Why women must grow into leadership roles

CORPORATE GENDER DIVERSITY

The world of business and technology is male-dominated but it doesn’t have to be this way. Not if more individuals like Sucharita Shome Eashwar, Senior Director of NASSCOM, the industry body representing the Indian IT and BPO industry, had their way.

“The change is not due to any newfound appreciation that the world has of women but because gender diversity has become an urgent business imperative,” Sucharita declares, adding that IT as an industry is facing a scarcity of talent.

“Firms have to get, retain and promote talent and they are ready to go all out to do so. They are ready to invest in growing women into leadership positions. Women are the purchase decision makers in significant sectors of the economy all over the world. If you don’t have women represented in Sales & Marketing, Product Design, Customer Relationship & Support, then you, as a firm, are sure to lose out. Documented research has also shown that companies that have women on the company board show better return on investment and are more profitable,” she says.

For someone who has made it a mission to explicitly place gender diversity at the heart of NASSCOM’s Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, Sucharita makes some candid revelations about her own journey to the top.

“I consciously gave up a very demanding but very satisfying job, launching brands for major Indian and multinational FMCG clients, to work in the not-for-profit sector because I wanted to spend time with my young daughter,” she says, rewinding to the time when flexi-hours were unheard of in Corporate India. After years spent founding and nurturing two not-for-profit organisations in Bangalore, she joined a start-up at the beginning of the dotcom boom.

“After 15 years of marriage, I found myself grappling with divorce. When I started out in life, I had unquestioningly accepted that the husband takes care of everything. Suddenly, I had 2 kids to support and zero bank balance. I started afresh in a new field — IT,  because it looked challenging and full of potential,” she says.

Life of choice, not chance
Stating that there are more choices currently available to women who want to ramp down on the career front due to personal reasons, Sucharita thinks it’s important for women to make the choice themselves.

“Earning a fat salary is not empowerment. Women must free themselves of stereotypes,” says the soft-spoken but strong woman, who has been instrumental in launching women-friendly initiatives like Shared ChildCare Services and WEConnect India. The latter is a certification programme for women-owned businesses, qualifying them to win major supplier contracts from Fortune 100 companies. But more on that later because right now the cappuccino in front of her is cooling rapidly as she animatedly describes the genesis of the Shared ChildCare Services Project. 

“A major reason for women to drop out of the work force is because they have to look after their kids. If the IT industry as a body makes professional childcare services available in IT hubs in every city, then we would have happier and more productive employees and more profitable firms,” she states.

Encouraged by the response to the Shared ChildCare Services Project in Hyderabad’s Hi-Tech City, Sucharita is confident that the project will find plenty of takers in Bangalore too, where it will soon be launched.

Big companies can afford to run their own daycare units; it’s the small and medium firms and the women who work in them that the project hopes to help, because informal support structures — comprising extended families and friends — are slowly crumbling.
Her project management skills, advertising and media experience and work in the not-for-profit sector in many ways prepared her to launch WEConnect because she believes “a woman entrepreneur is someone who is truly in control of her own destiny”.
Through WEConnect, NASSCOM hopes that companies in India will follow supplier diversity and help women entrepreneurs win supplier contracts.

“In the United States, the Government has a policy to give out a certain percentage of their business to women, minority communities and indigenous communities. So, they look at their supplier chains to ensure that the diversity is in place. Here, in India, large MNCs and others have agreed to look at women-owned businesses for products and services that they outsource. This will be provide a foot in the door for women entrepreneurs who have great quality standards, but fall below the radar on account of scale,” she explains.

Despite these projects progressing at a healthy clip, Sucharita says her work is far from over. “NASSCOM is looking to develop Mangalore, Hubli-Dharwad, Shimoga and Mysore as IT centres, which means I will be travelling a lot to these towns, designing solutions to empower underserved communities.”

And when she gets a breather, she is determined to sign up for Spanish language classes and start styling services for women like herself. Considering that she carries off hot pink corduroys, deep laugh lines and streaked hair with panache, it looks like she’s got a career there as well!

Talking for all the women out there waiting to spread their wings and for those already flying high, she declares that success and satisfaction only come to those who step out of their comfort zone and take risks. We’ll take her word for it because we don’t know too many women  who are on corporate advisory councils as well as Gandhian Trusts like the Sarvodaya Trust. But that’s another story for another day and another round of coffee.