Why women do not have an equal presence in executive leadership?

In the last 12 years of my work life I have consistently heard companies and institutions discuss the importance of increasing the number of women in their boards and executive leadership. So why is it that women do not have an equal presence in executive roles? Many companies report a great gender mix at the entry level but not so much at the leadership level. What happens from the first year at work till the time one reaches a leadership role, where and why do women drop out? The answer has multiple aspects which vary greatly as we move from one country to another. Let's discuss one major aspect in one major country - women joining work back after their maternity leave in India.

Despite fulfilling all their responsibilities of motherhood, women in our country often get to hear this from their extended families and society: "You leave your office and all now, focus on your baby, that is your real wealth. You aren't so heartless to leave him/her for so many hours everyday!". While some women give in to this expectation and leave their work, others leave work as a conscious choice. But there are so many women out there who pull the courage to fight this popular sentiment and resume their jobs. This is the section of women we need to focus the most on, the women who join work back despite innumerable changes in their life and familial pressures.

To support these women, organisations need to install favourable mechanisms. First and foremost, a mechanism to preserve her role at work, ideal scenario will be to keep her role as is, just the way she left it. Now we all know this isn't easy, work is so dynamic these days, client needs, external/internal changes, strategic priorities make it hard to keep someone's role waiting for 6 months. Here is what I believe we can do, just like your employee has 9 months to prepare for her baby's arrival, you too have these 9 months to develop systems which will support her in joining work back.

Let's do a quick exercise to understand this better. Let's imagine ourselves in the role of a new mother coming back to work. This is your first week at work after 6 months of maternity leave and after extensive reasoning with your family on why you must join work back. While you are juggling with understanding the organisational changes and establishing the new work life balance, you realise that your role isn't what it used to be. The new/modified collection of duties seems ill placed and do not tally up with what you signed up for, your earlier role in the company. Or that you don't have a defined role now and sit idle at your workplace. How do you feel? As time goes by, the courage to put up that fight with your family, missing time with your kid, and coming back to work starts to seem less and less meaningful, this is when many women in India decide to leave their careers.

Hence there is a compelling need for creating organisational support systems. Let’s talk about what organisations can do during the 6 months of maternity leave. During this period your employee is trying to find balance between the duties towards her baby, changes in her schedule, almost no sleep, and in many cases post pregnancy health concerns. What can you do to support her? To keep her motivated about work? This question doesn't have just one fixed answer, here's something which we did for one of our team members when she became a new mother.

Now what I am about to tell you might sound impractical at first, but once put in practice it would turn out pretty simple. We put together a schedule in place wherein any one of us visited our colleague every weekend for few hours. While supporting her in child care, we used to update her on the weekly happenings at work and also take her suggestions for any improvements. This simple exercise helped her feel connected to her work life by being aware of what's going on at the office and eventually she didn't feel out of place when she joined work back. In addition to this we had put systems in place for flexible e-learning, which enabled her to spend time on upskilling herself as and when possible. Her role was well preserved to welcome her back.

Summing up simply, child birth is a natural process, we need to build systems to keep it as healthy for the new mother as possible both physically and mentally. I strongly believe that creation of such support mechanisms will help bring more women back to work. Hopefully this initiative along with systemic solutions to other major factors which make women drop out of work (which we will discuss in future posts) will lead us to a future where leadership gender disparity will only be a history lesson in MBA books.