Does corporate culture sidestep women?

For all the talk of gender justice, gender equality and the like, it is still a man's world. Witness the Sisyphean labour into which even powerful spokespersons of women in India belonging to political parties and the civil society have been thrown in trying to secure a mere 30 per cent reservation in Parliament and State Assemblies.

Men are not yet reconciled to Rajiv Gandhi's farsightedness and forceful backing for a like reservation for women in panchayati raj institutions. They are insinuating that elected women members and chairpersons are under the thumb of their husbands and male relatives in carrying out their responsibilities. This is absurd as borne out by my personal experience of conducting nearly 500 camps to train village leaders with a high proportion of women.

On the contrary, I have found that wherever women occupied positions of responsibility, from village bodies right up to the high reaches of government and corporate boards, they performed their duties diligently and conscientiously. I was delighted to find support for my impressionistic observation from academic research and independent surveys.

Social sensitivity

For instance, a write-up at the Knowledge@Wharton Web site published on October 26 mentions studies at places as far apart as MIT Sloan School of Management and Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business which credit women with possessing the special skill set of empathy, communication and flexibility, enabling them to be more collaborative and interested in consensus building, whereas men have a more command-and-control leadership style.

Further, teams that included more women tended to perform better than those with fewer women because of their higher “social sensitivity” and cautious, conservative and calculated approach to risk-taking. This made the teams of which they were members collectively more intelligent, more democratic, politer and more respectful towards each other in inter-personal relations, leading to better outcomes.

Now, coming to the corporate world, the same write-up refers to a study by professors at the University of Queensland in Australia and the London School of Economics showing that women took the monitoring role of the board more seriously and had a better attendance records than male directors. The very presence of women directors makes the men show up more often and no wonder!

With all this, corporate boards in the US, as also in other countries, prefer to sidestep women. Here are some startling figures that I had squirreled away in my database: The total number of women CEOs in the Fortune 500 has been able to touch only 15 in the 13 years from 1998 when it was just two. Half the workforce is made up of women, but the number of Board seats they occupy is only 16 per cent in Fortune 500 companies, while there are no women on the boards of more than 10 per cent of them

The picture outside of the US is even worse. The percentage of seats held by women on corporate boards is roughly 12 in Britain, France and Germany, 8.5 in China, and nine in Japan.

Getting ahead of men

But it is 38 per cent in Norway following the enactment of a law in 2003 making it mandatory for all state-owned and publicly listed companies to ensure that by 2008 women made up at least 40 per cent of the strength of their boards. As a ripple effect, although there is no such law, the percentage is 26 in Sweden and Finland. Spain and the Netherlands have followed Norway's example, but it is not known to what effect. In Britain, FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Programme is striving to boost the number of female directors on a voluntary basis.

India comes off the worst with only 5.3 per cent of the seats on corporate boards held by women. It is ironical because Indian women have been playing conspicuous roles in politics and society far as long as one can remember. They also get ahead of men in no time in whatever direction they channel their energies, be it studies, research, or jobs. Why, then, have they been sidelined to this extent? Here, then, is a gauntlet for women's groups to pick up and have a good, clean fight on!

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