Gender diversity in the workplace: Taking stock and working ahead

An increasing number of Indian companies are starting initiatives targeted towards inclusion at workplace, but experts believe it’s also time to take stock of the outcomes of such programmes that have already been run.

“Impact bias training, mentoring programmes for women, training programmes for women, work-family accommodation…none of these interventions have created meaningful, sustained change,” said Robin Ely, Diane Doerge Wilson professor of business administration, Harvard Business School, at a conference in Mumbai. She says that understanding what works and what doesn’t can help design better initiatives for the future.

Earlier this month, when the Supreme Court scrapped Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to make gay sex legal, many big businesses and start-ups reiterated their efforts to build an inclusive, gender-diverse workplace. But, experts believe, for the success of diversity-focussed programmes, the human resources (HR) department and the senior leadership of companies need to work together.

“Work in organisations needs to start with leadership development. Educate the leaders of organisations to understand what is it really to change a culture and how is it that they need to personally change in the process,” Ely says.

A 2017 whitepaper titled ‘Reimagining leadership: Steering India's workforce in 2030' by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) identified management of multidimensional diversity as one of the top six critical capabilities that will differentiate successful leaders in India’s world of work in 2030.

Multidimensional diversity, the paper said, refers to a workforce comprising of multiple generations, cultures, employment models - part-time with multiple employment contracts, and full-time, and compositions - machines, bots, artificial intelligence and humans.

At this point, India still lags when it comes to diversity in the workplace. According to the United Nations, women in India represent 29 percent of the labour force, down from 35 percent in 2004, and they are not well represented in most sectors, including business. Although, there are some companies that are pioneering inclusion programs to add and retain female employees.

One of the largest business process outsourcing firms in the country, Genpact did something innovative to retain women employees who went on maternity leaves. Most of them did not join back due to issues with shift timings. The company helped employees going on maternity leave identify the role they would come back to and assured a shift time and location of their choice to ensure that they join back.

“We need to build mechanisms for preventing the 50% workforce which are women to become the 20% in the leadership,” said Piyush Mehta, chief human resources officer at Genpact.

While these programs can be effective, organisations agree that more needs to be done.

“When you look at what we have achieved and how we have done it, we can look back with a good amount of satisfaction but it is still a journey,” acknowledged Sanjiv Mehta, chairman and managing director, FMCG firm Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), adding, “change has to start from me, at the top.”

Talking about HUL, Mehta says, “If I were to put a spectrum, something from a fundamental to intuitive to inclusive to making it a strategic advantage, we would be somewhere between strategic and inclusive.”

Also, since women form a large part of the consumer base, companies need to do everything to ensure that they hire, retain and empower women at workplace to get their advise in the strategic decisions for brand building.