By Lubinisha Saha

Each year, we look at the United Nations Women’s Day theme, hoping to find some much-needed inspiration. In 2023, the theme was ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’. In 2022, it was “Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow”. This year, it is ‘Invest in women—accelerate progress’. Many big words with impressive agendas, that over the years, sometimes sound tiring. Then there are conferences (which have a way of multiplying around Women’s Day) that encourage you with beguiling phrases such as ‘lead like women’, ‘change the world’ and ‘we can do it’. To be honest, a lot of these phrases have left us wondering—are we truly inspired? With this thought, I am inspired to maybe go beyond tokenism and un-celebrate Women’s Day and make every day phenomenal.

My strong sentiment comes from the fact that over the years, there have been huge strides in building diverse and inclusive workplaces within corporations in India. For instance, with 23.4% of boards comprising at least three women members, the female representation in Indian boardrooms is higher than the global and Asian averages. As of March 2023, 19.5% women were Board Directors in NSE-listed companies. According to Grant Thornton’s International Business Report (titled Women in Business 2023—The push for parity), India has 36% women in the senior management positions in mid-market businesses, which is 4% higher than the global count. At the same time, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022, the share of women legislators, senior officials and managers in India increased from 14.6% to 17.6%, and the share of women as professional and technical workers grew from 29.2% to 32.9%.

With more diversity than before, what can we do to further accentuate the success of women at the workplace? The larger question is how do we make workplaces more inclusive beyond tokenism, a metric, or a KPI, with inclusivity being ingrained as a tenet? We need to focus on organisational policies, work culture, and company values, which holistically enable a diverse and inclusive workforce. Such workforces make resilient organisations.

Today, the organisational challenge is how to go beyond Women’s Day to everyday. Diversity should not be a one-time special push, and organisations must be evolved enough to see the merits of having a  diverse workforce. I believe building a diverse culture and inclusive perspective is a journey that has to cross many junctions and intersections.

At the outset, one way forward could be to strengthen the middle management with a diverse workforce. To enable this, we need to work on unconscious bias, especially among the leadership. Some examples of this include not asking women employees questions about their personal life or their life’s choices. Making unsolicited judgement when an interviewee is pregnant or is a single mom or a working mother with presuppositions about lack of effort, ability, and drive at the workplace are some other instances of unconscious bias at work. These need to be thrown out from all doors, those within us and those of the organisation.

Companies should actively recruit women for ‘non-conventional roles’ such as security, engineering, sales, and other domains less frequently explored by female talent. We must strive to foster gender diversity across departments, thereby tapping into fresh perspectives and strengthening the collective skillset 

Sharing the importance and the reason for policies such as those on maternity, sexual harassment, work from home, and more will help build a context for these rules within the organisations. Sharing stories on how organisations benefit from a diverse workforce and how policies and conversations help build a very easy and fluid culture will help to break down the mindset of tokenism, forced percentage hiring, seeing benefits as perks and not needs. Gender inclusivity in conversations and perspective-building is vital, as we do not need women talking about the need for diverse teams. Men and women should be seen as equal stakeholders. Lastly, gender pay parity should become a non-issue in 21st century India.

Organisations should not solely be accountable for diversity and inclusion; women should also equally participate in driving this change. They need to apply for jobs, not only when they are 100% skilled, but if they have the competence and the organisation is willing to invest in them. Each woman needs to own her career and it is for them to ask, raise hands, and use the company policies/ benefits as needed to further this approach. Since women are part of the story, even tales such as wrongful accusations of harassment or women ‘milking the system’ need to stop.

When we focus on the ‘why for organisations’ and ‘why for women’, the ‘how of implementation’ becomes a natural corollary. Going beyond the fields of diversity and gender, it is time for all stakeholders to converge there. Let’s begin with un-celebrating Women’s Day together!

The author is Head of legal & compliance, Airbus: South Asia & International. Views are personal.