Entry barriers

Workplaces still fall short on women's safety

Since 2014, Indian companies have been pressured by courts and the market regulator to enhance the protection of their women employees against sexual harassment at the workplace. But in the 10 years since the start of such coordinated state action to safeguard the safety and dignity of women at the workplace, corporate India’s efforts towards meaningfully addressing the issue appear to be woefully inadequate. First came the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, POSH for short, which was passed by Parliament in 2013, and it made it mandatory for companies to set up internal complaint committees (ICCs) to hear complaints of sexual harassment and disclose this data in their annual reports. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) required all listed companies to disclose data on sexual harassment in their annual reports. But the inadequacy of the data and the absence of follow-up by regulatory agencies point to widespread indifference to the issue.

A recent study by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis, based on 300 listed companies on the National Stock Exchange (NSE), underlines this trend. It shows an increase in the number of cases of sexual harassment reported by Indian companies in their annual reports but a growing gap between the number of complaints and their resolution. To create as representative a sample as possible, researchers covered 100 companies with the highest market capitalisation, another 100 in the middle, and the rest from the smallcap segment analysed from 2012-13, a year before the Act was implemented, to 2022-23. In the first year that POSH came into effect, the companies in this sample reported 161 cases; by FY23, the number had jumped to 1,160, suggesting improved reporting and redress protocols. But this is a partial picture at best. For one, the gap between resolution and reporting has been steadily expanding. The POSH Act also requires companies to disclose the number of complaints unresolved and pending at the end of each year; this too has been rising. If the rise in the number of cases suggests that employees are becoming more confident about reporting harassment, the poor resolution could point to the inefficacy of the ICCs. According to a Walchand Plus survey, conducted in January last year, about a third of the organisations do not conduct any POSH training for employees and a third have little faith in ICCs as a means of redress.
 

Institutional inertia towards addressing workplace harassment is also evident in the starkly uneven pattern of compliance with the laws. Just 81 of the 300 companies in the data set accounted for 1,160 cases in FY23, with half the cases reported across just eight companies. The rest of the sample, 219 companies, did not report any cases, a trend since 2014. The Ashoka University study also reveals that it is the largecap companies that account for 98 per cent of the complaints. Smallcap companies are conspicuous by their absence. When these trends are extrapolated to the corporate sector as a whole, the picture that emerges is that in the third decade of the 21st century the Indian workplace remains hostile to women, that too at a time when women’s participation in the workforce remains low.