Corporations in India have a rather long journey to make on understanding the gender gaps and giving the attention and resources the discrepancies deserve in order to be eliminated
Saadia Zahidi’s new book launched this month is called Fifty Million Rising. It is an apt title for the work of a writer who is a self-confessed data enthusiast and the author of 12 editions of the World Economic Forum’s iconic report that quantifies the magnitude of gender disparities in countries worldwide. Fifty Million Rising, however, is about the Muslim world and the great numbers of women who are now working there. The book tells extraordinary stories of a few ordinary women who are challenging the most rigid stereotypes at home and at their workplace.
I have known Saadia as a colleague at the World Economic Forum, but that was much after I had closely followed for several years her data published in the annual gender gap reports. Prior to joining the WEF and even during my tenure at the Forum, I founded and ran a small not-for-profit organisation that took upon as its first task the creation of a tool for private companies located in the Middle East to calculate, track, and decrease the gender gap. There was a workbook designed to suit companies belonging to different cultural contexts, sizes, sectors, from which the appropriate questionnaire needed to be simply pulled out and given to employees. There was a digital option for this too, in case employees used computers. The results of the manually filled questionnaire or of the digital one, were recorded on to a software that would then calculate the ‘gender gap’ in the company based on a large number of parameters specifically weighted to the context that the company operated within.
The idea that had led me to create this tool was that a company’s gender gap was not just an issue about headcount, ie how many men and women have been employed. In my earlier tenure at Goldman Sachs, I had been saddened to notice how women were often hired by the bank to simply improve its public image on gender diversity calculated on the basis of headcount. To counter this popular practice, the tool measured gender gap after considering a large number of other criteria, such as wage differentials between men and women employees, aspirations versus roles offered to both genders, access to leadership for both, and so on.
My point was that gender gap is not just about headcount. An organisation can well employ the same number of men and women, but if those women are being paid less than the men for the same work, then that is not gender parity. Further, if a woman is paid less or employed on a role that does not match her aspirations, then that damages her spirits, the company’s productivity, and ultimately the economy.
With support from the International labour Organization, the tool brought companies to quantify the differentials across various parameters of men and women employees’ quality of work life, monitor it, and improve it. Collecting and leveraging data about socio-economic issues is tricky. Any serious scholar of the social sciences will tell you that data can be used to prove both sides of almost any argument. Yet data or at least quantifying certain complex social issues is important because it explains the problem in tangible terms, and thus hopefully help point towards solutions.
This is what makes Fifty Million Rising an immensely important book. Saadia assesses the progress of women who are caught in complex societal entrapments at home and opportunities for work. She points out how seemingly simple trajectories of progress are, in fact, a consequence of several difficult victories against stereotypes. The stories are of how an employee at McDonald’s in Pakistan worked up to the ranks of a manager; a widow in Egypt runs a catering business with her daughter, against her son’s wishes; an employee in a Saudi company spearheads change in the culture of her workplace; and many others. Saadia points out that in just a decade, millions of Muslim women have joined the workforce, gaining more earning power and greater economic freedom, which in turn is changing cultural norms. She shows that how these trends are re-shaping how women are viewed in the Muslim world and indeed elsewhere.
Why is this an important book for IndiaIJ The wealth of a nation is not just a number. It must be measured in terms of how the expansion of opportunities has taken place for individuals in society. It is, therefore, that the trends pointed out by Saadia must be seen in India too as a far greater contributor to progress (or not) rather than the GDP. For, after all, these trends lay out the implications of economic and political changes on providing (or not) the power of choice. Choice is determined by the availability of options in the individual’s environment as well as the freedom the individual can exercise to avail of those options. Progress must be about what the economy gives us, rather than just the growth of the economy per se.
Secondly, I strongly believe — and I have written about this often as well — that the economic growth of a country must be assessed by also taking into account the progress made by the country’s most socio-economically disadvantaged communities. In India, the literacy rate of Muslims has increased from 59.1 per cent in 2001 to 68.5 per cent in 2011, but it still lags behind almost any other section of society in India. Further, the rate of participation in work by Indian Muslims continues to be the lowest among all minorities, more so for Muslim women. These women need role models of real women who have overcome challenges they too faced.
Finally, corporations in India have a rather long journey to make on appropriately understanding the gender gaps in their organisation and giving the attention and resources those discrepancies deserve in order to be eliminated. They need to be tutored on grasping the nuances and provided with hard-hitting examples. They also have to understand that the commitment to ensure men and women are happy and progressing at the place of their work is not just because this makes for a ‘business case’ to do so, but because every life is more precious than a company balance sheet.
Miniya is the author of Indian Instincts: Essays on Freedom and Equality in India, Penguin Random House (2018), and the CEO of Sustain labs Paris, the world’s first sustainability incubator. Email: miniya@labsparis.com