Talk about gender issues in the workplace and India Inc invariably points to the number of women who head Indian companies. Five Indians figured in the latest Financial Times’ ranking of the world’s top 50 women in business.
We are right to be proud of them — in a country in which the majority of women are oppressed, our CEO ladies are beacons of what India’s chaotic democracy can achieve in terms of social transformation. As one commentator enthused in Harvard Business Review, though women CEOs account for just 11 per cent of the CEOs of India’s largest companies, they also serve as models for thousands of aspiring middle class women.
One of the less-noticed but no-less-notable features of this trend is the role of men. In her assessment of the FT ranking, the sharply perceptive Lucy Kellaway highlighted the inconvenient truth that most of these women CEOs, or “alpha women”, don’t have alpha male partners. “Nearly all have children, but I could not find a single one with an alpha male husband,” she wrote. On the contrary, several of them have husbands who have given up their jobs to better accommodate the “glorious rise” of their wives (Indra Nooyi’s husband, for example).
This is broadly true of the Indian Big Six on the FT list. It is striking that in interviews about their personal lives, several of them have spoken about the support of their husbands and families. “For a woman to rise in the workplace, a supportive husband and family are a prerequisite,” Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, one of the India Big Six, said some years ago, and she is emphatic that she wouldn’t be where she is had it not been for John Shaw, who is a director in Biocon. ICICI Bank’s Chanda Kochhar, arguably the most iconic of our women CEOs, says much the same, as does Shikha Sharma of Axis Bank who married an IIM batchmate who works in the Tata group.
But they, too, are outliers because they work in professionally run organisations. Alpha women in India Inc differ from their western counterparts in one significant way: most of them have alpha dads or, at the very least, come from alpha business families. At least one woman CEO on the FT list — Shobhana Bhartia of HT Media — owes her position to her father K K Birla. This holds true if you consider a random list of other current or emerging alpha women in India Inc. Rajshree Pathy inherited her sugar empire from her father who died young, though it was she who built it against huge odds, including gender bias. Mallika Srinivasan, who heads southern tractor major Tafe, has an alpha dad (A Sivasailam, chairman of the Amalgamations Group) and an alpha husband, Venu Srinivasan of TVS Motors: their daughter Lakshmi is being groomed to head the TVS group.
Meher Pudumjee of Thermax is the daughter of Anu Aga who took charge of the company built by her husband after he died. Roshni Nadar, daughter of HCL founder Shiv Nadar, Ashni Biyani, Future Group chairman Kishore Biyani’s daughter, Preetha Reddy, eldest daughter of Apollo Hospitals’ Prathap Reddy, are all inheritors from alpha dads. An outlier is Swati Piramal, an executive director in Piramal Healthcare and current Assocham chief, an alpha lady with an alpha husband, Ajay Piramal.
It would be easy to knock this trend were it not for the fact that India Inc is dominated by family-run conglomerates. Nor does this detract from these women’s abilities — after all, it is equally true that many of today’s leading and emerging businessmen are also inheritors, Ratan Tata and the Ambani brothers included. The fact that daughters are increasingly taking charge is a reflection of the progressive thinking of their alpha dads — even the ones who had no sons have not considered bequeathing their businesses to their sons-in-law as many families still do. Indeed, it is to the credit of K K Birla that he chose to break with the arch-conservatism of his community to divide his empire among his three daughters in the eighties. If you consider the findings of a recent survey*, these alpha dads should be doubly applauded: only 55 per cent of women in the Indian workplace are married compared to 90 per cent of men.
*http://catalyst.org/file/408/leadership_gender_gap_in_india-final.pdf
