Women in workforce? A work in progress, even in India's largest companies

The final part of the series on affirmative action in India Inc finds that women account for just 20% of employees. For most firms, the number is in single digit

Women seem to have less of a space in the workforce of India’s largest companies than one might imagine.

A Business Standard analysis reveals that less than a tenth of the employee base of even India’s largest companies may be made up of women. The data on female employee was sourced from the business responsibility reports of S&P BSE 100 companies. A total of 67 of these companies had data comparable over three years.  

The total women as a proportion of all total employees in the companies under consideration has risen from 18.51 per cent to in 2015-16 to 19.74 per cent in 2017-18.
 

However, the median value for female workforce participation was just 9.11 per cent for 2017-18.  

Even in numbers, the majority of companies (39 of 67 companies) in the sample had less than 10 per cent women employees. On the other hand, technology and banking companies had 30 per cent or more women on their payroll.  

Amit Tandon, founder and managing director of Institutional Investor Advisory Services (IiAS), “The number of women employees changes by the industry so you will have more women in services than in manufacturing. One issue we find is that a lot of the labour force is employed on contract.”

Many companies don’t report contract workers as part of their total work force. This makes it more difficult to ascertain the actual proportion of women among their employees. 

The broader workforce shows more worrying trends. The proportion of women in India’s labour force has actually been falling in recent years. It was at 29.4 per cent in 2005, shows World Bank data. It has fallen to 24.5 per cent in 2017. The fall is said to be on account of increased income levels overall, which result in many families relegating women back to the status of homemakers since a second income is no longer needed to meet expenses.  

“People work for two main reasons either for money or for identity. Identity is a luxury that many women do not enjoy, if that identity does not come with a benefit to the family. With the kind of socioeconomic changes that are happening, with the rise in income levels, I am seeing a lot more women opting out of work to be able to cater to their family and children,” says R M Vishakha, chief executive officer and managing director of IndiaFirst Life Insurance.

IndiaFirst has introduced a temporary hiring system to facilitate female employees who go on maternity leave so that their gap is filled by a temporary employee and women feel more secure about having a job to come back to.

Many companies have introduced other programmes which helps with employees’ family and career planning to help retain women: crèche services for new-born children, smart-apps for women that work at night to track their cab movements and work from home options.

But it’s not just in the workforce that women are absent – there is a big gap in senior leadership, which remains male dominated.

Numbers from Prime Database show that women account for only 15.8 per cent of directors on the boards of companies listed on the National Stock Exchange.

“The focus for companies should not only be to employ more women, but also on how to create more successful female leaders. A platform for women (similar to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ initiative) within the company — or across many companies  — where they can share experiences, seek solutions and learn from each other will do wonders,” says Neeti Sharma, senior vice president at TeamLease Services.

Gender bias is a problem even before the hiring stage, said a former senior human resources executive at a large IT firm. “The educational institutions also have huge gender biases. For instance even premier engineering colleges are heavily dominated by men. This reduces the pool of talented women available for companies to hire,” said the former HR executive.

The general enrolment in higher education for women is 25.4 per cent compared to 26.3 per cent for men, states the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), 2017-18.