Women leadership missing in pharma sector, says Mercer India

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According to a study from Mercer India, the life sciences industry is way behind in terms of female workforce representation that stands at 11 per cent on an overall basis. In life sciences industry, there is only five per cent of female representation in sales and marketing function. Diversity, however, looks somewhat better in other functions in life sciences companies with women representation being 12 per cent in manufacturing, 17 per cent in R&D and 21 per cent in corporate functions.

“One of the major reasons for pharma lagging behind is the significantly large sales force which is not perceived as a career of choice by women and hence the talent pool is very limited at the entry level,” said Kalpesh Vohra, cluster leader for life sciences and health care at Mercer. He adds, pharma sector is still at the entry level of building ecosystems for gender inclusion and women leadership. However, there are some recent positive trends such as some companies putting in the mandated ratio of female candidates while sourcing, providing higher amount to employees referring female candidates as part of the overall employee referral schemes in the company and a few more.
 

Firms with advanced training benefit in compliance
 

Return on investment is greater for organisations with training programmes deemed mature or advanced, helping them achieve risk mitigation and culture change, according to the 2017 Ethics & Compliance Training Benchmark Report by ethics and compliance software and services company NAVEX Global. “More than half of our respondents classified their training programmes as at least mature and said they are better able to determine and then show the linkage between programme maturity and training objectives to executives,” said Ingrid Fredeen, J D, NAVEX Global’s vice-president of online learning content and the report’s author. “Being able to sharpen the business case for training is important for compliance programmes hoping to secure more funding at this critical time, when a scandal or cyber-attack can have swift and sweeping negative effects on an organisation and its brand.”

Forty-eight percent of respondents said their training programmes were maturing — meaning they have a basic plan for the year that covers risk and role-based topic assignments. Effectiveness measures for the programmes are limited to completion rates and qualitative feedback.

Most companies fail to gauge cybersecurity effectiveness

Fifty-eight per cent of the respondents to a survey scored an F or D grade when evaluating their organisation’s efforts to measure their cybersecurity investments and performance against best practices, the report by Thycotic, a provider of privileged account management and endpoint privilege management solutions, revealed. The results of the first annual 2017 State of Cybersecurity Metrics Report, an analysis of key findings from Thycotic’s Security Measurement Index (SMI), were the outcome of a benchmark survey of over 400 global business and security executives.

“It’s really astonishing to see just how many people are failing at measuring the effectiveness of their cybersecurity and performance against best practices,” said Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic. 

“At a time when threats are escalating and the need for quantifiable metrics is putting security teams and executives under pressure, the 2017 State of Cybersecurity Metrics Report reveals what is actually occurring so that companies can produce assurances, remedy their errors and protect their businesses.”

India to have 850 million online users by 2025

India will have more than 850 million online users by 2025, with Reliance Jio 4G triggering most of the growth which has added 100 million connections in just seven months, a survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed. “While it took the country eight years to reach 250 million 3G connections, Reliance Jio 4G network added 100 million connections in just seven months,” it said. It estimated that by 2020, half of all Internet users in India will be rural, 40 per cent of whom will be women and 33 per cent will be of 35 years of age or older.

“Digital’s impact is becoming pervasive across all consumer segments. This breaks the earlier trend in the country when the initial digital consumers were male, millennial and mostly metro-based,” the survey noted, while predicting that digitally influenced spending, which stands at $45 billion-$50 billion a year, may go up to $500 billion-$550 billion. “This will account for 30 to 35 per cent of all retail sales by 2025,” the survey found. The survey examined the changing behaviour of more than 10,000 consumers across more than 50 product categories.