India Inc's Gender Diversity Below Global Standards, Plagued By Execution Ills: Survey

New Delhi: India Inc is increasingly going in for policies to improve gender diversity at workplace, but practical gains from this remain low as just 29 per cent of women respondents say they have actually benefited from such programmes, finds out a survey.

Nearly 60 per cent of women respondents in the BCG survey, which covered 1,500 employees across 25 large Indian companies, said their company is focused on promoting diversity, but only 29 per cent believe that they benefited from the programme.

Women’s representation in Indian firms, the survey said, stands at around 27 per cent of the country’s total workforce, while globally, this figure is 38 per cent. Moreover, women account for just 17 per cent of senior management positions in India, compared to 26 per cent in emerging Asia-Pacific countries.

In the BSE 500 companies, only 3 per cent of the CEOs are women.

One of the key reasons behind the gender diversity programme being ineffective is poor implementation, the survey found out, adding that nearly 50 per cent of interventions are ineffective not because they are poorly designed, but because they are poorly executed.

"Companies cannot expect progress by simply putting down policies on paper. Instead, they need to focus on practical challenges faced on the ground to make the interventions truly impactful," the survey noted.

Moreover, gender diversity initiatives have helped more women employees in MNCs operating in India (33 per cent) than their counterparts employed by Indian companies (27 per cent).

"Each organisation is at a different stage in the maturity of its gender diversity initiatives. There can be no one size fits all solution," BCG said, adding that "the success of the programme lies not in the number of interventions launched, but in how they are implemented and finally how they practically benefited women".

The report titled From Intention to Impact: Bridging the Diversity Gap in the Workplace is based on the survey of leading organisations in India to understand the current status of gender diversity and obstacles in the way of improving gender balance.