Love them or hate them, but you can’t ignore them. Women are storming boardrooms — traditional male-bastions — with increasing force and they are here to stay.
They are not afraid of taking up aggressive roles and are fighting for space on equal grounds.
“Today women are taking roles that they earlier wouldn’t want to take. For example, roles in sales and marketing that involve a lot of travel and staying out of town. Women are comfortable with all kinds of roles, and these areas are becoming gender neutral,” said V.K. Menon, Senior Director (Admissions, Financial Aid and Career Advancement Studies), Indian School of Business (ISB).
An increasing number of women are joining B-schools, which reflects the needs of the industry. Menon said that the number of women in ISB used to range between 15 and18 per cent five years back. This has now risen to 30 per cent.
“What happens in an MBA sequence is that it is all about the demand and supply equation and what’s happening at the recruiter side is that more companies want to build in gender diversity into the workforce,” Menon said.
He added that a number of companies have specific targets of gender diversity and that a number of corporate houses want to hire women as it provides different perspectives for problem solving.
“There was a time when there were no women in some of the B-schools or there were very few. One of the reasons for this new trend is that women are proving themselves. It is not that you have to create a place for them anymore or give them some reservation,” said Pritam Singh, Director General and Professor, International Management Institute.
Corporate houses, too, are realising the importance of having women in their boardrooms.
“We shouldn’t make a virtue out of necessity. In India the demand-supply gap for talent is so vast that whether you like it or not to succeed you need to have a mixed workforce. You are not going to find talent if you say ‘I only want males’,” said R. Sankar, Executive Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
However, Sankar added that though the country would find a larger number of women running the workforce, companies are facing a problem in retaining female talent.
“A large number of women join the workforce, but not many continue beyond a certain point? They go away, get married, have family responsibilities and so on. Companies are seriously looking at what they can do to stem the outflow of women. It is in their own interest. They can’t just allow good talent to go away,” he said.
So, has the glass ceiling been shattered? Not quite, said Singh, but it is definitely shrinking and shrinking fast. He added that today women, who wish to become senior managers, have strong role models such as ICICI Bank’s head Chanda Kochhar and HSBC Bank’s leader Naina Lal Kidwai.