What Women Want

To celebrate International Women's Day 2024, I'm taking the opportunity to reshare a blog that's been seen on my website by many over the last years. I hope it provides some good food for thought - and is also interesting to reflect how much we believe things have moved on since this was written.

I'd welcome your thoughts on that in the comments.

I started my career in the 80’s, when a majority of the girls around me chose to get married and settle down to a full-time ‘home-builder’ role. Blame it on ignorance, or destiny, I found myself in a sales executive role that demanded a significant amount of travel and external meetings — definitely not one of your predictable 9-to-5 jobs in the air-conditioned confines of a corporate office!

Having got into it, I soon realised that I thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of traveling, meeting new people, and ushering computers into the Indian workspaces. I reveled in competitive make-or-break negotiations, and nail-biting finishes. No wonder then that I did do very well in that unconventional role.

Imagine my surprise when my boss, during my second annual review asked me if I would want to consider moving to a more suitable back-office, support role! He was being considerate, assuming that I would soon get married, and would need more time for my family. Perhaps he was right, but I was livid. All I could see was my prospects for reaching the top vanish forever. Even that early in my career, I realised that business roles that directly impact the topline were the pathway to the top, not support roles.

Women have often been forced to make such choices early on in their life — right after they finish high school and after landing their first jobs. The result of this shows up glaringly in the gender-based income disparities even in the private sector.

The average annual income of a woman was less than a third of a man’s in corporate India, as per a World Economic Forum report published a decade ago. There's been some progress since, but the gap still very much exists.

The same survey, based on responses of 60 of the 100 best employers in India, showed that women employees held only 10 percent of the senior management positions in two-thirds of the surveyed companies. We don’t even need formal surveys to show this, as it is very apparent that there are only a handful of women who make it to executive boards or any position of power in India.

While girls outshine boys year after year in school exams, they do not charge ahead to compete for the most coveted seats in IITs or IIMs. Even the Civil Services that offer a highly secure and structured work environment attracted only 195 from the fairer sex, out of a total of 910 — a measly 20 percent share.

All this implies that the withdrawal and gradual dropping out from lucrative professions and powerful jobs starts early on in a woman executive’s life. This is true even in professions like medicine that are considered ‘women-friendly.

’Women dominate nursing while the higher paying specialties such as cardiac surgery, neurosurgery etc. are predominantly male-dominated. And this is just not true for Indian women, as a study done by Mathew Bidwell, a Wharton School professor, and Roxana Barbulescu, a McGill University professor, demonstrates.

They chose 1255 men and women graduating from an elite MBA program in the US as their sample. Their study showed that women are less likely to apply or accept Wall-Street type finance jobs or management consulting jobs and are more likely to take up internal marketing and finance jobs. Of course, the jobs they discard are the higher-paying ones. Not surprisingly, they found that the decision-making in women’s case stems from three factors. One, women prefer jobs that offer them work-life balance; two, women are often reluctant to apply for jobs that are seen as masculine; and three, women tend not to apply for jobs where they feel their chances of success are low.

If we take it that Indian women would also be using somewhat similar factors in their decision-making, it would explain a lot of gender segregation in India. Flexi-time, work-site crèches, and better infrastructure etc.- facilities that are crucial for women - are woefully inadequate in India. Add to this constraints around personal safety and you have a more complicated picture. No wonder women overwhelmingly vote to take up jobs that address these concerns, leaving out salary and growth prospects as ‘nice-to-have’ considerations, rather than ‘must haves.

We hear a lot of discussion in the media about what can be done to reverse this trend, or even move the needle a little towards bridging this gender gap. Others question the need to change this, as it appears that women themselves are choosing to compromise. What’s wrong if women prefer to play CEOs at home rather than at the workplace?

Do we count the number of men who don the apron, or choose to bring up kids? Are girls better off not spending their adolescent years cramming for JEE as most boys from middle-class homes are expected to?

Perhaps, we are missing the wood for the trees. Our measurement metrics are skewed when we decide to measure success only in terms of power and position. What about the number of women artists? How about teaching, which has always attracted women in droves? Should we assume that these statistics are irrelevant as their salaries are not what the investment banker and the management consultant make?

In 1972, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the ruler of the tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, coined the phrase Gross National Happiness (GNH) to measure how well his country and its people were doing. This was, and continues to be, a radical departure from the GDP-based measures that every other country chooses to measure its progress by. However four decades later, the UN held a conference attended by over 600 countries, to consider applying GNH as a model of national growth in place of a narrow, purely commercial benchmark.

What if we also look at gender parity through a similar lens? Can we change the framework to measure whether women are as happy as men in place of measuring whether they are earning as much as men? In one such study by Pew Research Center it was discovered that women, whatever be their position in the corporate hierarchy, are much happier than men - at least in Japan, India, the Philippines, Pakistan and Argentina!

Doesn’t that say it all? At least women are evolved enough to realise that happiness is not about landing the best-paying jobs!