shop Floor’) than men. A visit to any of the large factories in the industrial parts of, say, Chennai, Vadodara, or Bengaluru makes this pretty obvious.

Shilpa Kabra Maheshwari, Executive Vice President and Country Head (People & Organisation) at Siemens India, which is focused on industry, infrastructure, digital transformation, transport and electrical power, believes that the rise in women’s representation across the core sectors has largely been on account of the influence of technology and the work done in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) segment. Initiatives like the Vigyan Jyoti scheme by the government’s Department of Science & Technology to address the issue of under-representation of women in STEM has helped.

“Plus, over the last few years, a lot of companies have consciously worked towards hiring women in core sectors. This has started from the university level and metrics are in place to measure hiring and retention of women,” she says.

Policies are now in place to provide flexible work programmes or to set up requisite infrastructure to enable a safe work environment—which includes maternity benefits and childcare. Speaking specifically for Siemens, Maheshwari says women head departments in areas such as treasury, electrification and automation solutions, digitisation and software business, factory and smart infrastructure, to name a few.

One interesting facet is how the change is taking place across levels and functions. Take the case of L&T, where the gender diversity rate—according to Koneru Bhavani, Executive Vice President & Head (Urban Transit Systems Business Group)—stands at 8.1% for FY24, up from 5.57% a decade ago. “Besides, 30% of our GETs/PGETs (graduate and post graduate engineer trainee) for the last fiscal were women,” she adds.

Bhavani herself joined the company in the early 1990s right out of engineering college and has been involved in big-ticket projects. “For women, the urge to be financially independent and the desire to be successful are the biggest motivators to give their best,” she says.

Her achievements include leading projects such as the Jammu-Udhampur rail link, Mumbai monorail, Hyderabad metro and the high-profile Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail corridor project (MAHSR). She says that each project has been unique, though the Mumbai monorail is what she calls the “most challenging job” ever. “It involves a lot of thinking outside the box and coming up with innovative construction methods to navigate the city’s urban landscape,” explains Bhavani.

The Hyderabad metro is the largest PPP (public-private partnership) project in the world, with the design being done by the company in-house. That experience has clearly stood her in good stead. That said, a lot of interest remains for the MAHSR. “The speed of construction for this has been unheard of in India. It has redefined the way large-scale projects are executed by establishing a unique supplier ecosystem,” she says.

It’s Time For Change

It is interesting to examine why in the past, there were fewer women in the core sectors. A peek into the past throws up a world where manufacturing was male dominated ostensibly because of the physical effort involved. That has changed quite dramatically for many reasons, but nothing has possibly had as much of an impact as the emergence of digitalisation and automation on the shop floors.

Raman Kumar Singh, CHRO at ABB India, a tech leader in electrification and automation, says his company has more than doubled the proportion of women in the workforce over the past four years, from 9% to 20%. He emphasises on the role of technology, with the impact reflecting in an environment that is gender neutral.

“Automation has significantly reduced the need for manual labour or the strenuous tasks on the shop floor. Robots, conveyor systems and automated machines now handle much of the heavy lifting, making factory work more about operating, monitoring and maintaining technology,” he says.

Processes that are digitally controlled allow for remote management. “That leads to more flexibility in job roles and breaking barriers that might have discouraged women from taking up jobs on the shop floor,” he adds.

Companies, too, are being more strategic about their recruitment process. Tata Steel’s Sanyal says that the “catch them young” approach—which essentially means identifying students in the second or third year of college—is one way of doing it.

For that matter, around 35% of her company’s recruits from the IITs and IIMs are women. “While this is not always a conscious attempt, if there are two good candidates, we go for the woman,” Sanyal says.

Again, technology’s role in having, say, a digital blast furnace has helped to manufacture steel in a less hazardous environment. “We are barely at the tip of the iceberg and automation will be a bigger enabler to increase the proportion of women in an industry like ours,” adds Sanyal.

The Indian Way

The approach for multinational companies is also determined by what the parent does globally. For Siemens, the gender equity programme unveiled globally in 2021 focussed on women’s representation at all levels and to also create a strong foundation of leaders. In India, too, the aim is to increase diversity in hiring. Maheshwari says they are “actively encouraged” to break any bias and reimagine, rethink, and realign stereotypes.

At carmaker Mercedes-Benz India, every second hire is a woman, says MD & CEO Santosh Iyer. “We have doubled the number of women in the past decade. The commitment made by Mercedes-Benz is to have 30% women in senior management positions worldwide by 2030. It’s a strategic move towards realising the full potential of our diverse workforce,” he says.

Again, the job description varies across organisations. Iyer says the women in his company handle complex functions on the shop floor with a TAKT time (a manufacturing term that describes the rate at which a product is made to meet customer demand) of 15+ minutes, which includes the assembly process, updating reports, and analysing efficacies.

“Our manufacturing women workforce get global exposure since they support the CKD (completely knocked down) network across six plants in Asia. They manage all end-to-end vendor and supplier relations from negotiation to implementation and ensure cost optimisation,” says Iyer. Among the top positions at Mercedes-Benz India occupied by women are the CFO, CIO and head of data analytics.

Tata Steel’s Sanyal speaks of research done in mines out of South Africa and Australia where women operate heavy equipment leading to an increase in productivity. “It is perhaps right to say that women inherently have a better eye for detail and better time management since they need to deal with issues at home as well,” she says.

ABB’s Singh highlights how his company has an all-women team at the forefront of its remote monitoring centre, or a production line run completely by women. “The IoT implementation in our smart power factory is managed by a woman leader and her team,” he says.

Iyer points to the competitive landscape, where diverse leadership is recognised as a business imperative. “Those that champion it are more likely to attract and retain top talent, build a culture of innovation, and most likely outperform its competitors,” he says. In 2006, Mercedes-Benz globally set itself a target of increasing the share of women in senior management positions to 20% by 2020. That share stands at 26% today. Quite obviously, a lot has changed but this journey has barely started.

Technology will continue to be that pivot enabling greater participation of women in the core sectors. And with the increasing use of technology in these sectors, one can expect the number of women to keep rising.

@krishnagopalan