Smashing the glass ceiling from the corner office

How Women Work: Fitting In and Standing Out in Asia

Author: Aarti Kelshikar

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 240

Price: Rs 499

In Season 5 of Amazon Prime Video’s highly watchable The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the protagonist, comedienne Midge Maisel who aspires to make it big in stand-up, starts a new job as a writer for a popular late-night talk show. She’s the only woman on the job. On Day 1, as she enters the writers’ room, the men take one look and then proceed to ignore her. She scurries around looking for a place to sit; finds none; drags a heavy chair from a corner to be part of the team; plonks herself down on it; and gets busy scribbling jokes, good ones at that, in her notepad. But when it’s time to select the jokes that’ll make it to the show, hers are barely heard.
 

At the end of the day, as the male writers head to a bar, she too joins them, trying her best to fit in even as she strives to stand out.

Midge Maisel’s is the story of every woman who knows she is cut out to shine but realises that to get there, she needs to intelligently navigate, even challenge, cultural and social realities, expectations and perceptions. It’s a story with which women, particularly those in leadership roles, across the globe are all too familiar. And more so, in this part of the world, given the deep and varied cultural contexts in which gender roles are defined or understood here.

Asia has its share of successful women leaders, and the qualities they bring to the table aren’t that different from those of men in leadership positions. Leadership traits are, after all, gender-agnostic, acknowledges Aarti Kelshikar early on in her book, How Women Work: Fitting In and Standing Out in Asia. What varies, though, are the unique challenges that women face right from Point A to Point Z in their professional journey.

These might not be that evident, which is why a woman’s lived experience is the only way to understand it. And that is why there are so many books focused on women’s lives by women. Ms Kelshikar’s book is another one in that growing list. How it differs, though, is that it narrates the experiences of senior women leaders (among them CEOs and directors) of working in a region that is not only largely male-centric but also has cultural nuances that can’t just be brushed aside.
 

Besides providing an insider’s view through the eyes of the women leaders, it also offers an outsider’s perspective through conversations with the men who work with them. This is an area that is often missing in feminist writing, a gap that creates a silo-like space that has women writing about women after speaking to women and then being read only by women. This is a book that, more than women, men need to read.

 The book spans six Asian countries — Singapore, India, China, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines  — and begins by offering a “sliver of the cultural and gender dynamics” in these countries.

 The Philippines comes out looking quite good. Women enjoy equal opportunities here in education and jobs; they’re encouraged to work; and there are more women than men in the workforce, including in middle- to senior-level positions.

 China, with its high score on the power distance index (the degree of inequality that exists and is accepted in society), emerges as a masculine society. Its women are tenacious, entrepreneurial and successful, and account for 70 per cent of the world’s most successful women entrepreneurs and two-thirds of women billionaires globally. And yet, as Chinese publisher and author Xu Ge Fei is quoted as saying in the book, “these freedoms come at enormous responsibility, which women have to shoulder. You have to be three superwomen at the same time to manage home, health and all expectations.”

India features with its many paradoxes and promises, a society where businesses appear to be changing their outlook towards working women, with 39 per cent in senior management positions against the global average of 31 per cent (Grant Thorton’s Women in Business 2021 Report). The country that comes out looking really bad is Japan, with its punishing work culture and woeful position in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index.

 Beyond the numbers, the book is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes from women leaders on how they demonstrate courage and exercise control, deliver results while also nurturing relationships, build trust and ensure they are heard. It also talks about how women leaders choose to dress, a subject of interest often informally discussed in professional circles but seldom addressed in serious writing.

Many of the real-life accounts are accompanied with a box carrying the author’s insights and interpretations. On the subject of how women dress, Ms Kelshikar writes: “Dress is an additional layer of complexity that working women sometimes experience in India.” So are stereotypes. For instance, stakeholders would frequently question an Indian woman leader who worked in the liquor industry about her alcohol consumption, something they’d never ask a man.

Effective women leaders, the book demonstrates, have figured out how to sidestep many of these stereotypes in order to advance. Or else, they’ve learnt to smash them head-on  — from under the spotlight, like Midge Maisel, or from the corner office.