Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) made headlines earlier this week for becoming the first private sector company in India to employ over 100,000 women employees. Given that women now comprise a third of the information technology giant's 306,000 workforce, it may not be long before TCS overtakes IBM (130,000 women employees) as the world's largest employer of women in the technology space.
This is good news, no doubt, and is the result of several women-friendly initiatives TCS has taken over the past decade.
But beyond a point, the number doesn't mean much. Even TCS CEO & MD N Chandrasekaran was forthright enough to admit in an interview to The Times of India that despite the large numbers, women are still scarce at the company's leadership rank and non-existent at the board level. "Women diversity goes down as you go higher," Chandrasekaran said, adding the company is trying to set up a mechanism to fix this anomaly.
The TCS boss may be talking on behalf of the entire corporate India. The World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index bears this out. It placed India in the 101st position among 136 countries in the 2013 edition of an annual report that makes a global assessment of the progress made in bridging the gender gap.
More importantly, studies have shown that India sees the maximum drop in women representation from junior to middle-level positions.
There are many reasons for this - a lot of women drop out of higher studies or their professional career because of marriage or motherhood. That's the reason many women in their late twenties and early-thirties leave their careers since they find it difficult to do justice to both the roles - a factor that is cited by managements of many Indian companies to say that they don't have any control over women's decision to exit/re-enter the workforce. Flexible work policies or extended leave can, at best, be a minor enabler for those who possess career aspirations.
They have a point but it's equally true that women still face double standards and dead ends at the workplace. Experts have a better word for this: sexual politics.
This is not to say that no progress has been made. India and the rest of the world have made tremendous progress in allowing greater women diversity at the workplace. We are a long way off from the days of blatant sexual discrimination on office floors. Consider this: in 1982, Ann Hopkins was denied a promotion to partner at Price Waterhouse because her co-workers wanted her to walk and talk more femininely, dress more colourfully, wear make-up and have her hair styled. She was also advised to join a charm school. The suggestions could land her colleagues in jail now for blatant sexual harassment.
That's not all. Jean Hollands, author of Same Rules, Different Games, teaches women to "cry in meetings, wear softer-looking clothes and punctuate their speech with 'ums'and stutters." There is also literature galore that advise women to avoid traditional postures such as sitting with your legs crossed and hands folded as they look less confident during meetings. Some have even advised women to maintain eye contact with male colleagues for three to five seconds with a lowered brow - whatever that means.
These things may appear to be from days long gone by, but it's a fact that rarely is the label "leader" attached to women even now. Relatively lower- or mid-level positions are fine and are often seen as a politically correct move, but in senior positions, the unstated glass ceiling and warped mindset still exist across companies. How many times do women face sexist comments such as "what are you ladies gossiping about?" or "complaining about men again?" We have all seen women who are criticised as too assertive when they act like men and too passive when they act like women.
In their ground-breaking book, What Works for Women at Work, Joan C Williams and Rachel Dempsey have divided modern-day gender-based roadblocks into four categories: prove-it-again (men get the benefit of the doubt while women have to keep confirming their expertise); the tightrope (the challenge of striking just the right balance between femininity and masculinity); the maternal wall (mothers are marginalised in the workplace); and the tug-of-war (competition between women over the best way to behave). There is thus, no doubt that women still need to accomplish twice as much to get half as far as their male colleagues.
A woman employee says she can't recall the number of times she made a suggestion in a meeting that was ignored, only to have a man say the same thing 10 minutes later and everybody then thinks it's a great idea.
This may not be the rule, but here is something that may be of some consolation for her. Remember the famous FedEx commercial "Stolen Idea"? A boss asks his team for cost-cutting ideas and a young staffer suggests opening a FedEx.com account. Everyone is silent. The boss then repeats that suggestion, without crediting the staffer, and the rest of the team congratulates him on his brilliance while the staffer looks crestfallen.
The young staffer whose idea was stolen was not a woman - but a man.
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