Own It: Leadership Lessons from Women Who Do

By Aparna Jain

#NotAllMen are the problem. #NotAllWomen are victims. But there's enough of both to warrant this book. Most women today are opting for careers over jobs, even if it requires them to play multiple roles with superhuman abilities. Meanwhile, men, at home and at work, struggle to come to terms with their changing priorities. And therein lies the chasm between male expectations and female ambition. As Dame Julia Walsh says in the television miniseries The Honourable Woman, 'In a room full of pussies, I'm the only one with a vagina.' Own It tells women's stories: the ugly, the happy, the rarely discussed, the unacknowledged, the whispered, the denied. Close to two hundred Indian women leaders across industries discuss the challenges they face in the Indian workplace and at home. Heads of companies, human resource directors and senior managers talk about issues like pay parity, harassment, promotion and maternity policies. Why is the workplace agenda skewed against women and what are their own demons that keep them from breaking the glass ceiling? Thought-provoking and controversial, Own It takes the challenges that confront women in the workplace head-on - without discounting the complexities of being a woman in an Indian home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Collins Business India
• Release date: Jan 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9789351775270

Aparna Jain

Aparna Jain spent 23 years in corporate India in business development and marketing roles in technology and media in India and USA. She has authored two more books: Own It: Leadership Lessons from Women Who Do (HarperCollins, 2016), which was awarded a Laadli Prize and was shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! Business Book Award 2016, and Like A Girl (Context, 2018).

Book preview

Preface

In retrospect, the first time I became aware of a feeling that had some tiny elements of what some people would call feminism was when my baby brother and I were taken to visit my paternal grandfather in Old Delhi. I didn’t know the meaning of the word then, but the feeling had something to do with being discriminated against, and my mind summed it up in two words: Not fair!

My grandfather was old school, conservative and cold. I remember being on guarded behaviour during these strange visits to his place, spent mostly trying to figure out what games could be played around the perilously grated iron flooring on the top-floor courtyard. At the end of the visit, he would benevolently slip my brother a 100-rupee note and me a measly five rupees. I was barely six; what could I say to the grand patriarch except fold my hands in a polite namaste and thank him. Later, as though to set things right, I would simply take away my brother’s loot and put it in my piggy bank. There, that’s fair! He’s only a baby after all.

The monetary angle notwithstanding, I did not look forward to these visits as there was an overwhelming sense of being discriminated against. My mother somehow knew and once we were downstairs, after taking leave of my grandfather, she would simply take the five rupees from me and give me a 100-rupee note from her own money. Having grown up among five brothers and an equal number of sisters, things were relatively more equitable in her family. My nanaji kept up with the times and was free from the trappings of tradition. He would quietly pull out churan and ampapad from the hidden recesses of his cupboard and slip them to me when my nani was not looking. Thankfully, I grew up with that side of the family having a strong influence on my life.

How did this book come about? Well, the idea took root during an evening with friends at a hotel lounge. I had recently published a cookbook, The Sood Family Cookbook (my mother’s side of family, mind you) and the conversation started to veer towards my next book. Karthika, Rajiv and I spoke on issues that were important to us and brainstormed ideas over Barolo. I would write about women; women in the corporate world. ‘None of the usual suspects,’ I said. ‘I want to go a rung or two below the CEO level; women who will tell me how they got to where they are, the challenges they face in the corporate world … women not under obligation to give me media speak; women who have figured out how to steer their way through the system.’

We all reached an agreement, and more Italian red wine was poured.

It took time … appointments, cancelled appointments, mixed-up appointments. I met women from all industries across five cities, some men too. My friends in the media helped, as did my clients in the corporate world. Women I interviewed put me on to other women. Life was a bit of a blur at times, as were the stories. Over a year I met and interviewed 190 women in senior leadership positions in Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. Ninety-five per cent of these meetings were face to face, without a set questionnaire, and that made all the difference. It gave me richer data, also access to stories/incidents I did not know could impact women’s careers so profoundly. It gave me insights into deeply personal matters involving both home and family.

I wrote to HR heads from top ten Indian companies, seeking information relevant to the book. Some responded, most did not. I spoke with and wrote to subject experts from around the world to get the necessary inputs. They all wrote back within a week. An interesting fact: Of the men I wrote to in India, 80 per cent did not respond, not even an acknowledgement email. Of the women, 94 per cent responded, and I met 97 per cent of those I had written to.

Many names have been changed, very few women spoke on record for fear of repercussions vis-à-vis their careers. They felt their stories were important, needed to be told and if they could somehow reach out to other women and make them feel they were not alone, they were happy to talk. That they were worried about the repercussions, about being judged, about ‘gag orders’ from their companies, and therefore used fake names tells its own stories, as does the fact that a few of them called me up the next day to ask for their accounts to be retracted. Nonetheless, the stories kept coming in.

In July 2014, the Internet was abuzz with interview transcripts from the Aspen Ideas festival where PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi spoke about work-life balance and whether women can have it all, commenting on a question that alluded to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’.

Her response was candid: ‘I don’t think women can have it all. I just don’t think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all.’ She spoke about the tug-of-war between her role as a corporate doyen and her role as a mother, wife and daughter. And the choices she made.

Her voice found resonance in the corporate world, particularly among women executives who felt the same, whose sentiments had been validated.

Then there were those who scoffed: Should we want it all? Who has it all? Even men don’t have it all. We kill ourselves wanting it all!

On the final lap to finishing the book, a long chat with Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta (professor of psychological & brain studies at University of Massachusetts) helped me realize how I needed to frame the stories and anecdotes to make them powerful and relevant to women.

I often had to keep my own feelings under check during the writing of this book: my feelings of anger, sadness and helplessness at the fact that many women I spoke to had come to terms with the lives that had been dished out to them – lives that required them to be ‘on call’ between home and work almost 24x7. My own biases often crept up. I had to read, edit, re-edit some lines time and again, because I could see myself showing up all over.

What I loved about writing this book?

I met brilliant people.

I forged new friendships.

I learned a lot.

I heard stories that shocked, and that’s unusual.

I was able to help a few.

Many women called me back, days after our initial talk, only to say I had got them thinking … that they had some rude awakenings about the ‘shit they take’. Some had already taken steps to bring change and some called me for input.

What I learnt in the process of writing this?

Every woman has the power; but we need to support each other along with the will.

The more senior the women in the workplace, the more vulnerable they feel.

We need to stick together to deliver a more equitable future for generations.

If you can be a more supportive and open woman, who supports other women in your family, no matter what the relationships are like now, you will own that change.

If you can be a stronger mother, who can teach sons to respect women, to behave better, to cook, clean and help in traditional ‘women’ roles; and if you can teach your daughters to be brave and fearless, to stand up and stand out, you will own that change.

If you can stand up against the everyday patriarchy, shun rituals and sexist constructs, you will own that change.

If you can mentor even five women in your career, you will own that change.

We have the capacity to bring that change.

We have the capacity to own that change.

So…

Bring it.

Own it!

1

Biases, Bullies and The Boys’ Club

The ceiling isn’t glass. It’s a very dense layer of men.

– Anne Jardim

It would be naïve of us to believe we are not biased in some way or another. We all are – only the degree varies. Bias is, quite simply, an outcome of our conditioning, culture, experiences, and the society we live and grew up in.

Author Mahesh Rao and I were lunching on sushi and he recounted a scene with a character from his novel. I spontaneously said: ‘You NRIs!’

He looked at me, amused. ‘You have this picture about NRIs. Tell me, what are our typical characteristics?’

I rattled off: ‘Love Hindi movies of the seventies and eighties, enrol their kids in some Indian class like Bharatnatyam, love Bollywood dancing, wear seriously chamki Indian clothes for desi functions, suddenly roll their Rs even though born and brought up in India, have more desi friends than local, put up pictures of their fancy cars on FB, and the men still don’t share half the responsibility at home. They just do a bit more than the men here.’

We both giggled (a sign that we have a deeply ingrained tendency to joke about stereotypes), and he sternly told me I was biased.

It’s true. Most of us make generalizations about people and construct biases without any foundation. While this may seem fairly harmless, it’s not. Our perceptions can be outdated, archaic, steeped in our own sense of ‘what should be’, what’s right and what’s wrong. Such thinking is not only unfair, it is dangerous. We lull our brains into an automated ‘compartmentalizing’ mode and stop taking each person for what and who they really are. It’s a lazy and insensitive way to engage with others.

Answer this: A man and his son are involved in a car accident. The man is killed. His son survives, but is severely injured. He’s rushed to the local hospital where he is immediately taken to the operating room. After the nurses prep him, the surgeon approaches the operating table, stops suddenly and says, ‘I can’t operate on him, he’s my son!’

Who is the surgeon?

This riddle is probably the most cited example of the depth of gender bias.

The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Or, perhaps he has gay male parents.

To my dismay, it took me a few seconds before I said mother. Do I know women can be doctors? Absolutely. Was it my first guess? Yes, but sadly it was not instant.

In a research conducted by Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle, psychology professors, even young people and self-described feminists tended to overlook the possibility that the surgeon in the riddle could be a she.

It starts early, with parents painting a baby girl’s room pink and a boy’s blue. Girlie trappings like dolls, butterflies and other pretty stuff adorn girls’ rooms whereas boys have cars, trucks and the like to symbolize their masculine qualities. Few parents I know are gender neutral in this context.

When was the last time you bought a doll for a boy toddler and a car for a little girl? No wonder the toy industry reinforces our stereotypes simply by manufacturing gender-specific toys. From a young age, we are conditioning girls to think that cars, bikes, sports are not ‘their domain’, restricting their range of interest to softer options like dolls, jewellery kits, and to ‘playing house’.

The conditioning runs deep. Even children find it girlie when a boy wears pink. My seven-year-old niece Arianna went for a Power Rangers birthday party of a classmate and came back disappointed when she found only four rangers on the cake. When she asked the birthday boy’s mother where the fifth was, she was told that the son thought the fifth ranger could not be on his cake as it was a pink ranger.¹

‘Sit like a lady’, ‘Talk like a lady’, say family members to little girls, while the male child dashes madly all over the place, jumping, shouting, screaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if this leads to adult manspreading. Boys are boys after all. From an early age we give boys the license to misbehave. And this has nothing to do with whether we are educated or not.

I was lucky in this respect. Growing up, except for some bias in the extended family, I rarely experienced being side-lined because I was a girl. The stereotypical gender roles were reversed. My younger brother slept with a blond doll called Susannah till the age of seven; he had a fiercely protective nanny who contributed to what I termed his ‘nambi-pambiness’ as a child. I grew up with a prized collection of dinky cars that my entire neighbourhood coveted. I ran around and played pitthu (seven stones) – or what we called lagori in Bangalore – with the neighbourhood kids every evening. During the game no one had any qualms about hitting the others hard with a tennis ball, be it a boy or girl. We cycled together, we jumped over rooftops.

My brother, Arjun, thankfully, grew to be one of the few feminist men I know. He doesn’t believe men and women should be confined to set roles and he believes in equal opportunity. All the maternal instincts in the family are his (he craves having a child) and he is much better with babies and kids than I am. He happily whips up whatever little he knows in the kitchen. He laughs that none of his girlfriends have been able to cook. According to him, they could barely boil water.

On Women’s Day in 2015, there was a discussion on Twitter on vintage ads that I posted, which projected women as doormats, homemakers, helpless beings; the men were macho, they taught the women how to do things. We couldn’t find a single advertisement that projected the reality of the modern Indian woman.

I haven’t, for example, seen a single car ad targeted at the Indian woman. This could well be because auto manufacturers do not perceive women as the primary decision maker or influencer.

Some brands (not Indian in this case) went as far as to come up with a car called the Fit She – which died a quick death thankfully. What was it? A pink car developed in 2012 for women with a theme of ‘adult cute’ pink stitching, special windshield glass that cut 99 per cent of ultraviolet rays and a ‘Plasmacluster’ air-conditioning system that they claimed could improve a driver’s skin quality, all aimed at stopping those wrinkles that would turn an adult into adult cute!

The one ad I saw recently for a global car brand – a brand that I drove – was vaguely aimed at women and was nothing short of an insult to any woman’s intelligence.

A man goes to an auto showroom, sits in a car and asks the dealer: ‘What would happen if I were to press the accelerator instead of the brake, use the left indicator when turning right, park on a slope without putting the handbrake on?’

The dealer asks him whether he knows how to drive a car.

Cut to the next scene: The man is handing over the car keys to his daughter for her birthday … Need we say more?

Another ad by the same brand from the UK shows a father being there for his daughter right from the time of her birth till she’s all grown up and ready to move out of the house. It is at this point that he is shown handing her the keys of a new car he has brought for her, which presumably would continue to keep her safe like he did all these years. Beautiful, emotionally charged advertisement no doubt, and for the same brand of car. So in one ad you make fun of a daughter who is a representative sample of the woman this car is targeting, who all this while has been portrayed as being not as smart as a man. You have squarely alienated women while high-fiving other men with poor humour. Whereas in the other you demonstrate your intense feelings of love and protection for your daughter. Which ad do you think would appeal to both genders?

I spoke to some of my friends in advertising about the ad. A senior creative male head said to me, ‘Lighten up.’

Lighten up? Doesn’t he see these ads are regressive, and are endorsing gender stereotypes? Well, obviously not! All my women friends in advertising simply shook their heads. They were too used to being overruled by similar comments in creative meetings.

I came across a report on women and safe driving and spoke to Ash Hassib, senior vice president and general manager for auto and home insurance at LexisNexis.² Ash’s company had recently analysed driving data for the insurance industry in the USA. I tell Ash about the advertisement. He is quiet for a few seconds, processing the ad. He says, ‘Why would anyone make an ad like that? It is a well-known fact that females drive safer than males, and the way you measure that it is by looking at the insurance claims. The claims, the pay-outs. When it comes to driving-behaviour data, 99 per cent of all claims are by men. Using smart devices attached to a car, we studied over a billion miles of driving, and found females speed 12 per cent less than men. We measure hard braking. This means anything that’s beyond a normal slow down. We found females hard brake 11 per cent less than men. In general, men are rash drivers. We take the raw data and we have a risk score. If you are a female you start out with a rating table that has lower risk rates than a male.’

‘Biases do get dragged into communication and advertising,’ says Bhumika Mehra,³ who heads the copy division in a large advertising firm. ‘Men and teams who have clichéd notions of how women should be projected in ads tend to come up with ideas that are sexist, often driven by their personal opinion of women; ideas that are stereotypical or just a tiny fraction off the mark to pass off as progressive. Why do we continue to fuel such stereotyping? After all, not all women are bad drivers, not all wives are nagging, not all mothers-in-law are mean, and not all women are homemakers.’

When I meet clients and speak to them about bias, quite often the very first reaction I get is, ‘I don’t have a real bias, I am aware of the things I say and it’s always as a joke.’ When I say that we all have biases – even the most liberal, open-minded boss does – I get the slightly amused look and the standard, ‘We know when we make racist or classist jokes; we don’t mean any of it.’

To better illuminate bias, it is revealing to run one of the tools I use in my work with corporate clients: the IAT or the Implicit Association Test.

Interesting work has been done by a group of three scientists in American universities, called Project Implicit. They developed a bunch of online tests called the IAT, whereby you can test people for biases ranging from gender, gender-career, age, to weight and other biases that manifest in human beings. When I get my clients to take this test, much to their horror, everything doesn’t come up roses.

Speak to any HR people worth their salt and they will tell you that the most difficult nut to crack, with respect to creating a gender-neutral workplace, is bias. It takes unending work and time to get people to recognize their own biases. Bias is ingrained in our cultures, our values, and in our minds.

According to Nilanjana Dasgupta, professor of psychological and brain studies at University of Massachusetts, there is a large body of research literature on gender stereotypes, on perceptions about who is the ideal person in a given role. The ideal person in a professional role is presumed to be a man and the one in a nurturing role a women. Assumptions as to who is the most ‘natural’ choice for a particular role come with traits and personality characteristics that define a person, such as a visionary, a go-getter, ambitious, or nurturing, intuitive, warm. Characteristics that are leadership oriented are associated with men; nurturance, warmth, supportiveness are associated with women. When it comes to choosing a leader, people tend to go for the stereotypes rather than weighing the actual qualities of each individual in a group.

These are explicit biases. If you describe a leader, people say it’s a man, if you describe a parent, they say it’s a woman. Nowadays, because it is becoming increasingly important to be seen as gender fair and not gender biased, few will admit to being explicitly biased.

Neelu Khatri, one of the first woman officers in the Indian Air Force, recounts her experience: ‘In Pune, as a young officer, I was walking to a meeting and there was this tall, well-built person who just stood there and stared at me as though he would eat me up. He didn’t salute me; any non-officer was supposed to salute an officer and not doing so is considered an offence. I got upset since I felt his behaviour was inappropriate. So I went to his commanding officer and said I was going to charge sheet him. That afternoon I got a call from the same officer asking me if I could come to his office. He said, I was surprised to hear about your issues, because the soldier is a disciplined air warrior. I have no problem your placing a charge but hear what the background is. He comes from a village in Haryana, where he has only seen women in the kitchen and now suddenly he sees a woman officer. He couldn’t believe his eyes and he kept staring. I didn’t file a complaint, and it was good of the officer to explain things to me. So sometimes it is important for us women to dig a little deeper than to simply react to what we perceive to be an issue.’

Biases run deep. And when they are conscious, it is simply discrimination.

Shalini Rai⁴ is an immaculately dressed, no-nonsense chief marketing officer for a travel firm, well known for leading her teams to success, whom I met over lunch. ‘It’s not as tough to work with the typical male chauvinists; those you recognize from a mile away and know how to deal with. It’s the men with the silent biases. Most men, especially on leadership teams, like to posture they are forward thinking and open.

‘I had a head of business in an earlier company. He was of the notion that women are not good with numbers. Every time I would present anything to him, he would ask me ten additional questions on the numbers. I always wondered how the other presentations got through without much questioning when they were not half as diligent as mine, yet mine was most scrutinized. Basically he made a blanket judgement about all women. He thought we didn’t know maths or we ran away from numbers. Well, it so happens that I am extremely good at maths. After a few meetings he eased up, so I just say, stay calm, prove your point and walk away. Soon, everyone will realize your worth.’

Assumptions and misconceptions about women can range from the ludicrous to the incredibly stupid. Richa Arora is the COO of a consumer products business at a large conglomerate. Calm and matter-of-fact, she says, ‘In organizations women always feel cold in conference rooms. It’s quite funny sometimes. Over the years, I have heard random comments from men like women feel cold because they wax their arms.’⁵

Richa adds, ‘More seriously, as a woman, people are always watching you. Can she do it? Will she do it? There is apprehension about women at senior levels. I think it has to do with the fact that we still live in a traditional society in some ways. Women have moved on, men have not. Some years ago, in meetings where men were outnumbered, the male would feel uncomfortable. Men are conscious when the equation is topsy-turvy for them. We don’t say I am the only woman here in a meeting. But some men make defensive statements from the start like looks like I am in the minority. There is less of that today.’

You can measure your own biases. You can simply log on to the IAT site and do the tests yourself. You will be surprised by the results. Nilanjana Dasgupta adds, ‘To capture implicit bias, I measure what associations pop into people’s mind spontaneously when they think of women and men. Using the IAT, I measure how quickly people associate men versus women with leadership qualities like ambitious, visionary, and go-getter while associating women versus men with back-up support roles like helpful, supportive, a secretary. What I find consistently, with both women and men, is that they are faster at associating leadership qualities with men and support qualities with women.’

In the corporate world, bias can manifest in well-meaning assumptions about women. Debjani Ghosh, the media savvy high-energy top executive in a tech company, says, ‘Some men assume that women want something, without first checking with them. For instance, it is assumed that a woman doesn’t want travel because she has had a baby. A man thinks he is being a good manager. Why not ask her instead? She may tell him she wants to travel. Maybe a young father doesn’t want to travel either. Do we ask him? In our company, we focus on and pay a lot of attention to sensitizing people on these issues. It can’t happen through workshops. It is via regular dialogue and the everyday actions of the leaders. We have two senior women leaders here. I find that corridor conversations – the little conversations – have a much deeper impact than standing in front of thousands of people at a conference.’

‘Biases can stem from top levels. Leaders can sometimes be the issue in fact,’ says Anika Tiwari,⁶ who has held multiple positions in various organizations and has also led senior functions in the largest knowledge process outsourcing company (KPO) in the country. ‘They (the leaders) head the boys’ club. I have sat through many appraisal cycles as part of the management team, and seen it all. You see the bias, and you see the boys in action. On a chart of 200 names of employees put up for senior movement in the company, every woman’s name gets plucked for discussion. Men look for opportunities to discuss women at every level. They drag bizarre personal stories into an appraisal instead of staying focused on work. Is she the one who is seen with so-and-so? Is she the one who was thrown into the pool at the offsite?

‘As the only woman in the pack I would get irritated. Men would tell me my face was like a mirror to them. I had to stop them. You don’t drag personal stories into an appraisal because these have no relevance here. But to them it does. I would constantly remind them that appraisals were about the professional bit. If a man goes around with someone, they do not talk about it, but if a woman does the same they do. So with me around, sometimes they would stop, sometimes they would stare and wait for me to leave the room so that they could start again.’

It gets worse. It’s not just individuals who are biased, the workplace itself can be biased. This bias manifests via the policies, the facilities, the values and the work culture. For example, if an organization attributes its progress and productivity to the amount of midnight oil burnt, it is actually discouraging women in that organization who have additional responsibilities at home with their family. Incidentally, this unhealthy practice is questionable even for men.

If the most important jobs involve sales beats that are not safe or geared for women – be it a safe living facility in remote towns, toilets for women, anything that precludes them from doing that important sales stint which is critical to their becoming a CEO – the company is gender-biased. If the office facilities for women don’t make concessions for pregnancy and motherhood, or if the conferences and off-sites have programmes, perks or shows that are ‘male oriented’ (and I am being polite), then too the organization is gender-biased. If women are portrayed sexually or told to look a certain way in a company, the organization is certainly biased.

In my first year of working in Delhi, I was managing a restaurant in a hotel. I remember there were hardly any women in operations; they were largely in support functions like sales and marketing that were more the nine-to-five jobs. I was on a split shift, which meant I came to work at 10.30 a.m. and worked till 3 p.m.; came back again at 7 p.m. and worked till midnight. My male colleagues who had a split shift could go into the executive lockers and stretch out on the bunk beds. They could have showers. The women’s locker had two chairs in a miserly space.

One day, after a particularly gruelling shift, I walked into the general manager’s office and asked him, why the discrimination? Within six hours, there was a set of bunk beds in the ladies executive locker. There was no shower, but it was a start. I don’t recall ever really sleeping there but I certainly remember that in a four-hour break between shifts, when home was too far away to go back to, one could at least stretch out for those much-needed