Here's a business case for gender equality

According to a KPMG survey, the proportion of women directors in NSE-listed companies jumped 180% between 2013 and 2016 after the Companies Act, 2013. This jump only translates to a 13.7% representation of women in 2016 from a meagre 4.9% in 2013.

How do we resolve this? Companies need to find answers to few essential questions to understand how easy or how difficult it is for the women workforce to work in their respective companies - Are we treating women differently than men in our organisation? Is the resignation percentage higher in women? What if our company’s culture has limited women’s growth? Is the workload and appreciation ratio equal for both the genders? Based on the inputs received from these questions, the company should accordingly look for a solution to slowly and gradually build an unbiased work environment.

Gagan Singh, chief evangelist officer – diversity and inclusion, ethics, legal and CSR, ANAROCK Property Consultants says, “Gender equality at the workplace is important because apart from the fact that women can be as qualified and capable as men in any role, they also bring a unique set of attributes to the table without which a modern company is incomplete. Men and women are, by nature, wired differently. Each gender comes with some unique capabilities. Men’s qualities are those that shaped the past, while women’s qualities are those that will shape the future. Both serve their respective purposes, so there is no question of one gender being superior to another”.

The issues start right at the bottom from the basic amenities offered to women at work to the presence of a glass-ceiling which acts as an invisible barrier for women to climb up the ladder in an organisation.

While addressing the subject of bringing in gender equality, we need to understand that ensuring equality cannot be restricted to just a policy, it needs to be imbibed in the culture of the organisation. Drafting women employee friendly or gender-neutral policies can be the first step, ensuring commitment to the policies can be the second step – which needs be a top-down approach. The third step can be to have an unbiased grievance redressal system wherein issues with respect to equality for both the genders are addressed and resolved. Eventually, this shall become a part of the organisation’s culture itself.

Jayant Kumar, chief – HR, Tata Power adds, “A country’s economy is more likely to grow sustainably when women and men fully participate as employees, entrepreneurs, stakeholders, and leaders. Most studies focus on women in higher level roles, especially in executive positions and on corporate boards as they add economic value to the organisations. More companies are realising that recruitment of women professionals will aim towards expanding the pool of talent to help drive transformational changes especially to build new management styles, and increase operational efficiency to bring greater value to the company. HR’s role is to support and reinforce gender equity through policies implementing gender-based equity and make the company more evolved.

Diversity at the workplace is not a 'nice-to-have' slogan. It’s a business case. When half of the population is added to the consideration set, the quality of talent goes up significantly. Enhanced diversity also uplifts various work related dimensions, like quality of decisions. Innovative employment models which account for life stage needs of women workforce will propel the diversity ratios since marriage, maternity and mobility are the prime reasons where careers get disrupted and dignified re-entry becomes difficult.

The McKinsey Global Institute report 2016 estimates that improved gender diversity can add $12 trillion to the world GDP by 2025. For this to really work, the public, private, and social sectors will need to act to close gender gaps in hiring as well as pay packages”.

The writer is manager-human resources, SILA