Power women: business as usual

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The latest issue of the Fortune magazine, which has its annual ranking of the world's 50 most powerful women in business on the cover, has expressed surprise that families have played a major role in helping women make great strides in international business.

The leader article notes that while 14 of the international power 50 inherited or married into their companies, only two in the US listings did. From an American perspective, the high proportion of inherited power among women executives is no doubt surprising.

Despite their collective image of swaggering machismo, US corporations tend to predicate their hiring policies far more on talent and ability than on what Carly Fiorina once evocatively described as "packaging".

Fortune seems to suggest that it is family businesses that are helping forge cracks in the glass ceiling that women face at the workplace. This is only partly true "" inherited power also tends to get discounted if it is not backed by ability.

What the Fortune list does largely confirm is that, as far as international business "" especially in Asia "" is concerned the glass ceiling has developed cracks, but has not yet been pierced. Indeed, the very fact that Fortune chooses to devote one issue every year to powerful women executives is telling "" it doesn't do the same for men, after all.

Coming to India, if you were to draw up a roster of powerful Indian women executives, the listing would show that we've made some reasonable progress, but the cracks in the glass ceiling are yet to be made.

The two India entries on the Fortune list "" Naina Lal Kidwai of HSBC and Vidya Chhabria of the Jumbo group, both with improved rankings over last year "" show why. Kidwai makes it to the list because she is one of the highest-paid women executives in the glamourous, networked world of investment banking.

More importantly, she is a professional and does not owe her position in HSBC or, before that, at Morgan Stanley to family ties. Vidya Chhabria, on the other hand, owes her position in the ranking to her late husband Manohar, who single-handedly built a liquor-to-electronic goods empire in Dubai and India.

Interestingly, a listing drawn up a decade ago would have consisted mostly of wives and daughters and there used to be a dearth of them "" Mallika Srinivasan of TAFE, Anu Aga of Thermax, Anuradha Desai of Venky's would be about the limit of that list (to be fair, all of them have more than earned their spurs).

Among professional women executives or entrepreneurs you could probably count in the legendary Tara Sinha and perhaps Kiran Mazumdar Shaw.

Today, the list would not only be longer but the muster of professional executives would outweigh the inheritors by a generous margin. In the second category, you could add Sulajja Firodia Motwani of Kinetic, maybe Komal Wazir of Shaw Wallace.

It's the first that would be encouragingly long "" Amrita Patel of NDDB, Ranjana Kumar of Indian Bank, Naina Lal Kidwai of HSBC, Lalitha Gupte, Kalpana Morparia, Shikha Sharma and Madhabi Puri Buch, all of ICICI, Vibha Rishi of Pepsi. Note that many of the rising professional women executives come from the financial sector.

Despite this heartening progress, few of the women in the list above are chief executives. Also, if you run your eye down the BS 1,000, Business Standard's annual ranking of India's largest listed companies by net sales, and you'll be hard put to find a woman chief executive in the first 50 companies "" indeed, in the entire listing. Think of the country's largest corporate groups "" Reliance, the Tatas, the Birlas.

None of them has a woman chief executive heading their group companies. In Business Standard's ranking of unlisted companies only two companies "" TAFE at number 16 and Hindustan Times at number 45 had women chiefs in Srinivasan and Shobhna Bhartia respectively.

Overall, it would be fair to say that the old prejudices against women executives in corporate India are diminishing "" it is significant that at least two women on the India's 'most powerful' list head public sector organisations, which are traditionally not known for forward-looking HR policies.

How far women executives rise now largely depend on their abilities. Organisations that are able to create enabling structures like flexi-time and good child care facilities will find themselves maximising the talent of their women employees even more.

Laws that insist on a women's quota for corporate board membership, on the other hand, will be self- defeating. If the government stays away from such pointless recommendations, a listing of India's powerful business-women ten years from now might consist of many more CEOs and board members who've made it on their own merit.