Lady, Not Luck
Long before her recent slew of firsts in the business world, Leena Nair set another first. This first — despite its seeming innocuousness — would go on to define all of the other firsts in her life.
In 1992, when she joined Hindustan Unilever Limited as a management trainee, Leena was deputed to work at factories in Kolkata, Ambattur, and Taloja. The first thing that she noticed at those shop floors was a very basic problem, one that continues to be a bane for India — and the world — even today.
Leena’s Loos came into being. At a time when this problem was light-years away from becoming a part of mainstream conversations, it was a significant first.
Over the years, those dots of empathy and feminism have connected to such an extent that HUL has held bragging rights for gender balance for more than two years.
The Frontwoman
That women are better-equipped cognitively is not just a sweeping generalisation, it’s a scientifically-proven fact. That despite incremental gains in terms of workplace representation last year, “the Broken Rung continues to be a professional obstacle for women” is also a conversation that needs no introduction. And that economics and monies apart, having women in policy-making roles is a no-brainer choice that — despite its obviousness — is still not finding many takers is also something that has been dissected into oblivion.
With that as context, before we delve into the how, let’s properly flesh out the why behind the need for more women to take up leadership roles.
In the Women In The Workplace report for 2021, McKinsey shed light on the fact that in the pandemic era, “women are rising to the moment as stronger leaders, but their work is going unrecognised”.
To clearly flesh out this issue, the consulting group broke down on two broad fronts how women managers led better than their male counterparts:
1) Employee Well-Being and Emotional Support: Without getting too much into statistics — women fared at least 5 percentage points better than men in all individual behavioural elements — McKinsey’s study established that women were more empathetic in their managerial approach. They consistently put in more efforts to manage employee workloads, and acted as a better safety net for those dealing with burnouts and work-life challenges.
2) Active Championing of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Women were ahead by at least four percentage points, in this regard. They were twice as inclined to back Employee Resource Groups, to organise events that promulgated DEI and its benefits, to tailor recruitment policies to combat under-representation, and opt for other informal avenues for promoting the notion of allyship in general.
To get a better understanding of all of this in simple terms, consider this hypothetical scenario. An employee has been working from home for three months for an organisation, during the peak of the pandemic. A woman manager is likely to take better cognisance of his continual workload, stagger out his days to alleviate pressure and provide a better work-life balance, do one-on-one virtual interactions to keep a tab on his well-being, and suggest appropriate pre-emptive measures if he exhibits signs of an impending burnout.
With this backdrop, there’s one pertinent statistic from the referenced McKinsey report that underscores the importance of having a woman leader: employees with a strong ally are 65 per cent more likely to be happy with their job.
But the harsh truth is that despite these benefits, the work that women managers put in on these fronts, only a fourth of the companies that McKinsey surveyed (423) had actually acknowledged these efforts. And the higher women are up on the professional ladder, the more likely it is that their communication is curtailed (34 per cent of senior leaders) and expertise is questioned (34 per cent).
The Way Forward
The blueprint for creating a future that has better representation in the upper echelons of organisations — be it at the C-Suite or managerial level — starts with three basic words that have found increasing relevance in the post-pandemic world: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The internal dynamics of top organisations offer clues on how these words can reduce gender-based leadership skew and fix the Broken Rung. What differentiates these firms from the rest boils down to certain Diversity and Inclusion-oriented processes. Some of them are listed below:
1) Tracking hiring outcomes and promotion rates.
2) Bias training for evaluators.
3) Statistical benchmarking for representation.
4) Holding senior personnel accountable for diversity metrics.
5) DEI training for virtual environments.
6) Allyship programmes.
The pandemic has catalysed many seismic shifts in the professional domain. Among them are narratives — nascent, but narratives nonetheless — that seem to hint that the business world has finally embarked on a journey that might eventually culminate at a gender-equal utopia. But with that destination still being a distant speck on the horizon, it is up to us women to ensure that this ship stays on course throughout this journey.