Why Is It Becoming Necessary To Employ More Women Into Agriculture Sector?

The agriculture sector is a significant source of livelihood for a large proportion of the global population, particularly in low-income countries. Women play a critical role in food production, processing, and distribution, accounting for nearly half of the agricultural workforce in many parts of the world. However, women's contribution to the sector is often invisible, and they are excluded from decision-making processes and access to resources.

Therefore, Satender K Sighadia, HR Head, FMC India is on a full spree plan of including more and more women in the agriculture segment. Let's ee what's in store for women employment in this sector.

1. What changes would you like to bring to the hiring culture prevalent in agriculture sector?

Unlike other sectors, agriculture sector in India has not been able to reap the benefits of the culture of diversity. This, in a way, has limited the growth potential of the industry. As per a study by the Harvard Business Review (HBR), diverse companies enjoyed better overall financial performance. EBIT margins for companies with diverse management teams were 10% higher than for companies with below-average management diversity. When we look at the historical hiring trend in the agriculture sector, it is largely dominated by Male employees. Female employees form only around 10% of the employees. There are multiple reasons for this i.e. Since majority of the roles in the Agri industry require the employees to travel extensively in the field and have meetings with farmers/dealers in hinter lands, it requires one to travel to remote areas as well at odd hours and hence the family members of the female talent had been less supportive. This led to lesser number of female students opting for Agri related courses which in-turn led to reduction in female talent pool available for selection resulting in even lesser number of positions getting filled by female talent. Agriculture has tremendous potential for growth in India and having equal participation from male and female is the need of the hour. Changing this trend will require multiple interventions at Macro and Micro level, including but not limiting to spreading awareness around career prospects for females, projecting role-models from the industry to inspire the new generation, making the working environment equitable and inclusive for both the genders, Awareness training for hiring Managers etc. We, at FMC, are committed to and working on this very cultural aspect in the sector through multiple initiatives.

2. How do you plan to control the attrition rate of women talent in your industry?

While I just spoke of hiring in the previous question, retention is the next big challenge facing the industry. There are multiple factors for attrition in the sector, some controllable, and some are not. We, at FMC strongly believe that we must strive to make the work environment inclusive and a create a work culture which promotes merit-based high-performance rather than based on opinions and biases. This would require a lot of time and effort investment from all of us. It would require reconditioning of our thought processes, understanding the gaps that exist amongst the genders and then taking steps to make the playing field equitable.

3. What are the challenges you think women face from grassroot levels to top rung in corporate management specific to your industry?

As part of our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy at FMC, we keep communicating with our female talent to understand their challenges. Dealing with people having unconscious bias towards women is the most common challenge. It is not only prevalent within the employees, but also have been felt by them while interacting with farmers and customers. We also see lesser number of women in the middle-management as well as leadership roles. One of the reasons women are not moving into the more senior ranks of organizations as per perception is because they need to have their own family: they have to raise children, and its at this point that they leave the workforce. While that might be true in a lot of cases but is not the overall truth. As per a study conducted by McKinsey 1, the reason for this is women ending up more in staff roles (IT, Strategy) compared to line roles (business-unit presidents, product management) over a period of time. The pipeline of roles that lead to ‘line roles’ have a much higher propensity to lead to the C-suite compared to ‘staff roles’. In the beginning, when people are hired, the proportion of line versus staff across genders is not materially different. However, over time,

what you see is women disproportionately end up in those staff roles that don’t lead to the C-suite.1 This trend needs to be addressed to be able to make a meaningful progress.

4. What are the top skills in demand that you plan to look at for hiring talent?

As we know each role has specific skill requirements based on function, type of role, experience etc. However, a few competencies that we look for in all our hired talent across all functions are learning agility, accountability, inclusive behavior, adaptiveness, innovativeness, and a positive attitude.

5. Is digital advancement going to create more and equal job opportunities for women talent in Agri and allied industries?

The digital advancement is gender-agnostic and has equal opportunities for each and everyone. There’s no denying the positive impact of technology in agriculture with respect to improved productivity, better management of limited resources such as land and water, environmentally safe and sustainable practices and the likes. Contrary to the popular belief that tech advancements such as the use of drones and precision agriculture tools including machine learning and IoT may lead to reduced jobs, these forces will in fact drive employment generation. Corroborating this is a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) report that puts the positive impact at a 1-1.5% boost to the country’s GDP and the creation of at least 5,00,000 jobs in the coming years.2

6. Where does gender equity stand in meeting the rising pressure to retain the best talent as workforce disruption intensifies?

Gender equity is on top when it comes to our employees’ related priorities at FMC. Employee retention is one of the lagging indicators to measure employee engagement levels of any organization. If an organization has a culture which promotes transparency, gender-neutrality, inclusiveness, and meritocracy then it not only is able to have high retention of talent, but also attracts talent from other Companies and industries.

7. Your goal to have 50% women talent across all functions by 2027, what is the progress on it? Do you plan on including any policies to reach that goal before the timeline?

Yes, this is a global target for FMC, and we are not only focused on it, but also making great progress towards achieving it. Happy to share with you that at FMC India, our hiring numbers as well as net female addition have seen 100% growth in the last two 2-3 years. From having female employees in single digits 4 years ago, we are now close to making a century. There are multiple steps that we have taken at policy as well as implementation level to achieve the same. To start with, at the Talent Acquisition stage, making a gender- diverse slate of talent available to hire from, including female interviewers as part of the interviewing panel, and giving higher referral amount to employees for referring female talent. We have also reached out to Agri based universities and rolled out Internship opportunities as well as hired them as Management Trainees. To make sure the working environment is welcoming, we have periodic trainings for our employees across roles, tenures, and functions. We also have seen a lot of X-functional movements in recent years where our female talent has successfully transitioned into new roles as well as shown progress. We are also driving initiatives creating better awareness and interest among potential female talents through showcasing the ‘success mantras’ that the existing female leaders are following for growth and progress.

8. In a span of five years, what roles do you foresee will have the maximum participation from women talent in the Agri and allied sectors?

To get the true benefit of diversity, we need to have equal participation from males and females across all roles and function and restricting them to only a specific few will mean limiting their opportunities. If we have a narrow-minded approach and offer only a set of roles (Office based, data analytics), then we are not only indirectly creating a bias, but also denying the male population of opportunities in these fields. Our female population needs to feel that they are no less than anyone else and can perform a role at-par with others and it is everybody’s responsibility to support them. Only then will we truly become a diversity promoting Industry.