Indian corporates feel the women power wave
Last year, my boss and I interviewed Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox Corp. She was the chief guest at Business Today's 'Most Powerful Women (MPW) in Indian Business' event and had flown in from Connecticut, US. Interviewing Burns was as much a pleasure as thought-provoking.
When she noted a flip-cam was video-recording the interview, she raised her eyebrows in mock horror. I offered to video-record a few questions at the end of the interview as some CEOs, who are less self-assured than brand conscious, ask for. She chuckled. "Nothing I say is off the record," she said. True to promise, Burns was truthful and quick to crack jokes, including some on herself. She didn't duck questions or hold back punches. The first African American woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, her answers were cerebral and came from hard knocks of experience. One of the points she made was what she called a "tidal wave" of a female talent coming to the global workforce.
The logic to her engineer brain was simple: it's probability at work. With more girls getting into colleges in the US, the increase in the number of women in offices, factories and labs is but a corollary. "It is inevitable that this very inflexible, very male-dominated global work structure cannot stay the way it is unless we're willing to live with problems for a lot longer than we can afford to," she put it elegantly. Some traits that will stand out in teams of the future, she said, are compassion, ability to listen, empathy, and flexibility. "...women were trained in these things, they are becoming more of an advantage. So we have to actually figure out a way to not leave all the boys behind." If you've been following the rise of demand for single-gender education in the West, you'll know how study after study over a decade has shown that boys lag behind girls in schools and colleges. Richard Whitmore, author of Why Boys Fail, posits that one of the main reasons for this is the rising aspirations of girls in high schools.
The context for Burns and Whitmore is the US, but much of what they say is true in pockets of India, especially in our cities. I haven't come across a similar survey or study in India, but anecdotal evidence of a "tidal wave" can be seen right from Class X board exam results. Talk to CEOs in India from banking and financial services, media and entertainment, or software and BPO sectors, and they will confirm how one-third to half of job recruits at the entry level are women - a significant rise over the last decade or two. In functions like HR or marketing, the number of girls is even higher.
On shopfloors too, you see more women than before. More women in the workforce, obviously, works very well for employers and they are not being politically correct in saying so. It is a narrow way to look at women's roles in society, but it is this economic reality that we are celebrating this issue. We have been running our MPW listing for a decade now and this 11th year, we decided to produce what in our business we call a collector's issue - our first cover-to-cover women's issue. We have a rich collection of stories pulled together by Assistant Editor Sarika Malhotra, who took to her issue editor role with gusto as early as April. Apart from the rich MPW profiles, I'd recommend you read five stories if you are short of time: women chairing boards in India, the rush of women relatives on boards after the new Companies Act, husband 'mukhiyapatis' running panchayats, how the Bharatiya Mahila Bank has got off the blocks, and a provocative take on how the role of women in Bollywood has regressed.
Do tell us how you like the issue at letters.bt@intoday.com, @BT_India (#BTPowerWomen), and facebook.com/BusinessToday.
