With women folk increasingly joining the workforce in Indian businesses, both as leaders and employees, the Indian legal community is no longer an exception. The in-house legal departments led by General Counsel are ensuring to adhere to inclusion and diversity standpoints to attract the best talent.
In any organisation, ideas and perspectives are very important for the process of decision making. Whenever there is a bottleneck or a crisis, life experiences gathered by different team members help in navigating the organisation out of difficulties. This is exactly where the tenets of diversity and inclusion come to the rescue.
In an interview with BW Legal World, Vani Mehta, Regional General Counsel, South Asia, GE Aerospace is of the opinion that diversity and inclusion should be treated as a business priority by an organisation’s leadership and should be taken very seriously.
"We need to have the right policies, practices and implementation in place in our workplaces and in the corporate world to set the right practice. Leadership has to rise to support communities to provide encouragement and support to get mainstream acceptance while at the same time not compromising on meritocracy," Mehta says.
For women to grow as professionals, organisations will have to look at them beyond them being women and consider them as professionals.
Mehta believes that a shift needs to occur in how women are treated in our society; we need to provide women with a level playing field right from home, be it in terms of education, the pursuit of a career and the freedom and encouragement to work.
In an interview with BW Legal World, Pooja Bedi, Head of Legal and Compliance, Phillips says that ‘Diversity’ is dynamic and it goes beyond gender and race.
"Organisations need to adopt a flexible approach to manage the diverse pool of talent that is available today. Having a ‘One size fit all’ approach works only for short term and falls through the cracks when individuals’ intellectual capabilities stop identifying with the employer value proposition around diversity," says Bedi.
As per a study conducted by LinkedIn, there are currently two women compared with 10 men at leadership roles like Director, Vice President, CXO or Partner at Indian Companies. This fortifies the issue of gender diversity and inclusion and the fact that much more needs to be done in this regard.
Bedi further said that people tend to oversimplify and standardise the differences that exist in people, which may help to attract talent, but overtime makes it difficult to retain them.
"Although on woman leadership, India seems to be doing better than before but there is still a long way for us to go. Pay and benefits might attract someone initially, but it takes more to make a women stay in the workforce and aspire for more. Organisation of today are trying to change the way they have worked with women traditionally by changing polices, accommodating flexibility yet in some ways the responsibility lies on us," Bedi says.
A concerted approach with the right intent will definitely lead to more women in the workforce thereby bridging the gender gap which exists in the present scenario.
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