T Thomas: Rise of Women CEOs in Indian industry

Despite familial and societal restrictions, Indian women executives can perform better than their western counterparts.

With the appointment of India-born Indra Nooyi as the CEO of PepsiCo, one must hope that more women will head national governments and multinational corporations in different parts of the world. In our own country we had Indira Gandhi as one of the most powerful Prime Ministers of her time. She had the advantage of being Nehru's daughter. The UK had Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful Prime Ministers of that country in several decades. Unlike Mrs Gandhi, who was born into a powerful political family, Mrs Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer and got to the pinnacle as the first woman Prime Minister of a major European country on the strength of her own merit and abilities. The US, which has been foremost in articulating women's rights, is still to have a woman President. If Hillary Clinton makes it in 2008""and it is a big if""it will be over 40 years after it happened in India, and over 25 years after it happened in Britain. We in India can justly be proud of the record of women in our political history.

But when it comes to business, Indian women managers face significant limitations if they want to become the CEO of a firm. First of all, by the time they reach the senior management level they are most likely to have married and started a family. In most Indian families, the primary responsibility for bringing up the children still rests with the mother""their food, clothing, studies and emotional issues. Children too find it easier to deal with the mother than with their father. The result is that women managers who also are mothers find it difficult to travel far from home, or stay away overnight.

Sometimes, a woman manager has to turn down a new posting in another city because she cannot or will not leave her family behind. More frequently, a woman has to give up a job she holds and find another one in a new city because her husband has got transferred. In all these circumstances, her career suffers a setback""either because she cannot find a suitable job in the new setting and has to settle for second-best, or because the refusal to accept transfers could come in the way of the next move up the ladder. In short, women managers lose out in their career because it is they who have to make the compromises in combining their dual roles at home and in office.

Then, it does not come naturally to most Indian women managers to go club hopping or spend extra time out with their male colleagues""the bonding exercise that leads to general acceptance within a team. Another problem is that sexist attitudes persist in the commercial world and this can come in the way of a woman manager being assessed solely on her work performance. Even when it comes to dealing with the trade or customers, men are often reluctant to take women managers as seriously as they would their male counterparts. The attitude of airline managements to air hostesses is illustrative of the larger problem, for several airlines encourage air hostesses to retire at an early age, which is like putting a premature "expiry date" on a food product in a supermarket. Such age limitations do not apply to male counterparts.

However, if we are to balance the books, there are several key advantages which female managers enjoy when compared to men. First, most women managers are inherently better at human relations at all levels""right from workmen to senior managers. It is an inbuilt female trait. Similarly women have much better intuition""the ability to understand without conscious reasoning""than men. It is one of their protective instincts. Thirdly, women can influence people, especially their male counterparts, not only through their intelligence but also through their charm, which is a mixture of the way they talk, listen, smile and respond. Men can hardly match that! Fourthly, most women (being conscious of the fact that they have to compete against male counterparts) tend to work and try harder at the same task""as Indra Nooyi has herself admitted. Lastly, whether it is an assembly line or a relay race, women seem to team together much better than men. Perhaps it has to do with their superior ability to bond. In addition to all these in-built advantages women also enjoy the extra tolerance that people tend to extend to them.

I am associated with a company in a high-technology industry. It has a female CEO. She is not an engineer or a technologist but an MBA in marketing. But she has been intelligent enough to learn the technology and can hold her own in discussions with high-tech customers. Her husband, who is the chief technologist of the company, briefs her patiently and she soaks up the knowledge like a sponge. Her own technical sales force and customers understand her commonsense language better than that of hard-core technologists. Her excellent communication and human relations skills and commercial acumen earn respect from colleagues and customers. The husband, who is a realist, preferred to choose her as the CEO and his boss, because he realised that her combination of marketing, commercial and communication skills is more important that his own technological skills. It is rare for a man to accept such a fact. But this has paid rich dividends because the company has been growing at about five times the rate of growth of GDP in the domestic market and is expanding into highly competitive markets in the US and Europe. And it is doing so with a high return on capital employed. It has even been chosen as the product-sourcing point by a leading competitor in the US. All this is because the company has a CEO who has the ability and drive to market the products.

The female CEO has to make young children ready for school in the morning, make sure their lunch boxes are ready, uniforms ironed, etc. before she leaves for work. She cannot afford to be late as she has to set the right example before other employees in the company. When they all get back home in the evening she has to be the ears and shoulders for children to unwind and then settle them into bed. It is a long and taxing day, but at the end of it, she has the great satisfaction of knowing that she is creating wealth for her family. No man can match this combination of functions. Surely India is going to have many more successful female CEOs, not only in family-owned businesses but also in professionally managed companies and in high-tech industries""perhaps more so than in many European countries because contrary to common perception, Indian women are not only more hardworking but are also better able to reconcile the roles of wife, mother and CEO than many of their Western counterparts.