By Smarinita Shetty
The Indian corporate sector is a bleak space for women to be in.
• Women’s strength in the corporate labour force stands at 28 percent at the junior level, 14.91 at the middle level and 9.32 percent at the senior level.
• India also has the highest rate of women dropping out of the workforce and earlier in their careers – 48 percent of women drop out between the junior and middle levels.
• Only five percent of working women in India make it to senior leadership positions in the corporate sector, compared to the global average of 20 percent.
None of this is news, though. We have been belabouring the point of gender inequality and inadequate representation of women in the corporate sector for a while now. What we haven’t been speaking about is solutions – ones that will fundamentally change the narrative.
Having women in leadership requires change in the way business is done. Change is costly though, and entails a great deal of hard work. It means hiring enough women in the first place at all levels, and then creating an environment that is fair and equitable in terms of quality of work, mentoring, pathways to leadership and employee-friendly workplaces.
Why would the CEO, senior management, the Board or shareholders encourage this? What’s in it for them? Why make the effort when business as usual seems to be working really well for everyone concerned – especially when one’s definition of “everyone” basically means men.
The business case for diversity and women in leadership is never going to be enough for men to willingly give up their positions of power and influence. Change will therefore never come from within the system. It will have to be forced from outside. It requires external pressures, government policy and activism to make change happen. And who better than civil society to seed and nurture this change?
But what if civil society won’t do this either? With corporates it’s simple. If there’s no business imperative, they see no reason to be inclusive and diverse. The bar is fairly low. But in the social sector the standards ought to be higher. When it comes to non-profits, inclusion, diversity, human rights, moral standards are not nice-to-haves. They are must-haves. Without these, we shouldn’t exist.
So when the social sector does poorly on gender equality, it’s time to sit up, pay attention and change.
In a survey done on gender in the non-profit sector – the first ever in India, Dasra, a non-profit based in Mumbai, elicited responses from 328 civil society organisations across sectors including education, health, governance, human rights, environment – and the picture was dismal.
Everyone seems to start off equal: when the organisations are small, there is a near equal ratio of men-led and women-led non-profits. This is remarkably different from the business world where there are few or no women leaders across all sizes of organisations: less than two per cent of Bombay Stock Exchange 500 companies have female CEOs and only 10 percent of SMEs in India are women-owned.
However, instead of the corporate sector learning from civil society, we are adopting their worst practices: as the size of a non-profit grows, the men edge out the women. For the largest non-profits, the proportion of women-led organisations is HALF that of men-led organisations.
So what happens here that causes this imbalance? Do the traditional roadblocks of access to capital, old boys’ network and gender biases come into play as the stakes get higher? We don’t know the answers yet, but it would be a shame to allow traditional prejudices and practices to influence civil society instead of the other way round.
This keeping up with the corporate Jones’ and the race to the bottom – to reduced numbers of women – starts at the management level.
While a slight majority of the non-profits reported a greater number of women on their overall staff, this ratio drastically changed when looking at management and leadership roles – two-thirds of organisations report an under-representation of women when it comes to positions that are managerial and above.
And this trend is more pronounced for the largest organisations surveyed.
This trend seems familiar to observers of diversity in the corporate world: Data from 20 global markets shows that while women comprise nearly 60 percent of employees in the financial services industry, only 19 percent progress through the leadership ranks to senior level roles.
Having women at the top can change the gender dynamics across the organisation
Of all the organisations surveyed, women-led organisations were around 10 times as likely as the average to have a higher representation of women in Board positions.
Women-led organisations were five times as likely as the average to have a higher representation of women in managerial positions.
The presence of women on boards and in senior management is critical: In the world of business, according to a study by Catalyst, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least, by 53 percent. A study by Randstad further backs this up; it found that the board of a private sector company, run by a professional CEO with a mix of both men and women, helped Return on Equity (ROE) rise by 4.4 percent in 2014. In contrast, a similar company with a men-only board saw its ROE rise by a mere 1.8 percent in the same period.
And it’s not just within the organisations, it’s in the work that’s being done on the ground as well. Women led organisations were 1.5 times as likely as men-led non-profits to have over 50 percent of their target group being girls and women
In a country where the default status is men-first or even men-only, this focus on women is critical since for development programmes to be truly effective, it needs to include a group that not only comprises half the country’s population but also operates from a society-enforced position of disadvantage.
So why is this still an issue up for debate?
There is a clear link between women at the top and impact on the ground. Or at least the focus on impact on the ground.
We found that women-led oranisations were 5 times more likely than men-led ones to link gender sensitivity in their organisations to increased impact on the ground.
We might not have evidence in the development sector as yet that says women in leadership positions are able to create greater impact. But if there have been studies that have demonstrated that having women on corporate boards improves ROE and ROI, then, by extension, having women leaders in the social sector should translate into higher impact.
It’s really simple, then: If we want to move Indians out of poverty faster, we need more women in leadership positions in civil society and a greater emphasis on programming for girls and women. What is our excuse for not doing this?
Smarinita Shetty leads the Dasra Girl Alliance and Communications teams at Dasra, a philanthropy foundation.