Corporate India should get its act together and implement the law in letter and spirit, says Anu Parthasarathy There is an ecosystem geared towards negative selection that excludes women. The job criteria are fashioned out in such a way that only men will make it to the shortlist,” said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director of Bangalore-based Biocon, India’s largest biotech firm. I would venture to add that the Indian corporate sector has fashioned not only job criteria but also the everyday work environment to favour men. This is why we find that, while women form a healthy 50 per cent of the graduating class, their representation in the workforce keeps dropping as we go up the ranks. According to Gender Diversity Benchmark 2011, India has the lowest national female labour force, and the worst leaking pipeline for women is in junior-to-middle level positions.

Interestingly, we also have proof that wherever a conducive work environment was provided, women have risen to the top and proven themselves. Take the banking sector, for instance. ICICI Bank (Chanda Kochhar ) and Axis Bank (Shikha Sharma), among the largest in the private sector, are led by women. A clutch of foreign bank subsidiaries, like J.P. Morgan (Kalpana Morparia) and Morgan Stanley (Aisha De Sequeira), have women at the top. SBI, India’s largest public sector bank, has a woman CEO, Arundhati Bhattacharya, and so do smaller ones like Bank of India (Vijayalakshmi R. Iyer).

This is even more surprising as this is an India-specific phenomenon — women are few and far between in the executive ranks of global banks, and certainly none occupying the corner office. Among the 10 biggest banks by assets in the US, not one has a woman CEO!

How did we in India buck the trend only in banking? To a great extent, credit for this needs to go to one institution — ICICI, and its forward thinking chairmen: Suresh Nadkarni, Narayanan Vaghul and K.V. Kamath. Women form 30 per cent of the workforce entering ICICI. The company has nurtured, mentored and handheld its woman executives such as Kochhar, Morparia, Sharma, Renuka Ramnath, and many more, who all then went on to become globally acknowledged leaders.

Kochhar has talked about how when she was head of Infrastructure Financing at ICICI, had an infant son and was struggling with work-life balance, K.V. Kamath let her take a six-month break from her job! Morparia, a law graduate who was very comfortably perched in the legal team of ICICI, was encouraged by Kamath to take up a core banking role in Treasury, and the rest, as they say, is history! Believe it or not, ICICI has produced seven of the top 14 women finance professionals in the country!

If one organisation with a welcoming work culture for women could produce such a stupendous result, then just imagine where Indian women would be when every public company starts moving in this direction! This is exactly what the Indian government is trying to achieve with its new law requiring public companies to have at least one woman on the board. Any woman on the board, whether she is there because of her professional track record, or because of her proximity to the owners, will still see things from the women’s point of view. She will weigh in when the company grapples with issues affecting women — like maternity benefits, work-from-home flexibility, safety, sexual harassment, etc. The more competent ones will go further, and want the company to take affirmative action to promote and retain women. Given that the stakes are so high, it is imperative that Corporate India gets its act together and implements the law in letter and spirit, sooner rather than later. If done well, the exercise could unearth many successful women who may not necessarily have stuck to the corporate ladder, and therefore may not be on the usual suspect list. What is critical is that industry associations such as the Ficci, Nasscom, CII, etc., should come forward to actively help identify, encourage and empanel competent professional women as Board candidates.

From my experience in dealing with leadership talent in India, I am certain that the issue is not one of paucity of women leaders. What is required is a concerted effort by industry to find and encourage women to come on board. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 18-05-2015)