HT G20 Agenda: Why the world needs more women in leadership roles

The representation of women continues to remain low in different professional spheres, including academics and judiciary, and there is a need to bring more women in leadership roles, experts said during a panel discussion held at HT’s G20 event on “Women-led development” on Monday.

Justice Gita Mittal, who was among the panelists, discussed how women were not even permitted to be part of the law fraternity earlier, and how it was challenging for them to rise to leadership positions.

“You would be surprised to see that women were not even permitted to study law. Most of the judges are being appointed on the eve of their retirement from the high court which is at approximately when they are around 62 years of age. You retire from the Supreme Court at the age of 65… Other than one woman judge – Justice Ruma Paul, the only judge who will be in the Supreme Court for 7 years who made it to the collegium. No woman judge has been in a leadership position where she is in a position to be a part of the selection committee for appointment of judges,” she said.

Professor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, said that she has also observed that there are comparatively lower women applicants for jobs like assistant professor, associates and professor, even as the representation of female students is more at her university.

“I have seen the number of applications that come, the women are less. I don’t understand, I don’t see an application at all for head jobs like assistant professor, associates and professor. The reason may be that they don’t want to come to Delhi because JNU is one university that has students from all over the country. The other is that as an assistant professor I get many [women applicants] but somehow at the associate and professor level, women are not favoured for promotions,” she said.

Pandit said the society has to take collective efforts to bring the change. “It has to come from the families and parenting. Parents should stop educating their daughters for marriage and their sons for a career. Both of them should be educated for a career. This has to be changed rather than blaming the government,” the JNU VC said.

Advocate Madhavi Divan also spoke on the lack of women’s representation in the legal arena and explained how a woman’s biological clock, coinciding with her career goals, was a major issue for women in making life choices.

“A woman’s biological clock is ticking parallel to what would be the best years of her career trajectory. The two are on a complete collision path. Therefore she often has to make that choice. It’s very difficult to juggle the two… No one taught us this when we were growing up… I think it’s really important whether in colleges or any educational institutions, gender sensitisation has to be taught to both men and women.”

Speaking on issues women deal during maternity and how their work gets affected due to the same, she added, “I know a person who took eight years off to be a full-time mom and she came back and did very well but by the time she was thought fit for judgeship she was regarded as too old. Ultimately you are punishing a woman for taking time off to bring up her child and in the process the system is losing out on the best talent.”

UN Women India Representative Susan Ferguson said that safety and security for women in India was still one aspect that needed attention. She was in line with the other panelists’ thoughts that family responsibilities played a huge role in a women’s career.

“The issue of women in national parliaments is a global issue and the average of women in national parliaments is 26%. There are a lot of women who don’t want to do that work as they have these care responsibilities but also often women are not considered as good leaders as the social norms underline that. But there are also infrastructure challenges. I remember when a parliamentarian first breastfed a baby in Parliament there was outrage and some parliamentarians walked off the chamber thinking that it was disgusting. Some kind of infrastructure for the women to bring their children to Parliament is also very important,” Ferguson said.

While responding to a statement by Union minister Smriti Irani, who in the same event had said that when the lockdown was imposed there was word from New York that 80% women in our country would get beaten up, Ferguson acknowledged that some of the indices were not inclusive enough to understand the situation in different countries, especially India.She further raised the need to collect ground-level data to make the indices richer.

“A lot of the indices in the past for example don’t collect information about women in the informal sector and in India that is enormous and its huge contribution to the GDP though not necessarily counted as such. There is an index which is the human development index and also the STG 5 which is gender equality and only recently that index has included women in local-level government or parliaments and so previously that has only looked at the number of women at the national parliament level,” she said.

“Fortunately the UN has changed that and so we do count and collect the numbers of women at the panchayat level. So I think some of the indices do need to be more inclusive to understand the situation in different countries and India is a massive, massive country, one of the biggest in the world. So some of these data collecting measurements do need to collect some additional information to understand the situation in India,” Ferguson said.

Meanwhile, Justice Mittal further urged women to stand up for each other. “Women must stand together and women must stand by women. Have the courage to tell Madhavi that you have argued a case very well. Tell Suzan that you framed a beautiful policy, tell the learned vice-chancellor that she is doing a wonderful job. And unless we do that and speak up for each other, we will not get anywhere,” she said.