Shyamal Majumdar: Gender inequality in boardrooms

HUMAN FACTOR

Seventy years. That's what it will take for there to be as many women as men on company boards.

It was a matter of coincidence but the irony was difficult to miss. The day Naina Lal Kidwai hit the headlines for being appointed HSBC India's chairperson, Catalyst, a US-based research and advisory group, released a report that said it will take 70 years for there to be as many women as men on the boards of the largest US companies at the pace women are getting such positions. The rate of progress over the past decade has been, on average, one-half of one percentage point each year. And women typically served solo or with just one other woman on a company's board.

There are no prizes for guessing that the situation is far worse in corporate India. While women like Kidwai, and ICICI's Lalita Gupte, Kalpana Morparia et al have been successful in breaking the glass ceiling, they are still in a hopeless minority. Consider the figures: according to a CII study of 149 companies in India, while there is a healthy ratio (16 per cent) of women managers in junior levels, they make up only 4 per cent of senior managerial posts. Further, only 1 per cent of the organisations have women CEOs.

The same bias exists in the lower rungs also. For instance, a team of labour researchers did a survey of women workers in three prominent industrial belts of India (Bangalore, Delhi-Faridabad and Pune) and found that bias against women included wage and non-wage discrimination as well as qualitative differences in the nature of work offered to women.

The fact is women employees in India are still fighting an uphill battle for level pegging in areas such as equal pay for equal work. Consider the startling findings of a Sakshi survey of 2,400 men and women in a cross-section of workplaces and hierarchies: 80 per cent of respondents said sexual harassment existed at their workplace and 53 per cent said men and women did not have equal opportunities at work.

The latest US Population Division estimates also take the sheen off the popular notion that India has made rapid strides in female labour force participation. India's female labour participation rate of 47.7 per cent is only higher than Fiji's (35.3 per cent) in a list of 14 Asia-Pacific nations. To put things in perspective, even countries like Bangladesh (60 per cent) are far ahead of India. Even in the organised sector, the lot of women workers in Bangladesh has been improving dramatically. The female share of the labour force in the export processing zones (almost 72 per cent) in Bangladesh exceeds that of Malaysia and is almost as high as Korea and the Philippines.

Compare this with India. While micro-credit for women is picking up, the pace is still too slow, resulting in women depending solely on job opportunities of the kind that are still heavily biased against them.

Nearly two-thirds of women in manufacturing are employed as production operators or manual workers. Even in the service sector, women are concentrated in clerical, sales and services jobs that are traditionally regarded as female occupations. In India, women's employment is heavily skewed towards low-paying, low-skilled dead-end jobs. HR consultants say women "" the very few of them "" who complain about being harassed are often advised by colleagues and superiors to develop a sense of humour.

But there is no denying that women themselves are partly responsible for the bias against them in the workplace. HR experts quote a BBC report late last year, which said at the heart of the matter is the Cinderella complex "" where no matter how successful a woman is, subconsciously she still expects that a prince is going to come along and rescue her.

Also, the difficulties facing women who occupy the corner office are more complex than those of a generation ago. One is their skewed business experience. Women are prominent in top staff jobs, such as head of human resources, but still scarce in the line, or core-business, positions essential to the resume of any would-be CEO.

A University of Michigan Business School study conducted with Catalyst found that women who had worked full-time without interruption after receiving MBAs were far less likely to be married or to have children than their male counterparts. A related issue is time off. The study found that women MBAs were more likely than men to have taken time off from their careers, which can be a huge misstep for those aspiring to reach the pinnacle of corporate life.