Power girls: (From left to right) Naina Lal Kidwai, India CEO of HSBC, Punita Lal, Executive Director, PepsiCo India, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, CEO Of Biocon, and Kalpana Morparia, Joint MD of ICICI Bank

The past few months have been good for working women. First, Naina Lal Kidwai was appointed the India CEO of banking behemoth HSBC. (She was forced off the global board of Nestlé because of Reserve Bank of India regulations, but that is another story).

Then, Indra Nooyi, an ethnic Indian and an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, was appointed CEO of soft drinks major PepsiCo. Not too many women make it to the top even in the US. This appointment bids fair to make Nooyi the most powerful woman in corporate America.

At the other end of the spectrum, in India IBM has announced that it will increase its intake of women graduates to try and improve the gender ratio. The objective is to get to a 50:50 level. It’s easier said than done. The current ratio, adversely skewed against women, is 24:76. In new sectors like business process outsourcing, there are places where women outnumber men.

These may be a sign of things to come. And it’s much needed. All studies point to the fact that the role of women in the workforce is limited. Contrast this with China, where there is really no concept of a difference between the sexes in the workplace. “There was some heavy lifting work to do in the office and I couldn’t do it myself because I had a bad back,” says the Shanghai representative of an Indian industry association. “My (female) secretary got positively insulted when I asked her to call in my (male) driver to do it. ‘We don’t do things that way in China,’ she told me. ‘What he can do, I can do. Do you have only sick women in your country?’”

Women in India are not sick. But they are clearly sidelined at the workplace. According to a study on the empowerment of women in the workplace, women constitute just 6 per cent of India’s workforce. The study, conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), says the numbers get further skewed as you climb the ladder. When it comes to senior management levels, there are only 4 per cent women. And if you leave out the wives and daughters of business families, you will be hard pressed to find even one woman at the very top.

Another finding from the CII study is that women constitute 16 per cent of the workforce in mid-sized companies defined as those with a turnover of between Rs 30 crore and Rs 100 crore. This drops to 4 per cent in companies with a turnover above Rs 100 crore. The study rationalises that larger companies tend to be in the manufacturing sector. Indian managements have been traditionally uncomfortable with women on the shopfloor. But people now realise that unless you tap a very productive component of the workforce, you can never match China in its manufacturing prowess.

Yet China, more than India, is the target for issues relating to discrimination against women. The United Nations Committee to Eliminate Discrimination against Women was critical of China’s progress in increasing the number of women in decision-making roles.

The critics — mainly from the West — don’t have a good enough track record at home. A study by US research and advisory group Catalyst, which deals with women’s issues in the workplace, says that the rate of growth of women in top corporate officer positions is slowing down. In Fortune 500 companies, it will take 40 years for women to reach parity with men. (See Box.)

The attitudes say it all. A recent article titled Don’t Marry Career Women, published in Forbes in August, says that you shouldn’t marry professional women because they “are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it”. The unkindest cut: “Even your house will be dirtier”.

Stay at home, young lady. This is the Gospel according to Forbes.

Still holding the thin end

Women occupied only 16.4 corporate officer positions in Fortune 500 companies in 2005, compared to 15.7 per cent in 2002.

In the past three years, average growth in the number of corporate officer positions held by women fell dramatically to 0.23 per cent per year, the lowest gain in the past 10 years.

At the 10-year growth trend of 0.82 per cent per year, it will take 40 years for women officers to reach parity with men officers.

Source: 2005 Catalyst census of women corporate officers and top earners of the Fortune 500