Mumbai: Media and entertainment companies must take deliberate action to foster gender diversity at the workplace. This includes instituting mentorship programmes for emerging leaders, flexible work policies and empowering the female workforce to take up non-traditional roles.
In the corporate world, women are not just encumbered by low female labour force participation of 27 per cent, they also face deeply embedded biases in leadership roles and emerging disciplines such as technology, product development and data science. Women have always been an integral part of the Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry since its inception. The sector which employs four million people, both directly and indirectly, has a higher female labour force participation compared to other industries with more women represented in leadership roles every year.
In the last decade, the M&E industry has seen a transformative shift led by increasing digitisation of workflows and emerging technologies. While women are well represented in creative fields they still lack a presence in management positions. Although this trend is changing, corporates have an outsized role to play in ushering in an era of gender inclusivity and diversity at the workplace. This includes policy changes that engender not just an egalitarian work culture but also encourage women to aspire to leadership roles. For example, the Companies Act 2013 mandated that every board should have at least one woman and today women hold 17.1 per cent of board seats in India.
“I don’t think any organisation begins by saying ‘I do not want a woman for this role’. Nor women begin by saying ‘I do not want a challenging role’,” remarked Wunderman Thompson South Asia chief talent officer Roopa Badrinath. “By now, all organisations are aware of the benefits of having more women in their workforce. I would like to believe that it is not that organisations do not want to hire women, it is just that they do not know where to find them.”
“With digital becoming mainstream only in the recent past, tech and product are still relatively new roles. However, of late, we have seen the emergence of many women entrepreneurs who are creating their own digital businesses,” observed Josh country manager Rubeena Singh. “We are also seeing more women in management roles today, as compared to a few years ago. It takes years of work and experience to get to the top step and with more women today in middle management roles, there is hope of seeing many more women leaders in the coming future.
A recent study by Grant Thornton India showed that the percentage of women in senior management roles in India is at 39 per cent versus 31 per cent globally. This pace of change has been aided by changing perception of women in the workplace as well as the shift towards hybrid style of working. “Covid-19 has taught us all to work from home at scale. This has provided women with the luxury of flexibility, a big positive, as it has enabled us to balance work and family responsibilities seamlessly,” explained Singh. “With this increased flexibility, women now have the opportunity to explore more with their careers and experiment with it.”
In India, women do seven times more unpaid labour, i.e., household chores, as compared to men. This huge disparity was considerably reduced during the lockdown, enforced in 2020, when both men and women were working from home and divided domestic duties more fairly. “Work from home is a blessing for both genders. I see men enjoying it equally as much as women. Women are more challenged to work from home because while working from home, and you are expected to take care of the home chores, cooking, cleaning, kids, exams, tuition, teachers, etc. So, yes, I think work from home or a hybrid model is good, and it should encourage more diverse talent to come into the industry. It is suitable for the companies because A) your infrastructure cost is less and you can hire talent from vast geography,” said Altbalaji SVP marketing partnerships and revenue Divya Dixit.
“Organisations like ours were quick to understand this and relentlessly emphasized on the importance of an empathy and trust driven leadership. We encouraged our leaders to course correct their leadership style if need be and be more mindful of such challenges of women and focus on the well-being of their people. The hybrid workplaces where we do not work 100 per cent from home or 100 per cent from the office will be empowering this under-served population to make choices which will be in their career interest and eventually be beneficial to the organisations,” said Badrinath.
According to an industry observer, women in M&E have been confined to traditional roles such as HR, creative, media planning, business development, legal, corporate communication and marketing and have shied away from male dominated roles such as distribution, product development, strategy and operations. Strongly disagreeing with this view, Dixit said, “I’ve seen women take up leadership roles and challenges across industries and not just in the M&E sector. I think what needs to be kept in mind is that more women are reinstating themselves in non-traditional roles despite the glass ceiling. Today, I still think the male workforce is paid about 15-20 per cent more than women.”
Women in corporate roles are judged by different standards by men and often face gender biased appraisals, found a McKinsey study. There is a need to retrain HR managers in the way they evaluate women candidates for leadership roles. “As an industry which almost always works on changing perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of consumers, we have a huge role to play through the work we do in breaking societal stereotypes imposed upon women,” noted Badrinath.
“Social change takes a long time and we’re in the process of change,” according to Zee Entertainment Enterprises chief creative officer special projects Shailja Kejriwal. “If you’re a business leader you’re expected to be the ‘alpha’ and until you change the concept of a leader being ‘alpha’ a business won’t be run by women leaders who are perceived as empathetic.”
I think as an industry and society we are heading towards a more empathetic way of working, whether it is flexible working hours or leave policies, and this is brought about by the pandemic,” she added. “It has made people question a lot of embedded beliefs and, therefore, you see things such as ‘The Great Resignation.’ What happens if corporates start realising that you need to nurture talent regardless of whether it is a man or a woman, otherwise your business won’t run? Then there is no choice but to go in the direction of dealing with things differently.”
