<div>Shirish Patnaik, CFO at Morro’s Vulcan Steel, rocked in his chair, back and forth. Before him lay three CVs and across him sat Morro Retail’s VP Marketing Madhavi Lal and VP Finance Harish Vaidya. As he searched for words to say, in walked Gauri Rao (Head MR, Morro Corporate) and Atal Vaid, the COO, Morro Vulcan Steels (MVS).<br /><br />Gauri (with her characteristic gurgling laughter): What happened, Shirish? You have called your army out?<br /><br />The Morro teams were quite familiar with each other, thanks to ex-chairman Vittal Morro’s management-by-rotation approach. <br /><br /><strong>Shirish (shaking his head):</strong> Boss has given me a tough job. MVS needs to have a lady director on its board and this appointment has to happen in 10 days. And we have been trying for the last seven months! Today he sent me these two CVs and...! <br /><strong>Atal: </strong>To jaldi hire karo? Why are you traumatised?<br /><strong>Shirish: </strong>(as others laugh) Until now we have met four prospects. Boss is not happy... Good people, but he says look for more.<br /><strong>Gauri:</strong> But I don’t think there is a choice. There is, if anything, penalty for non-compliance. <br /><strong>Shirish: </strong>Penalties for non compliance? Where are the board-ready women? Did you allow them to be built up to the board level? Damn it! I am having a bad time keeping the entry level software girls in their jobs! They have pressures at home, with in-laws, with husbands... no nanny or nanny absconding, or nanny unwell...they have no backup! And this is 2015 — India Shining. Where are you going to find women directors if you did not start developing them in 1960?<br /><strong>Harish:</strong> If we had publicly shamed families that silenced their female foetuses, seriousness would have set in early. Truth is we do not have board-ready women. It is a fact. We have at best 200-600 such women, not 9,000 to go around. Because the glass ceiling is a reality. How many women grow beyond Level 2 at Morro? Eight? Nine? And forgive me, four out of these were dragged up to Level 1 because Chairman Morro said we must look like a gender diverse company! Talent has to develop consciously to attain board readiness. <br /><strong>Gauri: </strong>No comments on that. But seriously, I think having good people matters and they can be men or women and both. But to say....<br /><strong>Madhavi:</strong> I see it differently. The presence of women on boards does have an impact on other board members and the company. Even the way we strategise will have a balance. For example, today with the presence of women in Parliament, uncouth, insensitive talk (for example) that is common across all men groups has come to be challenged by women like Smriti Irani, Jaya Bachchan...gradually the quality of the interactions will change, and even the larger community will evolve.<br /><strong>Gauri: </strong>That’s very nice, but rising to the level of the board requires a certain combination of skills — we can call it assets made up of education, experience and a track record of performance. And our country has made very little investment in these! <br /><strong>Shirish:</strong> Why are you taking this to the level of the country?<br /><strong>Gauri:</strong> Think Shirish. Your mother is a gynaecologist from the 1960s, yes? What became of her? She stopped working at her father’s maternity home to look after her family. Because running off on emergency visits was inconvenient when the phulkas needed to be hot. Please don’t get me wrong. As a country, we continue to hang on to the ‘wonderful woman, can smock and knit and crochet model’; either we as a society are unwilling or unable to grow, or it is top down: the country does not want to grow, so society does not grow. <br /><br /><img width="300" height="300" align="right" src="/image/image_gallery?uuid=72c77005-91a5-44f3-b52b-319cb21d9f14&groupId=222861&t=1430226010663" alt="" />So, even if parents educated their daughters, it remained on the CV and was never allowed real expression. This is what I mean by investment. As a nation, you have to have a desire to grow your women. To enable them to evolve. But we don’t have that fire! On one hand, you want gender diversity and women in the boardrooms, on the other, you have politicians who, instead of raising the nation’s standards, talk about women’s bodies, about controlling women/girls... where is the synergy? Come on, our organisations still need to build internal infrastructure that is gender friendly, or rather, that is NOT gender unfriendly, build capabilities to co-opt women in decision making. And without this, how are you building women for board-level strategy? We are a backward nation. Face it.<br /><br /><strong>Madhavi:</strong> So, it is as much the responsibility of individual organisations as the country’s to raise the level of women. Not just by setting up schools, but by creating an environment for women workers where they can also be wives and mothers. You need to see that, feel that in your environment. It is not enough to have diaper changing rooms in airports — those cater to the tourists and their expectations — but to find a damn solution for women workers with children, to have creches close to the workplace and caregivers who are fit, healthy, honest and dependable and who are on a contract with the company. Create home care for our elderly parents and in-laws so that we can go to work without pain!<br /><strong>Harish: </strong>These are not easy; they have barely been able to begin talking about cleanliness...<br /><strong>Gauri: </strong>And cleanliness is beginning to work, isn’t it? We can complain all we want. The point is commitment. My master used to say, make a pure sankalpa and it will work. That purity of intention is not there. The passion is not there. The desire is not there. The will is not there. Because there is nothing in it for you....<br /><strong>Madhavi:</strong> Harish, to speak organisation language, these are the investments that result in women staying on at work, growing, adding experience, wanting to assume challenges, to evolve, to try harder, to excel... Today, it is a damp squib and I am not even talking about social conditioning that needs to be addressed at a different level. I agree with Gauri. What is having women on boards going to do? You still have TV serials that show women as suffering, helpless, Christmas trees. There is a whole industry thriving on it! Do you know the size of the Indian media and entertainment industry — in 2013 it clocked $15.7 billion? Where the norm is woman as homemaker, woman as subservient, woman as child-maker, woman as mindless and intelligence-free... this is the model that is preferred, because this is non-threatening. It is controllable. Whereas, even in a TV soap, you did not try and present a woman who strives to excel! <br /><br />The aspect of woman as needing self-expression is suppressed. You look at any woman who is actualised and you will see she is also a successful mother and wife. Somewhere this model is not desired. Somewhere she is threatening. Now, you want her to pole-vault from the pits to the boardroom. Where is the horsepower? If she is not built, she will not board.<br /><br /><strong>Shirish:</strong> Ha ha, nice! Yes, I see that we have not invested in her, hence she has no capital to bring to the table. I buy that. So, I ask, why are organisations not investing in her? One argument is that there prevails a section that prefers to see her as the subservient, non-thinking, helpless person. But a significant community should exist that believes in investing in her so that she builds her capital. So far, very good... Where I remain confused is that she herself does not seem to want that asset. Or let’s say, her self-opinion, however powerful, arises from the fountainhead of ‘I am a mother, I am a homemaker, I have to get home, children are waiting, mother-in-law will be annoyed, maid will come, water will go, nephew has naming ceremony, my husband needs dinner by....’ You hear this right at the interviews. You see this in the way they dress — the traditional thingy, the marital status, sindoor, bangles...I have nothing against all these, but these are not helping me see your workplace drive! She presents always in relation to someone else or something else. But never as ‘I’ the professional.<br /><strong>Gauri:</strong> You evaluate based on these?<br /><strong>Shirish:</strong> No baba.... I am sharing perceptions... understand that I want to help. And this is not just me. Other colleagues have been confused too. Please understand, as men in a world where we can be crucified for patriarchal perceptions, we steer clear of judgement. Yet when we have to think organisation, we have to ask, ‘Is this a dependable asset?’ <br /><br />At the entry stage, there is nothing to tell me who is going to last the marathon. Do I know where the investment is going? Educated women are aplenty. Plenty! They all excel at academics and are brilliant. At the time of the interview, all that is bio-data-specific intelligence; untapped, unused, unknown, un-tempered. If I put this intelligence to work, it will produce an explosion of greatness. But will she, in turn, allow herself to be tested by work? Employers struggle with this. When I work, I test work, and work tests me. Does this candidate carry a promise of tensility? When work begins to test her, will she find solutions and last it out or will she crumble? And almost always, she crumbles to the subtle pressures of social mores and false diktats. <br /><br />Staying power is what a board needs and is a function of your will to tackle the system with conviction. I mean this. I know our social system is pathetic... but change can come only with courage. And only victims can change the predatory system. Not the bystanders.<br /><br /><strong>Madhavi:</strong> Wow. Two completely different standpoints and viewpoints. Gauri says companies should invest and Shirish says women need to invest in self-evolution and courage to rewrite social norms. In the midst of this, women have not accumulated any directorial capital. I think we are not ready for lady board members owing to this sluggish human resource economy of ours!<br /><strong>Gauri: </strong>I disagree. We had and have the essential wherewithal. That we did not put it to good use, that we did not nurture our women, that we did not pay them well enough (so that it became a barrier to leaving a job), that we did not counsel them, that we did not encourage them, that we did not create flexibility for them in the workplace when we could have, that we only saw them as speedbreakers and never as dormant assets — these need to change now. I do feel the ball lies in our courts as organisations. Twenty years ago, we did a token Save the Girl Child thing. So girls didn’t get killed, some states made education free at school. Great. Then? Ok, so, some also went ahead and did their MBA. Then? Education alone is not enough. Her periphery needs emancipation much more! A mother may will herself to educate her daughter but she struggles with it when her daughter has to work late....<br /><strong>Atal:</strong> That has nothing to do with education or emancipation. It is to do with an unsafe male population...! When my daughter has to travel to Patiala for a state-level basketball match, my wife and I are close to a nervous breakdown! But our older daughter in Singapore lives alone. Because that is a country where the law works unconditionally. This is really at the heart of everything. But yes, I see that these come in the way of building professional experience.<br /><strong>Gauri:</strong> Correct! So many of our girls back away from working late if there is a need and I now do not even have a script for them. Even if I offer office cars to drop them, they decline. So, we need to find perfectly tenable solutions for ladies who have to work late; to legislate remuneration and training policies for women. To legislate maternity leave, legislate care-giving leave... create options for them to use the stay-at-home time to develop skills that will be valuable later. Companies send millions off to parent company as dividend; parent companies need to have a stake in our social growth. So, I say pull back a small percentage and apply that to finding solutions that will help us grow stronger women managers, to counsel families, to turn the social soil a bit so that women who have to take on international postings, or travel outside their home city, are able to do so with peace. Directorships can come later. <br /><strong>Madhavi:</strong> I see what you mean now. We saved a life but we could not sustain that life meaningfully. ‘Save A Girl Child’ saved an abortion, but we are not able to save India’s daughters, sadly. What we saved in the swing, we lost in the roundabout... Yes some law was enacted but we lack the spirit to implement them. So, why this kolavari? Why do you want women on boards? <br /><strong>Shirish: </strong>Yeah... we should instead take on a better challenge in women-resource building. We should take 5-10 years more, allow our women to grow in the direction of their choice, give them opportunities to grow into strong individuals. Yeah, maybe we really do not have women who are prepared for Boards yet. <br /><strong>Atal:</strong> I won’t speculate there... but a thought here: a Board needs the capital of knowledge to generate decisions, strategies and so on. Knowledge is education plus experience as one of you has pointed and yes also tensile strength. Mere education is not knowledge. When that education is put to test in a work situation, it catalyses into knowledge..And knowledge comes from both failures and successes. This is what Boards need... not just educated women...<br /><strong>Gauri: </strong>Attaboy, Atal! Shirish, good luck with those CVs. Hope Vinayak finds his lady directors, but I have a plan. I am going to talk to some of my lady friends and see what they say about Board positions. I am sure they have been approached by many... <br /><br />(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 18-05-2015)</div>
