Women Empowerment

Why the concerns of nearly fifty percent of the population have been falling on deaf years continuously?

The situation of women isn’t bad in one or two countries but is a worldwide phenomenon. From rapes and molestations issues in country like India to the fight for abortion rights and control over one’s own body in USA, the world seems to have no differentiation when the issue at being addressed is about gender sensitization and respect for women’s rights. Perhaps, that’s the reason why World Economic Forum stated that while it will take 100+ years to close the gender gap , it will take 200+ years to bring parity in workforce. One of the videos by P&G titled Always Like a Girl stands as the perfect example of how girls at a young age see themselves positively and are ambitious while the women in the later ages often do underestimate their capabilities and potential because of the constant tough societal circumstances they are subjected to.

While the Indian government was quick to dismiss the report compiled by Thomson Reuters recently which stated our country as being the most unsafe for women in the world, the situation of women in India needs to be understood in many contexts in order to get a real fact check regarding their standard of living and the opportunities available to them.

According to latest ASER report, 13.5% of the girls in age category of 15-16 are not enrolled in school. Even those girl students who are enrolled in school often have to face difficult times when they reach higher classes owing to lack of safe transportation, which results in them dropping out due to safety concerns of their parents. Girls being interested in engineering is proven by the fact that out of total 15 lakh students graduating as engineers from over 3000 institutes in India, around 30% of them are girls but the figure falls drastically when its about them being in India’s most prestigious colleges like IITs. This year the percentage of girls out of total number of students who qualified for admission into IITs stood at just 13.8%. The condition is somewhat similar across the STEM fields.

This leads us to measure the condition of women when they join the workforce after completing their education. The participation of women in workforce in India has fallen sharply from 32% in 2015 to 25% in 2018, with again the non-availability of safe public transport facilities emerging as one if the biggest issues. While our government’s own data from MoSPI does accepts that women do make up 42% of the new graduates who join the formal workforce, the number continues to depreciate to just 10% women present in the senior level management roles which further dwindles to only 1% reaching the CEO role finally.

The biggest culprit behind this constant degradation of the women in our society is the unknown bias with which the male population acts constantly. In a recent study, it was found that women candidates have 30% less chances of being called for a job interview despite having same CV quality as that of male candidates while applying for the same job. Additionally, the unconscious bias of men in terms of seeing women lacking the capability to take tough business decisions and being more driven by emotions hugely disincentivises their chances of being recruited on stereotypical grounds.  Even in the personal lives with friends and family, a woman is subjected to uncomfortable situations when the male members use cuss words which have an underlying derogatory tone targeting the female gender, or referring to the weaker male as being girlish. These unacknowledged biases have a deep unconscious effect on an individuals’ future behaviour as well as shape up what the children do learn from their observations thus compounding the bad situation.

There is a need to enable more women to rise to leadership roles because that would bring innovative solutions through empathetic behaviour and understanding for solving the problems faced by women employees. An excellent example is of Mrs Arundhati Bhattacharya who during her stint in the HR domain at SBI revamped the prevailing sabbatical leave structure after identifying the three most crucial stages at which women are forced to leave a job. Those three stages were when a woman used to have childbirth, when her kids would be preparing for entrance examinations and when her in-laws or parents would get sick for prolonged period of time - all standing as excellent examples of our patriarchal society. The biggest failure of empowering woman has been caused by the political leaders of India who over the years have been only giving lip service to this cause while doing nothing to bring ground change. Only 14% of current parliamentarians are women which is a huge misrepresentation when compared to their population. The fate of Women Reservation Bill in Parliament hasn’t still seen the light of the day. An even bigger challenge today is the future of women in work with increasing automation and adoption of Artificial Intelligence. Today only 22% of AI professionals are women and this number faces further threat with the organizations looking to trim down the costs of operations.

Thus, what we need today is to bring in all the stakeholders from a diverse set of fields to work towards the common goal of enabling women and girls to succeed and making available the opportunities they have deserved since ever, but we as a society have failed in safeguarding that for them. This cant be possible without sensitising the men first regarding their responsibilities and making the children of today more aware regarding these things in order to fasten the progress we can make in empowering the new women leaders of tomorrow.

Ankit Thakur

H19127