Top corporate executives vow to break male bastion
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 10 November 2009, 22:45 IST   |    7 Comments
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Top corporate executives vow to break male bastion
New Delhi: Women aspiring for top management positions have reason to smile, as they not only have support of innovators like Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi and ICICI Bank Managing Director Chanda Kochchar, but also have backing in the male bastion as well as with Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn coming out in favor of giving them a better break. At the World Economic Forum, Ghosn said that corporates will have to think seriously about hiring women as part of their management teams, not as part of a fashion or new trend, but because they would otherwise miss out on talent. "You cannot get the best and brightest by choosing only from 50 percent of the population and ignoring women who constitute the remaining half of the pool," said Indira. As reported by India Today, she also pointed out that a preponderance of housewives in India actually wants to work and unless they are given the choice, we cannot achieve gender equality. "Not giving them this choice is clearly a case of gender discrimination." Nissan had only one percent women in the company's management in 1999. "The number has now gone up to five percent and we are seeing the advantage in better products rolling off the assembly line," said Ghosn. Some corporate chiefs have been looking at women as a liability as they take long maternity leaves which affect the operations of the company. However, Chanda said that a company has to plan ahead and provide for the exigency if women are to be inducted in the workforce. About 26 percent of ICICI Bank's 40,000 employees were women and the bank had taken this into consideration while drawing up its human resource management plans. The bank even provides support for the children of working mothers and there are several male employees who are availing of this facility as well," added Chanda. Asked whether a women or a man was a better CEO for a company, Indra replied, "It is not whether you are a man or woman but the person that counts. I am the fifth in line to succeed great CEOs that have brought Pepsico to its present eminence and they were all men." "A culture of treating women on merit has to be developed for promoting gender equality in corporate and this is not merely tokenism," said Chanda. Also, according to Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for global women's issues, women had to work and raise a family which is essential for society and corporates would have to factor in the maternity leave in their business models. However, Nik Gowing of BBC said that he had visited the Maruti-Suzuki factory in Gurgaon and found no women at all employed on the assembly lines of the plant while very few of them were working in the back office. Gowing also pointed out that while the U.S. ranked 13th on the "gender gap" list, India slipped to the 114th rank.