A vicious circle: How gender gap makes workplaces unsafe for women

India's top companies lack women leaders, contributing to poor workplace safety for women. With only 1.6 per cent of Fortune 500 companies led by women, gender disparity remains deep-rooted

At first look, the tragedy at R G Kar Hospital and the revelations from a report on sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry may have a tenuous link with the latest Fortune India list of India’s 500 largest companies. But there is a connection. The first two highlight the lack of basic safety for women in the Indian workplace. The second probably explains why it’s likely to stay that way for some time to come.

The clue lies in the gender of the chief executive officers/managing directors of India’s largest companies by turnover. There is no woman heading even one of India’s 100 largest companies. Checking further down the ranking was too dispiriting an exercise but a White Paper by Fortune in collaboration with SPJIMR helpfully reveals that barely 1.6 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in India have women MDs and CEOs. Expanded to 1,000 companies, the number improves slightly to 3.2 per cent. It’s not as though the record elsewhere is stellar. In China, for instance, just 10.4 per cent of Fortune 500 companies were run by women, roughly the same proportion as in the US. Still, India underperforms on this metric by some distance.

There is no shortage of surveys to suggest that corporations run by women are more successful than those run by men because they tend to create more inclusive work environments. There is somewhat dubious logic to these conclusions since none of these surveys can present the counter-factual: Would these same corporations perform worse if they were headed by men? But the link between weak women’s safety in the workplace and the shortage of women leaders in companies is obvious and direct. 

This problem is unwittingly revealed in a perceptive analysis by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) of data on sexual harassment cases reported by listed companies. Companies submit this data in response to a 2018 mandate from the Securities and Exchange Board of India that all listed companies disclose data on cases of sexual harassment in their annual reports. 

The CEDA study, published in May this year, focused on 300 of the 2,000-odd listed companies on the National Stock Exchange, with 100 each selected from big-, mid and small-cap ranks to create a representative sample. The encouraging point about this data is that the number of cases of sexual harassment reported by Indian companies has increased steadily since 2013-2014, suggesting that more women employees feel encouraged enough to report sexual harassment. But as Akshi Chawla, director, CEDA, points out, the number of complaints has been growing faster than the number of complaints that have been resolved.

Though the study does not say so, at least part of the problems of tardy resolution lies in the fact that many organisations neglect to set up the complaints committee mandated under the Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act of 2013. This is a fact that the Supreme Court described as “disquieting” not so long ago. The apex court made the comment in connection with complaints of sexual harassment by women wrestlers against the head of the wrestling federation after an investigation revealed that half of India’s sports federations lacked internal complaints committees. The case for corporate India can scarcely be different.

There were two other notable points about the data in the CEDA study. The first is that only a fraction of companies actually report cases and several report zero cases year after year. This suggests two conclusions. Either managements have no mechanisms to address the problem of workplace harassment or they do not employ any women at all so they have no cases to report. 

Elsewhere, smaller surveys among women working in the organised sector reveal that female employees are either unaware of the POSH Act or their rights to access internal complaints committees or hesitated to report for fear of harassment, negative impact on their careers or victim-shaming. The CEDA study shows that the bulk of the complaints are recorded in the large-sized companies, which is understandable since these are subject to greater scrutiny. But what is happening below the radar is worrying. A minuscule share of mid-sizers report cases but almost no small companies do.   

All of these are symptoms of male-dominated work environments where managements can ignore with impunity the need to expend time and effort to create secure work-places for women. In May, a LinkedIn study showed that representation of women in corporate roles, both across organisations and in leadership positions, has stagnated since 2001, which was attributed to “bias, societal norms and structural barriers”. 

So the vicious circle is easy to spot. Uncongenial work environments keep women away, or force them to leave when they are subject to harassment, limiting the pool of women available to move up the ladder and make it to the top. Fewer women at the top in turn weakens the impulse to create congenial environments for women to join the workplace. Each deterrent undermines gender equality in myriad ways.