The rare breed of Indian 'sheEOs'

The Human Factor

But just in case you thought the glass ceiling has finally been pierced in India, consider the following figures which conclusively prove how the firmly entrenched old boys' network still make many boardrooms no-go areas for women.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Association of Management Development Institutions in South Asia and Cosmode, women managers today comprise only 2 per cent of the total managerial strength in the Indian corporate sector.

One-third of all Indian women executives leave their organisations or drop out of the job market because they perceive a lack of intellectual stimulation and more than three-fourths of them maintain that they have to work much harder to prove themselves at the work place.

Among the reasons that hold women back from top management were male stereotyping and preconceptions (52 per cent of women executives felt this), exclusion from informal networks of communication (49 per cent) and lack of significant general management/line experience (47 per cent).

And only four out of 10 chief executive officers (CEOs) considered the advancement of women to be critical for their organisations "" a pointer to how the CEOs in India have a long way to go before a change in their mindset that is essential to understand the gender nuances and degrees of sex discrimination bias in their organisations.

A GE study of its 1,35,000 professional workers found that women quit at a higher rate: annual voluntary turnover of women was 8 per cent compared to 6.5 per cent for men. That may not sound much, but it adds up to 2,025 more women than men a year.

Fortune itself acknowledged this problem while announcing its power women list: "female corporate power is still spread unevenly across the business world. Many cultural, social and logistical issues conspire against women's development in business, from stereotyping to maternity leave."

The point to note is India Inc is not alone. Managers all over the word are united in having such stereotyped notions about women executives "" a reason why few women ever make it into the "O-zone" "" the positions of CEO, COO (chief operating officer) and CFO (chief financial officer) "" at Fortune 500 companies.

There's more: women make up less than 6 per cent of European company boards. A study of 568 UK companies shows that only 5.3 per cent of directors of FTSE-listed UK companies are women and almost 65 per cent of these companies have no women on the board.

The findings compare with a survey of US companies by New York-based research organisation Catalyst, which revealed that women hold just over 10 per cent of director appointments in the top 500 boardrooms in America.

Women executives in India also often complain in private that as they reach the highest levels, the gap between their total earnings and the pay of their male colleagues gets even wider. While nobody has done any research on this in India, a study done in the UK shows this could well be true.

The average total remuneration of women directors in British firms was less than half that of their male equivalents. The study shows that women in the boardroom tend to be even less well paid relative to male colleagues than are female workers on the shop floor.

An ILO report explains the reasons for this quite succinctly. "Wage differences in male and female managerial jobs stem from the reality that even when women hold management jobs, they are often in less strategic, lower-paying areas of a company's operations."

The suggestion that the problem can be resolved by having a fixed quota for women on corporate boards is, however, outlandish. While successful candidates will hate to be seen as "quota" candidates, the quota itself does nothing to improve the status of women. After all, a similar experiment in the UK fell flat on its face.

While a company must harness the ability, talent, creativity and determination that many women in the workplace so clearly possess, the fact is women themselves must share part of the blame for the bias against them in organisations. HR experts say in quite a few cases, apparently it's not that women can't get high-level jobs. Rather, they're choosing not to.

Many fast-track women are surprisingly ambivalent about what's next. Dozens of powerful women Fortune interviewed recently said that they didn't want to be Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard (and a consistent number one on the powerful women list), and many didn't want to run a huge company. In fact, most women said that Fiorina has a drive and tenacity that they simply cannot match "" and wouldn't want to.

Yet those very same women also said that they foresaw the day when there was parity in terms of gender representation at the top of the corporate ladder. It was a goal that they honestly and fervently wanted to reach.

A case of having the cake and eating it too?