I'm a lady director and other anachronisms

Yo!

I used to cry in meetings. This was at Infosys in my late 20s. It all came flooding back when I saw one of my former bosses there, Kris Gopalakrishnan at the Horasis India Meeting held in Vietnam. I was speaking on a panel titled "Female Leadership and Why We need it More than Ever”, and it made me think about what it had taken me to get from crying and/or shouting in meetings to being an Independent Director on the boards of 5 publicly listed companies, and of course founder of my own successful consulting business.

(Spoiler alert: I no longer cry in meetings!)

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?Flashback!

My high school was all girls and traditional. We were taught that modest girls looked at their feet as they walked home. And dutifully averted their eyes from any men or boys who happened to look at them. Girls also were not expected to go out to public places unaccompanied. My engineering college - REC Trichy - was very progressive by current (or past) standards but still had a 10.30pm curfew for the female students. We had less time in the computer lab and library than the male students which, during assignments, was a definite handicap. It wasn’t until I joined Tata Elxsi after my engineering degree that I experienced anything like gender parity, though I still did not know the term.

Shouty or Weepy

When I joined the workforce post an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta I had really good presentation skills, but I didn’t have much practice on how to get my ideas across in a meeting. Or how to fight for a budget in a nice way. 奥美 , my first post-MBA job, did a lot to smoothen the rough edges but I was still very much work-in-progress when I joined the Infosys Limited marketing team.?I tended to be either shouty or burst into tears out of frustration. It is to the eternal credit of Mr Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, Phaneesh Murthy, Sudha Kumar and of course my husband Aniruddha Paul who doubles up as career coach and sounding board, for guiding me on channelizing my ideas and energy into a more productive format.

Men and women live in different planets

All humans experience the world differently. You and I could be in the exact same spot but we would experience it differently based on our own history and current situation. Taking a bus at 11pm would be experienced differently depending on your gender, age, race, and physical stature. A male bodybuilder would be more relaxed about taking a bus at night, than a slender young woman. If the young lady was equipped with a gun and a police uniform she would experience the bus quite differently, and if I were to hazard a guess, might be even more relaxed than the bodybuilder about the experience.

?The?Reykjavik Index for Leadership Research shows the difference in perceptions of men and women leaders in business and politics. This shapes our environment - whether we are viewed as candidates or not.

The Office

Our experience of the office or the corporate world is also shaped by all our experiences. If we have been conditioned all our lives to be “selfess,” “patient,” “sensitive,” “sincere,” “nurturing,” and “trustworthy,” chances are we will continue to be so in every situation, more so if we have also been rewarded in the past for these attributes. On the other hand if we have been rewarded for being “rugged,” “dominant,” “aggressive,” “selfish,” and “hard-working” then we will continue with this behaviour in every environment.?

?Modern leadership - as per?research?- requires attributes such as “plans for the future”, “expressive”, “reasonable”, “loyal”, “flexible”, “resilient”, “patient”, “intuitive”, “independent” and “analytical”. While you might associate many of these as ‘feminine” that is a result of conditioning and adoption levels of these values will rise once there is mass awareness that these are the attributes that will be rewarded not just socially, but also economically.

?Saying women are inherently only good at a certain type of leadership is false and does a disservice to everyone. As it is the pool of leadership roles is constrained for historical reasons, but if add a further qualifier that women are certain kinds of leaders, the pool shrinks even more.

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So where are the leaders-who-happen-to-be-women?

?One of my daughter’s names is in honour of?Dr Kadambini Ganguly?one of India’s first two women graduates, and one of India’s first medical doctors, back in the 1880s. Till the not so recent past, you had to see a doctor-who-was-male regardless of your gender. Most of us are now ok with seeing a doctor of any gender. And don’t think that a male doctor will be any less competent or caring than a female one.

?The main reason there are less women leaders is the environment - the pool of women who enter any commercial activity and sustain in the face of the odds - is less than the number of men who do so. The women who do make it to leadership roles exhibit certain characteristics because of the environment and conditioning.

?Just as we’ve stopped asking for “lady doctors” we need to stop (a) asking for women leaders and (b) provide leadership opportunities to the few women who are currently eligible.

Affirmative Action

Uh-oh. Yes, it is a sensitive topic and one that has all kinds of nuances. All I can say is that one of the common considerations for giving a person a senior role is having held a similar role in the past. So if you’re recruiting a board director you want someone who has already been a director. If for some environmental reason there are no women meeting that criteria-?it’s chicken-and-egg - there are no lady directors to put on your board because there are no lady directors to choose from. When the government intervenes with a policy change that insists you have to have a director-who-identifies-as-female on your board, you choose from the available candidates and hire a first-timer. I am very grateful to Rajiv Kuchhal for introducing me to my first board, Expleo Group . Out of the five boards on which I sit, there are other women on two of them - a key indicator that the choice of a board member is not by gender.

Tolerance limits of jobs

I’m also a lady engineer. I’m using that as an excuse for bandying about words like “tolerance limits”. Anyways let me wrap up with a provocative anecdote. IT companies hire large numbers which makes them susceptible to hiring candidates who fake their resumes, usually in terms of changing the name of their engineering college to a more premium one or claiming job experience at a premium organization.

What is interesting is that most of these candidates get caught on post employment fact checks rather than the actual quality of their work.?Basically, if you give someone an opportunity despite them not having the right credentials, in many cases they can stretch into the role. I am not suggesting that candidates lie, but that employers widen their nets for diversity if the role is not one that requires extremely precise qualifications.

?No more women leaders!

?Let’s move to gender neutral language - no more male nurses, lady doctors or women leaders.