Second, the good news lies only in primary education data. According to UNICEF data from 2013, while the enrolment ratio of girls as a percentage of boys8 for primary education is a fantastic 99.9 per cent; this drops to 91.8 per cent for secondary education. Thereafter, there is no guarantee that the girls who have been enrolled will complete their education. The survival rate at secondary school for girls is 48.7 per cent, as compared to 58.5 per cent for boys.9 Consequently, fewer women have jobs in cities, compared to women who work in farms in rural India. According to a Catalyst report, a meagre 16.2 per cent of urban workers are women (2015–16)!10 In contrast, a whopping 30 per cent of India’s adolescent girls are already married, as compared to 4.6 per cent married adolescent boys.11 Clearly, the primary role of girls in urban and rural India is perceived to be at home.
During board meetings in the early days of my tenure at the Jindals’, the office pantry boys would skip serving me a cup of tea. This was because they were not habituated to seeing a young girl taking a seat in the boardroom. They thought I was an assistant to one of the board members, and therefore undeserving of tea.
A number of general practices were not even recognized by employees as gender-insensitive, but were inconvenient for women employees. Some of these practices would be considered terribly odd in most other parts of the world. General electronic communication to the company’s men and women employees usually went out with the greeting ‘Dear Sir’. My boarding pass on our company aeroplane had me titled as ‘Mister’—they were not used to women passengers in a private jet. Some of our offices had the customary two toilets standing side by side—both for men.
There is also a peculiar practice in many Indian companies to celebrate employee birthdays inside an office meeting room with a cake, Coke, potato chips and a bouquet of flowers. Colleagues awkwardly line up at the designated time, the more enthusiastic ones start to sing the birthday song, and the cake is cut and subsequently smeared on the face of the employee whose birthday it is. Then comes the moment when it must be decided who will slice and serve the cake to everyone. All eyes turn to the women in the room. Even if there is one woman in a room full of men, and even if all the men are in greater proximity to the cake than the woman, the role of slicing and serving must be hers.
‘But this is not about gender, it is about the skill set!’ the company’s baffled head of human resources explained to me after I sent out company-wide instructions that whoever—man or woman—happened to be closest to the cake must slice it.
So do we capture these biases in our data on the workplace gender gap? We do not. And so my view is that, really, it is not just all about the headcount.
We know that 24 per cent of entry-level employees in India today are women, and 14 per cent women make it to considerable levels of seniority.12 To me, these numbers are inconclusive. They tell me nothing about the experience of these women at work. Is their role in line with their aspirations? Do they get equal access as the men to leadership opportunities? Can they be their authentic selves at work—no matter how feminine or geeky that might be? Or do they need to coerce themselves into becoming a clone of the majority personality type at work (as in most parts of the world) so as to ‘fit in’ and get the job done?
I have found that what men and women actually do and get at the workplace can be traced back to our education system.
Boxing young children of varying aptitudes and interests into a classroom of forty to teach them all the same content in the same manner is a sure-shot recipe for producing adults who are devoid of authenticity and programmed to wear blinders at the workplace.
When a four-year-old is told to fill the colour of his crayons within the boundary lines of the drawing in his colouring book, or that he needs to wear a uniform, walk in a queue, and greet his teacher ‘good morning’ without quite knowing the meaning of it, he is learning important lessons for life. A few years later, he is asked to learn by rote answers to questions, whereas he should have been taught to ask questions for the answers he seeks. Everywhere in the world—except in the Scandinavian countries, where some of the traditional subjects and teaching methods are being abandoned—education is designed to create an army of clones. It probably worked in the industrial era when we needed like-minded, hard-working employees who would obey orders without question. But in the knowledge era, especially in a country like India which wants to establish itself as a knowledge economy, furnishing the economy with zombies who work all day and night will not work.
One of the first things we are taught as young adults is the concept of ‘work culture’. We are made to understand that we need to spend a large chunk of our day on earning our living. We are told that the socially accepted way to do so is by getting a ‘job’ (rather than being a sportsperson or an artist, for instance), and dedicating our life towards adding one line at a time to our curriculum vitae. We give the entire process a name—‘career’.
When star employees switch jobs, they are applauded at their stellar ability to unlearn all behaviour patterns imbibed in their previous organization, and observe and correctly mimic the dominant mannerisms of colleagues in their new environment.
And hence, a herd mentality develops. Employees start to display similar behaviour patterns, and make similar choices at the workplace.
Since the early part of the millennium, well-educated Indians with degrees from India
