ADVERTISEMENT

Women Leaders Are Still Fighting Tiring Battles At Work

Even when their work is lauded, women continue to fight to be treated on equal grounds with their male counterparts.

<div class="paragraphs"><p>(Photo: Brooke Lark/Unsplash)</p></div>
(Photo: Brooke Lark/Unsplash)

When one of the country’s most successful lawyers, who featured on an international 50 Greatest Leaders of the World list in 2018, said that the more women advance in their career the greater the discrimination they face, it made me pause. This discrimination manifests in the form of “exclusion”, Indira Jaising told journalist Namita Bhandare. “As working women we don’t really believe in all-male networks,” she said. “I’m vested in my work but I’m not networked in my work.”

McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace report for 2022, in partnership with LeanIn.Org., surveyed 40,000 employees in the U.S. to reveal a “Great Breakup” was underway.

“Women are demanding more from work, and they’re leaving their companies in unprecedented numbers to get it. Women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rates we’ve ever seen—and at higher rates than men in leadership,” the report said, adding that for “every woman at the director level who gets promoted to the next level, two women directors are choosing to leave their company". 

Women Leaders Are Still Fighting Tiring Battles At Work

The reasons are worrying and any woman who has been in a leadership position will find it easy to relate. In my years as a woman leader, I often found myself dismissed as an outspoken contrarian in a roomful of suits who knew their careers depended on how closely they toed the line. They’re still working those jobs, while I quit to go independent eight years ago. 

“…at many companies, they face headwinds that signal it will be harder to advance,” the McKinsey report said, citing one such reason why women leave. “They’re more likely to experience belittling micro-aggressions, such as having their judgment questioned or being mistaken for someone more junior.” 

Women's leadership is trivialised across professions. A male reporter thought it was okay to ask New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden whether a historic meeting with Finland Prime Minister Sanna Marin happened “just because you’re similar in age and, you know, got a lot of common stuff there". Arden was forced to correct his sexism

<div class="paragraphs"><p>Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin (left) and her&nbsp;New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern. (Source: Reuters)</p></div>

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin (left) and her New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern. (Source: Reuters)

Even when their work is lauded, women continue to fight to be treated on equal grounds with their male counterparts. 

Amita Major’s mandate at the Mumbai branch of an advertising multinational, where she was vice president and strategic planning director, was to make her company think digitally. She conducted workshops and built a framework that the company still uses across its offices. Alongside, she did the bread-and-butter work of retaining brands and growing business. “The key brand I worked on remained one of our main revenue drivers,” she said, adding that she brought other leadership skills to the table too. “Flexibility, collaboration, listening, understanding, a complete focus on getting the job done rather than getting into ‘he said, she said’.” 

It wasn’t enough. “Despite all of this, there was a rude awakening that there is no reward at the end of all these efforts. My remuneration was even below what other people in my designation had,” she says. “The time finally came to have a blunt conversation.” 

She asked for a raise but instead of addressing her concerns her boss changed the conversation and didn’t offer any clear response. “Tired of the gaslighting and the egos of men, finally, I sent a resignation email,” she says. 

She said her boss had “one last power play” when she told him she wanted to buy out her notice period. He said that was at the employer’s discretion. The company policy stated otherwise, and she won that last face-off. 

Ironically, one reason women don’t get the recognition they deserve is because they take on extra work that doesn’t lend itself to quantitative number-crunching. The McKinsey report cited “critical work” that women did and which went “mostly unrewarded” as a reason women leave. “They’re doing more to support employee well-being and foster inclusion, but this critical work is spreading them thin and going mostly unrewarded,” it said. 

<div class="paragraphs"><p>(Source: Firmbee.com/Unsplash)</p></div>

(Source: Firmbee.com/Unsplash)

Sonal Agrawal, a managing partner at executive search firm Accord India, and global chair at AltoPartners agreed that women take on many key responsibilities such as diversity and inclusion initiatives that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line. 

“These are complicated, involve managing change in mindsets and are inherently time consuming and are lauded in the annual reports and on LinkedIn,” said Agrawal. “However, these non-revenue or non-core activities often do not get much weightage in performance reviews.” 

Agrawal said that anecdotally 2020-2022 have been “exceptional" years globally with a large number of top management—both men and women—switching jobs in the Covid era. 

At Major’s workplace, less than 10% of the colleagues at her designation or higher were women. One of the learnings for her was that she would have to fight her own battles. “There’s no one watching out for us, no professional mentors,” she said. “You have to navigate these issues on your own, you have to be kadak (strict), very transactional in your relationship with men so they understand it’s an equal partnership. The loss is theirs.” 

Indeed it is. Smart women leaders move on to find alternate employment. JobsForHer's DivHERsity Benchmarking Report 2020-2021 on women leadership (download it here), found that 42% of all companies have goals to increase female participation in leadership roles. Larger companies lead the way with 81% aspiring to this goal. 

As for the Covid effect? JobsForHer founder Neha Bagaria said these past few years have forced companies to embrace the value of a “flexible mindset” and taught families that two incomes are better than one. “The macro-economic conditions for women’s careers have never been better.”

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.