The nobility of women: Indian workplaces could do with more of it

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

From the inadequacy of India’s responses to the widespread effects of climate change to our shockingly poor standing of 103 on the just released Global Hunger Index, ours can be one depressing country. The astonishing courage of several young women who have stepped forward over the past few weeks has offered a break from this narrative. Tushita Patel’s detailed allegations of molestation were so vivid that the “taste of stale tea breath” of an unwanted kiss almost vaporized off my handphone.  

Yet, it is curious there are so few reports of harassment in corporate India. That we have heard of so much of it in journalism and in Bollywood is surely in part because these professions have plenty of women articulate enough to make bullies cower. An ex colleague who happens to be the Asia Pacific head of a company was likely mistaken for a secretary and had her bottom grabbed in a busy lift of the bluest of blue chips in Mumbai a few years ago. She protested, but the men around her acted as if she was behaving erratically.

At many levels, the battle for justice on women’s rights is only just beginning. Arguably, the primary reason India cannot follow the East Asian growth model that powered Korea, China and Taiwan to economic success is the status of women in this country.  Reflect on just a few  recent headlines  from this paper:

Item: “The prevalence of (male) vasectomies in India declined from 3.5 per cent in 1992-93 to 0.3 per cent in 2015-16, even though male sterilisation is simpler.”  Consider the implications of this: because of daft notions about how sterilization undermines one’s virility, men have outsourced contraception to women other than when they use condoms.

Item: This month, Mahesh Vyas of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy convincingly defended the data that suggests that the participation of women in the workforce in India has dropped as low as 11 percent, putting us at the bottom of the global pile.

Item: This week, two women could not make their way to the shrine after protests against the Supreme Court decision to allow women of menstruating age into the Ayyappa shrine at Sabarimala in a state with the highest literacy in India.

I returned to India after a quarter of a century overseas in 2013 to find that on women’s rights, things were worse than I remembered.  It came as a shock that three strong women friends were victims of pretty full-on and persistent sexual harassment in the workplace.

The loss from women’s second-class status in this country is a national tragedy and not just in terms of a lower GDP per capita. Overlooked in so much discussion of women in the workplace is that they have just the right set of skills for workplaces in the 21st century. Masculine authority works perhaps in the command and control regimes of authoritarian states and even factories. But, in the information economy where motivating people must be done more by persuasion than by hierarchical authority, women shine.

 

I owe my career largely to mentoring women bosses. The first chief of reporters I worked for not only overlooked that I was half an hour late for my interview because a metro train got stuck between stations, but made a joke about the city’s infrastructure. She had likely noticed that I was out of breath and a nervous wreck. At the same magazine, its most celebrated writer might have made chief executives nervous with her penetrating questions, but encouraged us as cub reporters never to be afraid of telling an interviewee, “I don’t understand. Please explain that again.”

 Less than a year into my first managerial job in 2004, my mother suffered a serious stroke that led to her death several months later. My then boss told me I could commission articles and edit just as easily from home. She insisted I work for weeks together from Bengaluru -- even though my office happened to be in London. This arrangement created more work for her. When I tried to thank her, she said anyone else would have done the same. Not many male managers would have.

This sort of empathy and kindness at work comes much more naturally to women. This summer, a contributor I had worked with for many years was recounting with amusement how, after a scheduling conflict on the pages that was almost certainly my fault, I had convinced her to completely recast her article. Understandably, she first protested at length. She recalls that I replied I would put the phone down and give her fifteen minutes to think it over. She regards this as a master stroke of management. I plead with her not to retell the story as to me it sounds like just another incompetent man blustering his way through the workday. Such is the nobility of women that she genuinely believes the credit in this embarrassing episode is due to me -- instead of her.