Future Female Forward |Women in Manufacturing — here're the evolving roles of women in the erstwhile male-dominated industries

From manufacturing to services, hospitality to automobiles, there has been a rise in the percentage of women workforce in almost every industry across ranks and divisions. However reports and surveys still suggest that India Inc has a long way to attain true gender equality and that it is going to take constant work to ensure gender diversity remains a strategic imperative and not just a record in the books.

To discuss the evolving role of women in the erstwhile male dominated industries and the challenges, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Rajiv Chhaba, President & MD of MG Motors; Nina Reddy, Joint MD of Savera Hotel; Sumita Ghose, Founder & MD of Rangsutra Crafts and Hemant Malik Divisional CEO of Foods Business at ITC.

Ghose: I think the biggest lesson has been that given a chance or opportunity a woman can achieve anything. So, prior to setting up Rangsutra, I actually worked in the not-for-profit social development sector. And I had worked with many women, especially in rural Rajasthan. One of the key things that they always raised was, we need work. Because our industries haven't gone to villages. Farming is still dependent on the rain, agriculture is still dependent on the rain, so it's risky. So that's how the idea of Rangsutra actually came to me that let's build on skills that women already have. I know that there's a market for such products, it's just that we decided we should be the bridge, which connects rural to urban, tradition to the modern, and bring about a new way of doing business.

Ghose: I think there's great opportunity for ourselves, we have worked with some global supply chains. And that's how we have also learned really how to build a safer, more inclusive better spaces for women. Like you said, it has been an informal area, and most women who are artisans and men for that matter work out of their homes, especially in rural India. So creating these spaces where your hobby in a sense becomes your profession, allowing for those kind of opportunities where women learn, I think that is seen by the customer today, especially the global customer, they are interested in the story behind the product, who made my garment that I'm wearing, what is her life like? So I think that there is great opportunity actually, especially in the global arena where people are looking to source from organisations, which are really ethical.

Ghose: I definitely think so. Because we've, benefited from it.

Ghose: It can definitely be a differentiator because the traditional skills are there. And as we learned, in Tamil Nadu, in the garment industry, there are women who work and so also in other parts of the country. But, I think, what needs to be done is that there needs to be an enabling environment where you have spaces where women can come and work --a safe and secure space-- and they can learn from each other. I think it can be advanced and we need to seize it.

Malik: For me I think driving the gender parity was in two big areas, one was sales, and second was manufacturing. In 2017, we just had about 5 percent people in ITC Foods, which were women. Today, in six years, it has come to 25 percent. We have employed in between our factories, about 5,000 people in the last six years, and very happy to report that about 56 percent of them have been women. But it was not easy because it starts firstly with the mindset internally because the factory manager is one who just used to working with men, and he's not very sure whether the women will be productive, what could be the other issues. That was one of the biggest challenges.

Then comes the challenge of recruitment. In Trichy, we have our largest factory and we had to recruit about 2,000 people, 500 of them on the line. And we said that we want to be 100 percent women. And then you find that somebody from HR comes in and says that he is not finding enough diploma holders. Since the diploma holder was our own norm, I said, why don't we change the norm and let's get people who are 12th pass and we can train them.

I must say that the experience for us has been that after every factory that we have been opening, the unit heads were saying we want only female managers, because I think they are way more productive, they're way smarter, they learn much faster. But, a few more challenges that we faced was the design of the factory itself, the ergonomics, the height. And therefore we told them to work on caissons, small improvement and what is it that can make a difference so that they know they are working can become better.

Then we started facing more interesting challenges. These were girls who had just come out from school and they were of marriageable age, and now they get married, and we find the attrition has gone through the roof. So how do you manage the attrition? And then we actually do marriage counselling. We would call it a social engineering experiment. We call the husbands to the factory, we told them and kind of agreed on what should be their family goals, how do you look at agreement and disagreements. I think it's been fascinating to see how can you actually transform and drive the gender balance in the organisation.

Chhaba: Initially, it was tough, because you start with a 10,000 feet goal, an objective and then slowly you let them experience themselves, the benefits of it. I was fortunate to work in many countries and when I came back to India, it was clear that no country can make progress if the women are not part of formal economy of the country. That was the top end goal. And when you want to give back to society, that's one area where we need to look at and we are fortunate to occupy these positions where you can make some impact. Luckily, we were starting from scratch where there was a brownfield project that we took over-- a GM plant where there was zero female employees. And we said, let's start with 30 percent. Initially, we said there are lot of studies from ILO World Bank, on why it's important to have female employee participation in the workforce. So we said, productivity, quality, balance, all this stuff we knew, but there is no hard data. So we used some Harvard data and some ILO data to prove a point. But slowly when we started hiring, and people started seeing the impact, now, we don't have to do that, they themselves are seeing the results, so we have increased our bar and now we are saying 50 percent. We said nature is 50-50 and so we should be 50 percent female and 50 percent male. So that's our new target now.

Chhaba: Not at that scale, but frankly, it's very interesting. It's again, challenging the male mindset, initially all of us probably have faced this when you're hiring a young girl, the guy will say she will get married and go away, so why should we hire? So you start with those kinds of issues. Hence you need to have an enabling environment, a lot of coaching sessions, and a lot of interventions for all levels of employees to understand this whole thing. So yes, we all go through these challenges and you keep learning a lot in the process.

Reddy: I got married into the family. I'm not born into the family. So that itself was a disadvantage. But for me, it was the most natural thing to do because I had the confidence of my father-in-law. And I think he would come and share everything that he did at work, he would share with us at home, and I would just keep soaking in everything. And then somewhere after a while, after my kids were born- I just felt the kids didn't need me anymore, they were in school, yes, but I was personally feeling a void. So I approached my father-in-law with lots of confidence, and no expertise. And I said, I would like to come and help him in his business. And I don't know it was my good moment, but he said yes. And my husband always said, you entered like the East India Company- you came in from the back door and you took over, so that's how I came into the family business. I just felt the sector required a little sensitivity. And I was just required there that was the only way I wanted to come in and take charge.

Reddy: I think we look at things very differently than men do. We look at the smaller details, and the small decisions that we take, I think can make a bigger impact. I think that's what has happened with my experience, the small nuances of everything, it need not be a big bank loans or expansion, and it's not that, it's just about how you make everyone feel when they come in.