En-gendering Leadership in India

20 Oct 2022

The world today is working towards targets that indicators for a more prosperous and equal society through the Sustainable Development Goals. Indicators 5.5.1 and 5.5.2 categorically draw commitment of all nations “to promote and secure women’s rights in decision making through political and other forms of leadership.”

This focus has been instituted because of the following reasons:

1. The report of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 stated, “Despite continuous progress, the world still has far to go towards equal gender representation in private and public decision-making.”
2.  Amartya Sen has been propounding that building talent and leadership is a critical imperative because 64% of a nation’s wealth lies in its human capabilities.

Empirical analyses undertaken by a number of agencies confirm the need to engender leadership in all sectors of development. In a 2007 study, Catalyst looked at three commonly used measures of a company’s financial performance namely, return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital from 2001 to 2004 in conjunction with data on women board directors. The study found that, in terms of return on equity, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors on average outperformed companies with the lowest percentages of women board directors by 53 per cent. With regard to returns on sales, the number was 42 per cent and for return on invested capital, the figure was 66 per cent.  A Harvard Business Review study shows that companies with women occupying 30% of leadership positions are 15% more profitable than companies with no women in leadership positions.

In India there are three very pertinent stories where women’s leadership has been     promoted through affirmative action-

1. The National Rural Livelihood Mission -  Building on the successes of the women’s movement and in keeping with the entitlement approach, women are being organized into self-help groups (SHGs) and are given capital subsidies. These SHGs get help in federating themselves for enhancing joint decision making and bargaining skills for collective action. Women’s group leadership is emerging and showing results. The Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty is reaching to more than one crore women through 9 lakh SHGs federated in Andhra Pradesh. Women’s ability to lead and influence is backed by asset ownership as 27 lakh acres of land have been brought under cultivation by them and they have become the primary suppliers of milk to the Andhra Dairy Development Cooperation through door-to-door collection programs. In India, the number of SHGs linked to banks has increased from 500 in 1990 to 1.6 million in 2006 and women have matured from leaders in savings and credit to leaders in credit, livelihood and pension schemes. SHGs have become the nurturing grounds for creating strong individuals who have fought societal battles in groups and are ready to lead and restore.
    
2. The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution - The spirit of this was that democracy in India without the real involvement of women who formed 50 percent of its population could not be a democracy in real terms unless women were deeply engaged in the processes of governance and accountability. Since 1993, this has brought in lakhs of women in grassroot leadership. Today, there are 14 lakh women in the panchayats with 86,000 chairing local bodies. Women constitute nearly 45% of the 30 lakh panchayat representatives in India. This was acknowledged in international forums and the Gender Gap report of 2016 placed India in the ninth rank out of 144 countries in the area of women’s political empowerment. Challenges persist but women are coming forward, contesting elections, attending panchayat meetings, attending leadership trainings which take them away from their villages into national training institutions that expose them to the outside world. 

3. The Skills to Education Framework - In the IT Industry, this breakthrough policy pronouncement has enabled more women to work and lead in this sector. This provides a laddered and modular approach to first equipping the learner with skills to make her employable and then providing her with continuous learning opportunities to upgrade her skills or to get a formal qualification right up to a PhD. As a result, more women are visible in leadership in the IT industry. Its apex body, the National Association of Software and Service Companies has appointed its first ever woman chairperson, Ms. Menon, who along with a woman president, Ms. Ghosh forms an all-women’s team of corporate leadership. Infosys has surpassed the SEBI mandate by appointing two women independent directors on its board. In fact 30% of the workforce in the IT/ITES sector comprises of women and there is no inequality in terms of compensation levels. The impact of an engendered leadership in this sector on national growth is documented. The IT sector has increased its contribution to India's GDP from 1.2% in 1998 to 7.7% in 2017.  Furthermore, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that India could add $770 billion to its current GDP of 2.8 trillion dollars by 2025 simply by giving equal opportunities to women.

These three landscapes where women have been enabled to become leaders are intertwined with stories of success and failure and provide useful learnings for stakeholders Some of these learnings are given below-

• To be effective as leaders, women require flexible approaches to respond to their multiple roles especially their reproductive role. Better recruitment and retention have been found to be a key motivation for employers to offer family-friendly policies and flexible working options. A large British telecommunication company reports a clear business case for flexible working conditions as a result of which, 98 per cent of women returned after maternity leave which saved an estimated £3 million and retained 1000 people, who would have left otherwise over the 2002-2003 period. In India some corporates are engaged in constructive ways is to build a pipeline of women executive directors from within the rank along with rigorous mentoring programs. The program is initiated by Shriram Capital, TCS, Aditya Birla Group, Vodafone, and Capgemini as they are the members of the Forum for Women in Leadership (WILL forum) and have been putting high potential women executives to build their aspiration level for acquiring board positions.
•  But as we promote and support women leaders in institutions of governance and management it is important to keep in mind that institutions require transformation because they govern patterns of exchange that determine who have power and voice. Aligning power and voice with gender equality is where we need to push the reset button in our minds. In the case of engendering grassroot leadership, historically, panchayats were all male and they settled disputes which was largely seen as a prerogative of men and not that of women. The panchayats have an inherent potential of carrying a male bias in the minds of people which needs to be demolished for the effective functioning of women in politics. Capacity building of panchayat functionaries as well as other change makers to unlearn stereotypes is needed along with assessments to measure changes in attitudes and practices in this direction. This unfortunately is not being done and grim realities continue to mar the canvas of engendering leadership. Forty-eight-year-old Dhoola Ratnam was burnt to death along with her grandson in a village of Andhra Pradesh in India in 2007 as she had dared to contest the elections against an upper caste Kapu community. In one state male panchayat members had spread stories that women members were sexually promiscuous, harassed them with obscene phone calls and made sexual advances during meetings. Because the institution of panchayati raj remained gender blind women leaders became victims of the national population policy and its two-child norm as some states had barred women who had more than two children from contesting elections. This has shrunk the pool of talent at a time when a larger pool would have been a driving force for promoting women’s leadership in the panchayats.
• Living in a world of partial realities, there is a mismatch between how women are perceived, and the qualities and experience people tend to associate with leaders. Can a woman leader with so called feminine qualities manage all kinds of challenging situations which uptil now had been in the men’s domain is the question that arises in many minds within and outside the workplace. Can a woman be seen and accepted as being assertive and dynamic? As we engender leadership well designed media campaigns are needed to fill this social vacuum; campaigns that use social media and mass media to bring out the reality that female leaders possess the same traits as their male counterparts: vision, perseverance, empathy, passion, assertion, even if she doesn’t look or behave like the current generation of senior male executives. Only then can women-empowered workplaces be created. Gender sensitive men have to be strong partners in such efforts. This is a critical imperative. The harm done by insensitive workspaces to women has been eloquently expressed by Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia.
   

“The longer I served as Prime Minister, the more shrill the sexism became…. What was different was that the go-to weapons in hard political debates became the kind of insults that get hurled only at women – bitch, witch, slut, menopausal, child hating. In retrospect, how could I have done things differently? I could have pointed out the gender bias early, provoked a debate to set new norms, reached out to community leaders beyond the world of politics, and reached out to men’s groups who can be seen as more objective than the leaders themselves”- Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia.

• Another important learning is that the real power that builds and sustains a leader is a strong constituency outside their workspaces to back them up as they take decisions that may sometimes question the social order. Building and nurturing a constituency is not always easy. Experience has clearly shown that when women are part of organizations they engage with women, their lives and their livelihoods. This invests in their confidence and builds their sisterhood which becomes their constituency. Not only in India, but in a number of Asian countries women leaders running self-help groups have become the logical choice for grassroot polity’. Women who had associated with the Kudumbashree Mission in Kerala, a hugely successful women’s empowerment group, were better at executing their roles in panchayats. So far, 13,100 of the 38,268 women candidates who contested the local body elections in Kerala in 2015 had links with Kudumbashree.

Rajalakshmi Ammal, president of the Kilimanoor panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram district, said that she never felt that her hands were tied. Ammal worked as a mahila pradhan agent till 1995 before taking the plunge into politics. Now 52-years-old, Ammal completed three terms as a ward member of the panchayat before becoming its president two years ago. “I am confident that I can discharge my duties without male intervention,” she said.  

In Gujarat, Mahila Samakhya facilitated women's participation in the panchayats by building their constituency providing information, organizing workshops and public events, and of the 295 women who stood for elections, 284 were elected. The data is clearly showing that a strong constituency builds strong leaders by creating a women’s agency. Women’s agency is therefore an important constituent of women’s empowerment. The women’s agency is said to be operative when it results in a fundamental shift in perceptions or inner transformation of social and political groups so that women are able to define self-interest and choice.

As stated above we know the problems and women’s voices are giving us the solutions. The Global Gender Gap Report, 2022, produced by the World Economic Forum for 146 countries is clearly showing that India’s ranking in the global index of political leadership is slipping and our attempts at engendering grassroot leadership have not translated into real gains in education, health and economic participation for women at large. Building on the learnings above, the time to act is now!

 

Year	Rank	Educational Attainment	Health	Economic Participation	Political Leadership/empowerment
2010	112	120	132	128	23
2016	87	113	142	136	9
2022	135	107	146	143	48