Where there's a WILL... ...there's a woman

India Inc has finally woken up to the idea of giving a 'fair' colour to its gender profile at the top. Even though the country's report card on women in top management has not been impressive, corporates are now moving with a sense of urgency. WILL (Women in Leadership) - a forum of women leaders launched at the Infosys campus last week - sought to initiate a dialogue on getting capable women leaders at the top. The participants from 40 different companies came from as diverse a function as finance, marketing, HR and legal. The forum threw up a host of initiatives like setting up a mentoring committee, research committee (for measuring the contributions of women to the bottom line), scholarships for women, amongst others. While such concerted efforts have raised the debate to a new level, companies are trying to get the balance right as well. While women constitute 40% of the top management team in HSBC, Zensar has worked hard to improve its figure, which is now at 10-15%, up from nil five years back. The number of women employees, it is discovered, has gone up from 12-15% to 35% for those companies initiating leadership development programmes. It has also resulted in the increasing number of women joining organisations at the entry level. Three years back, Motorola had 20% women engineers that went up to 30% last year. Of the total strength of management trainees hired, 50% were women last year when the telecom major went hiring at the campuses. This, say the companies, is no target meeting exercise, but an obvious choice to get good quality talent. That's the reason why IBM has a policy of offering special incentives to recruitment consultants for getting capable women professionals into the organisation. In many circumstances, women employees tend to quit jobs due to variety of reasons, marriage being one. Most organisations agree, losing such good quality people is just too high a cost to incur when they can be retained into the productive cycle by addressing their problems and supporting their resources. "Very little has been done to even understand what women executives need," says WILL convenor Poonam Barua. "Maintaining work-life balance alone is not the key priority for senior women executives in corporations, instead, their focus is also on a level playing field for equal opportunity to move into leadership positions." Mentoring, research, providing scholarships were some of the proposals that were made at the forum. WILL hopes to start with each participant volunteering to mentor someone in another company through regular interaction with her. Similarly, a mentoring committee of Indian CEOs would do the same. The idea is to redefine best employer organisations from the traditional and outdated indices to ones that include the best practices and a corporate code for women employees, have a diversity dashboard and create diversity indices for all business units apart from commissioning research on 'metrics' of measuring the contributions of women to the business bottom line. There are proposals to compare productivity levels of women and male executives in companies and design appraisal criteria that creates a more level playing field. Zensar of the RPG group, which has seen the results of a sustained approach of having a women forum, 'WE', feels it's all about valuing competent professionals. "Competency is not gender biased and you can't overlook the problems faced by your employees if you need a great workforce support," says Zensar global HR head Prameela Kalive. "Getting the right environment for both, your women and men only helps you to solve your retention issues." HSBC, which instituted its diversity committee two years back, has had a similar experience. According to the company, getting an understanding into women's issues allows an organisation to retain the much needed, efficient, talented and relatively stable women employees who could have otherwise left, if an all inclusive workplace environment were not offered. "All this is about how well you can retain your people," says HSBC HR head Tanuj Kapilashrami. "Any good talent at a senior position, who leaves the organisation due to reasons you could have helped tackle, is only a loss." While there has been a beginning towards getting more women at the top management, India Inc has a long way to go, before it gets a more gender diverse leadership at the helm. Raghuram Reddum, director, HR, Asia Pacific staffing and mobile device, Motorola, India, says, "It's a long-term effort and the results will show over a period of time."