Companies in India with Men as HR Heads:
Accenture,
Adobe, Aditya Birla Group, Airtel, Amazon, Britannia, Cap Gemini, Carl
Zeiss, Coke, Cipla, Deloitte, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Flipkart,
GE, Glaxo Smithkline, Godrej, HCL, HSBC, Honeywell, Himalaya Drug
Company, Infosys, IBM, Intuit, ITC, Johnson & Johnson Medical, JP
Morgan, Larsen & Toubro, Lenovo, MakeMyTrip, Marico, Microland,
Microsoft, Myntra, Oyo, Pfizer, Phillips, Tesco, Thomson Reuters,
Tavant, TCS, Unilever (note: Leena Nair is the Global CHRO), Vodafone,
VM Ware, Welspun, Wipro, Yes Bank
Companies in India with Women as HR Heads:
Cisco, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Greaves Cotton, Google, InMobi, Intel, Linkedin, Procter & Gamble, Star TV
Check out Linkedin’s HR Power Profiles 2016 here.
So where did all the women go?
Do women
become less ambitious with time? Or is there an unconscious bias, which
creeps in resulting in fewer women getting HR leadership roles? Are
companies not providing the required support and enabling mechanisms to
help women transition through years when they need to give time to their
families? Or is ensuring women’s progress to leadership positions not a
priority for organizations? Do women find starting their own
organizations, where they control their own time, a better alternative?
These and many other questions are hard to answer comprehensively. The
best answer is possibly a little bit of everything.
Another
question, which deserves attention, is whether women get appropriate
support and encouragement from their partners. When women struggle to
balance responsibilities, often the natural, instinctive response of men
is to protect and help their wives, take charge as the primary bread
earner, and tell their partners that it is ok to take a break, go slow
or look for work from home options. While this is done with genuinely
good intentions, it gives women a tempting option (with both men and
women comfortably falling back into more traditional gender roles). I
think men would play a far more critical role by supporting women in
tangible ways in the form of help with childcare, parental care and
household activities, and ensuring that their partners do not have to
compromise on their careers in any way. This is probably wishful
thinking.
Changing face of Leadership
While gender
roles are slowly evolving, traditional leadership behaviors are very
closely entangled with typical masculine traits. Research continues to
support claims that because of deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, even
if men and women leaders exhibit the same behaviors and
accomplishments, their effectiveness may be perceived differently. As per 2016 research from AAUW, time
and time again, female leaders are chided for being too bossy, bitchy,
cold, or aggressive: characteristics that are at odds with traditionally
“feminine” attributes like compassion, warmth, and submissiveness.
Often women leaders I talk to speak about how they do not want to
change their personalities just to fit in. They constantly struggle: if I
am aggressive, I am labelled as being overly emotional and asked to
keep my emotions in check; if I am quiet and not aggressive, I am told I
lack a voice and am not ambitious. This is a real catch 22 situation!
As per a 2016 EgonZehnder study,
women adjust their goals to what they believe is realistic, and can be
touted as reduction in ambition. Rubbish. Often the ‘only choice’ women
have as they readjust their life-goals and start using a more
comprehensive framework (including their role as a parent/ primary
caregiver) to manage their lives is to slow down. This unfortunately
might be the beginning of a vicious cycle. Women take a break, lose
their network, miss out on opportunities, you get the drift. Also, this
is perhaps not a vicious cycle for each woman ‘individually’, but when
you view the situation at an aggregate level the situation is far from
rosy.
The need for a Virtuous Cycle
I believe
this situation needs to change and action needs to be taken now. Perhaps
senior HR women leaders at the helm of organizations are better
positioned to design appropriate programs and policies required across
different career-stages (and life stages) for women. It was during Leena
Nair’s HR leadership at Unilever India, that the innovative Career by
Choice program was put in place. The program helps women who have fallen
off the career ladder to rejoin the workforce. Arundhati Bhattacharya,
the first woman to head the State Bank of India in its 208-year-history,
put in place revolutionary rules on maternity, and she wasn’t even the
Chief HR Officer. Employees at SBI today are allowed to take sabbaticals
for upto two years — for child care or elder care. Adobe has taken
conscious steps to maintain pay-parity across genders. Just recently,
the Global Head of HR at Adobe, Donna Morris, announced that,
taking into consideration job and geography, women employees at Adobe
earn 99 cents for every dollar earned by male employees in the U.S.
Compare this to data from the US Department of Labor: women earn $0.79
for every $1.00 earned by men, on average across the U.S. These are only
a few examples of how women in leadership roles directly contribute to
enabling other women grow in their careers.
Working mothers raise daughters who are more likely to work, further bolstering the virtuous cycle. A 2015 research from HBS
points to evidence that women whose mothers worked outside the home are
more likely to have jobs themselves, are more likely to hold
supervisory responsibility at those jobs, and earn higher wages than
women whose mothers stayed home full time. Also, men raised by working
mothers are more likely to contribute to household chores and spend more
time caring for family members, a necessary and admittedly hard change
in otherwise well accepted societal roles and norms.
Clearly
there is an opportunity to fulfill a virtuous cycle: more women HR heads
(and women leaders in general), better programs and equal pay for women
in HR (and other functions) resulting in future women leaders in HR
(and other functions). Men in senior HR leadership roles, who ensure
diversity in their teams, invest in understanding women’s career
challenges, and drive relevant diversity programs are definitely needed
as well.
What Next
Clearly
organizations (both men and women leaders) need to take action in the
form of a range of measures: correcting for unconscious signalling
through lower pay for women compared to men in similar roles, putting in
place structured diversity programs, restart and primary caregiver
programs and committing to women’s progress to leadership roles.
But I also want to reach out to my network, specially my women friends and colleagues and ex-colleagues in HR.
The rules of the ‘career growth’ game change when you are in the
mid-career stage. While in the first 5-8 years of your career, your
job-changes and promotions are primarily impacted by your performance,
post the 7-8 year mark, ‘networking’ becomes a key component influencing
your future career moves. Whether you like it or not, who you know and
who will support your next career move matters. It matters because
someone needs to suggest your name for a job at the right time and
someone needs to be convinced of your performance to place a bet on you.
So get out there, rekindle your network and talk about your career
goals and achievements. Find a way to take on the next challenging
assignment (which requires a rejuggle of your responsibilities at home)
that comes your way. If you are on a career break, and have been
thinking about restarting, check out one of my previous posts here.
I know it is
sometimes genuinely hard to balance all your responsibilities. Hang in
there, keep at it, don’t give up. Speak more openly about these issues
because education and awareness is one of the most important steps
towards change. I am looking forward to a time when your jobs as heads
of HR will improve the statistics I shared earlier in this post. You
know you have it in you. Remind yourselves of your aspirations during
the first semester during your HR MBA program. You owe it to yourselves
to accomplish what you set out to.
And
we, both men and women, owe it to our daughters who deserve to grow up
in a world with many more role models than what we have today.