Courtesy: The Hindu Business Line
Author: D. MURALI


Do women in corporate boardrooms continue to be an exception rather than the norm? “Yes, very true,” agrees Anuradha Parthasarathy, Founder & CEO, Global Executive Talent (www.globalexecutivetalent.com). Even the ones that are there are typically from the owner family, she adds, during the course of a recent email interaction with Business Line.


A management graduate from BITS-Pilani, Anu was the Head of Marketing for Wipro's International Operations Division before founding Nexus Search Consultants, co-founding e4e, and then the current firm as a cross-border senior executive search enterprise based in the US.

Excerpts from the interview:


Your views on how women's presence on boards can be increased.
Women independent directors who have been recruited for their skills are rare. The problem starts at a different level — do we even have enough women at the CXO levels who can then be potential candidates for board positions? No.


So, when companies start looking to shortlist candidates for board positions 99 per cent of the candidates who surface will be men. Board positions today are tough, needing a fairly stringent evaluation process. Also it is a two-way street — the candidates too will evaluate the company to decide if they want to join the board.


Eventually, even the 1 per cent will fall off as it is next to impossible to have a high enough hit rate to select from within the miniscule pool. It is also a fact that most CEOs and investors are men and, therefore, will end up selecting a board which looks and feels more like them.

The only way we can ensure that there are enough women on the board will be through affirmative action; where they deliberately seek out the few women wherever they are and make them an attractive offer to join their board. Why would a corporate do that? Couple of reasons why they would take this extra trouble:


Legislative mandate as in Norway which insists that corporates reserve a certain number of board seats for women.


The CEO is convinced that women board members have a very powerful and positive impact on how well the company is run — that is, his short-term and long-term growth and profitability depends on having women on board. But we do see countries such as Japan with abysmal representation of women on boards still showcasing market-leading companies which are well run by all metrics. Hence it is not an open and shut case.

The only way, therefore, this situation can change at least in the next decade will be when enough women reach and stay at the top of the corporate pyramid and thereby increase the overall available pool of meritocratic candidates.


This will happen only if we get enough women in every layer of management. The only success story so far in this context is ICICI.


Why do women lose out in the mid-career phase?
Conventional wisdom will say that women are biased towards spending more time and effort in bringing up children when they are in their 30s. Hence they opt out of the corporate rat race. However the real reasons are different.

Once women put themselves through professional education such as engineering, management, etc., they are keen on building a good career. In fact, many qualified, educated women feel depressed and frustrated in the latter part of their life because they feel that they did not live up to their potential.


However, even today the corporate world is built by men, for men, of men. Often lip service is paid to the concept of supporting women and encouraging them to work — it is easy to reel out policies for the benefit of PR. But results speak louder than words and it is there to see.

Even in the IT industry, which unlike other industries depend on women for talent, there are not enough women at the top.

The easiest approach is to blame the women, but we all know that at heart all of us share the same aspirations to rise to the best of our potential — unfortunately women get pushed out, thanks to the non-conducive work environment.

We have a culture where there is a lot of emphasis placed on the physical time spent at the workplace. Networking after office hours over drinks is the key to getting to know about new opportunities. Again women hardly participate and get left out of consideration.

Going up also requires women to move out of back-office positions and take on line roles such as sales which can lead to P&L positions. However, travel within India, especially to remote places, is still very tough on women and will warrant taking undue risks in terms of safety.

Finally, the infrastructural facilities conspire to undo even the best intentions — hours to commute to work, no reliable childcare facility, absence of neighbourhood schools, and a school system which expects parents to supervise and tutor kids.

Do Indian companies pursue diversity, in general, and gender diversity, in particular? Where are the hurdles?
Indian companies have started talking about gender diversity especially the ones which want to be seen as progressive and which are catering to a global customer base. American companies want to do business with vendors who proactively pursue diversity, especially gender diversity.

However, as I said earlier, there is more lip service than real intention. And the reasons aren't far to see. Corporations are driven by the short-term, quarter-to-quarter performance goals. They will only bother about gender diversity if they feel their performance is getting affected by not having enough women at different levels.


This realisation can change attitudes overnight. Else we will need the Government to mandate “quotas” for women — in India they have enough on their plate to bother about this and it will have zero popular support.

So we will cross this hurdle when we hit the talent crunch. A talent crunch will force companies to compete for women by providing a better then “home” environment so that they would choose the corporate world over the “home” world.


Companies should feel that they need to attract enough women, retain and grow them if they are going to build a high performance, stable team. They should believe that having women in their midst will change their perspective positively. They should want women in their ranks to understand the customer and market needs better.


As of now, unfortunately (women will not like hearing this), these are not “felt” needs.