Catalyst Blog

By Ilene H. Lang, Deborah Gillis and Deepali Bagati

Earlier this month, we met with CEOs of Indian companies to discuss the importance of expanding opportunities for women and business in India Inc. Women currently make up 36 percent of the Indian labor force, yet 67 percent of Indian employers are struggling to fill jobs. One solution to this talent crunch: educated and ambitious Indian women.

CEOs across Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore shared with us inspiring, and effective, ways in which they’re shifting their organizations’ cultures to ensure that all talent is valued. One CEO talked about “leading by example.” He has taken action and asked each member of his leadership team to mentor three women, while he personally mentors five!

Another CEO talked about consciously changing the way he viewed women—namely, by thinking of them as natural leaders. Once he started from the assumption that women were born to lead, it helped him to confront and shatter biases and stereotypes about women that he grew up with.

Finally, a CEO talked about changing the default question at his company, so that when women are considering a new role with bigger responsibility, they are not asked, “why would you want to do this job,” but instead, “why wouldn’t you want to do this job?”

Actions like these are clearing a path for the success of talented, and ambitious, Indian women. Gender gaps exist in India, but we’ve discovered on this trip that many companies understand how women can fuel India Inc. And they are acting on it—an inspiring model for senior leaders in India, and around the world.

Women represent 40% of the world’s labor force yet hold 1% of the world’s wealth—does this seem fair to you? The latest World Bank report on gender equality and development paints a dark picture of global inequities across health, wealth and education. Find out the latest World Bank statistics, plus the demise of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the pervasive “think-leader-think-male” mentality, in today’s C This.

Leaks in the Indian Pipeline

A recent study of 21 large multinational companies across Asia found that India has the largest percentage of women dropping out of the workforce—with 50% attrition rates among women moving from junior to middle level. Some experts blame India’s high rate of so-called “daughterly guilt”—societal pressure to take care of elderly parents or in-laws.

READ: “Why Do Indian Women Drop Out of the Workforce?” by Rupa Subramanya Dehejia, The Wall Street Journal, 9/12/11

Where Women Rule

Using five metrics—Justice, Health, Education, Economics and Politics—Newsweek determined the best and worst places to be a woman. Nordic countries top the list while many Middle Eastern and African states hang at the bottom. Surprises include Canada, which ranks third best overall but 26th in Politics, behind countries like Burundi, Brunei and Cuba.

READ: “Global Women’s Progress Report,” by Jesse Ellison, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, 9/18/11

Where We’re At

The World Bank’s latest survey of gender inequality around the world contains an array of troubling statistics, as well as a few bright spots. Women account for more than half of university students worldwide, yet still lag men in health and wealth. “On the one hand, the enrollment of girls and young women in schools and universities and the participation of women in the labor force have increased in most of the developing world. And in many countries, such as Bangladesh and Colombia, at a pace much more rapid than was the case in the U.S during the 19th century,” said World Bank’s Sudhir Shetty in a press release. “On the other hand, gender disparities remain stubbornly large in most countries if earnings gaps, excess deaths of girls and women, and the representation of women in leadership positions in government and business are the focus.”

READ: “New Facts on the Gender Gap from the World Bank,” by Sudeep Reddy, The Wall Street Journal, 9/18/11

Do Tell

On Tuesday at 12:01 AM, the decades-old military provision mandating that LGBT soldiers “don’t ask, don’t tell” was officially rescinded. “Our nation will finally close the door on a fundamental unfairness for gays and lesbians, and indeed affirm equality for all Americans,” said House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, an advocate for the policy change.

READ: “U.S. Army Says Business as Usual as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Ends,” by Robert Burns, Associated Press, 9/20/11

Think Leader Think Male?

Stereotypes around leadership attributes are alive and well in the UK. A recent Oxford Brookes University study of middle-to-senior managers found that staff rated women higher than men, but bosses rated men higher than women! “A major problem for women is that they simply don’t look like the notion of a leader, because leaders look like men,” said Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, chief executive of the Real World Group, a corporate coaching and research firm.

READ: “Why Staff Rate Female Leaders Highly but Male Bosses Score Them Lower than Men,” by Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, The Guardian, 9/14/11

Double Up

It does make a difference if a woman is in charge. A new report by Corporate Women Directors International found that companies with a woman CEO have twice as many women in management and double the number of women board members as companies with a man CEO. These findings compliment previous Catalyst research showing a positive correlation between the percentage of women board directors in the past and the percentage of women corporate officers in the future.

READ: “Female CEOs Put More Women in Boardrooms,” The Daily Beast, 9/13/11

What’s measured gets done. After all, if you’re not tracking and measuring progress, how do you know how far you’ve come? Or how much further you need to go?

These are the takeaways from the just-launched 2010 India Benchmarking Report. While 68 percent of companies surveyed have formal strategies for advancing women, many lacked metrics and indicators to measure their impact. In particular, the majority of companies did not hold managers accountable for the retention and promotion of women.

The broad array of diversity programs on offer in India is impressive, but with the severe talent crunch that India is facing, tracking the progress and effectiveness of programs to advance women is essential to maximizing organizational investments in recruitment and improving retention of top talent.

This is one key to solving the crunch.

Catalyst’s latest Census of female leadership in the Fortune 500 and our report, Mentoring: Necessary But Insufficient for Advancement, received strong media coverage last week. Below are two clips highlighting the new research. Also in C This, new studies point to the challenges that Indian women face in the workplace, the dearth of diversity programs in American companies, and the “glass cliff” women face when getting top jobs.

Sponsors Explained

“A sponsor is somebody who is really your advocate, your champion,” said Barbara Adachi, National Managing Director for Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Human Capital practice, in this interview about Catalyst’s 2010 Census and our new study on sponsorship. “A sponsor has a stake in your success and a stake in your career,” she added.

WATCH: “What Women Need to Know to Get Ahead,” Good Morning America, ABC, 12/13/10

To Find a Sponsor

Kerrie Peraino, Chief Diversity Officer at American Express, advised women to be bold in order to find a sponsor. “It’s not enough to say, ‘I’m doing good work,’ and put your head down on your desk,” she said. “To earn sponsorship someone needs to see your work.”

READ: “Women’s Advancement in Business Flatlines, Study Shows,” by Barbara Mannino, FOXBusiness.com, 12/14/10

Get with the Program

A new survey of human resource and talent management leaders at more than 540 U.S. companies found that 43% had no formal activities or programs aimed at developing women leaders, and only 5% had “robust” initiatives. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that the progress of women into business leadership is stuck—and has been so for years.

READ: “Why Are There So Few Women Leaders? Companies are not Trying,” by Joanne Cleaver, BNET, 12/8/10

The Cliff

Experts call it the “glass cliff”—the precarious place high up on the corporate ladder where women are judged more harshly than men. Victoria Brescoll, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University, studied the phenomenon. “Stereotyping thrives on ambiguity. Mistakes create ambiguity and call the leader’s competence into question, which, in turn, leads to a loss of status,” she explained.

READ: “On the Other Side of the Glass Ceiling, a Glass Cliff,” by Belinda Luscombe, Time, 12/8/10

 Indian Ambitions

New research shows that 80 percent of Indian women want the top jobs and are prepared to work hard for them, but less than 30 percent of Indian women outside the agrarian economy are in the workplace. But, participation is likely to increase as the cultural stigmas attached to female-employment fade. “If we’re doing so well with only 30 percent of women in the work force, imagine what we’ll achieve when that goes up to 50 percent,” said Preeti Singh, a 21-year-old business management student aiming for the C-Suite.

READ: “Ambitions Meet Reality in India,” by Nilanjana S. Roy, New York Times, 12/14/10

What is India Inc.? For me, it’s not just India’s booming business sector. It’s also a phrase suggesting tremendous opportunity for Indian women and business.

India is undergoing explosive GDP growth—and a skilled labor shortage to match. Yet amid this tremendous thirst for talent, deep gender gaps persist. Women represent only 36% of the labor force—less than half that of men—and only 3% to 6% of senior management.

To mark the launch of our new report, Leadership Gap in India Inc., I’ve asked our Senior Advisor in India, Deepali Bagati, to write about what’s at stake in this emerging market. Women, she says, are core to India Inc.’s sustainable growth.

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Deepali Bagati writes:

India Inc.—the land of opportunities, relationships and contradictions—is a place where organizations find themselves thriving on growth and innovation, but also challenged by the talent crunch: finding and keeping top talent. Organizations are hiring aggressively, and employees are jumping ship even more aggressively especially at the skilled/managerial level. Culturally, the importance of relationships cannot be emphasized enough, and “who you know” continues to be critical in getting close to the ladder, let alone moving up the ladder.

Although women continue to be bogged down with familial and societal stereotypes about their roles and abilities, the burgeoning middle class, intense consumerism and a thirst for upward mobility in urban India is opening doors for women. In rural India, a million plus women are functioning as grassroots leaders in the Panchayati Raj Institutions, and rural India has already been anointed as the unexplored and untapped market with unprecedented opportunities.  

The India story is no longer about whether this is a growth play, but more about maximizing and accelerating this growth by leveraging female talent. A unique window of opportunity beckons the key stakeholders and decision-makers—the majority of who are still male—to set in motion processes and programs that bring more women into the workforce and create an agile and inclusive workplace.   (more…)