Women in the Workplace: Lessons in Hiring and Retaining

India has a 20% female workforce participation rate compared to an 80% participation rate for males. Societal expectations, biases at the recruitment stage, and a perceived lack of skills and confidence are some of the main reasons that lead women to drop out of the workforce, and overall, just 10% of all educated, qualified women currently pursue long-term careers. At a recent IMA India CHRO Forum session in Bangalore, Neha Bagaria, Founder & CEO of JobsForHer, shared insights on how organisations can help solve the problem of hiring and retaining more female workers.

Taking A 3-Pronged Approach…

Despite their initial aspirations to pursue a career, women across three groups become disengaged from their professional paths: 

1)Starters: Women who despite having obtained a degree, never started their careers – either due to early marriage or owing to familial expectations post-marriage. 

2)Re-starters: Includes the 50% of working-age women who quit within 3 years of starting, but later seek to rejoin the workforce. Their main reasons for doing so are the 4 ‘M’s: Marriage, Mobility, Motherhood and Medical care.

3)Risers: This group includes employed women who are at risk of burnout owing to working ‘double shifts’ at work and home, pay-parity issues etc.

What is required to solve the problem is a three-pronged approach – built around ‘opportunities’, ‘learning’ and ‘community.’ From an opportunities point of view, there are today many more fully women-led companies than ever. However, much more needs to be done to change mindsets around ‘women-acceptable’ jobs, both internally (at the individual level) and externally (across sectors). Actively pushing women to take up more challenging roles can help them develop the confidence to seize more opportunities.

Throughout their careers, women face different roadblocks as compared to men. Learning interventions and mentorship programmes specifically targeting roadblocks such as learning power skills, battling the imposter syndrome etc, can be highly effective. From a community point of view, encouraging women’s networks, showcasing women leaders, and changing the rules of the games around building communities of women employees, can all help. One simple change is to break the cycle of networking that happens in male-centric atmospheres, such as at bars or golf courses, or during smoke breaks (which might be alienating for women). Breakfast or lunch networking events often prove to be more gender-inclusive.

…and Supporting Returnees

Owing to family obligations, many women do not have the time to invest in L&D/upskilling. Resultantly, there are roughly 3 male learners for every female learner. However, L&D plays a crucial part for women returnees, and digital, bite-sized learning is becoming a game-changer. Many companies are instituting women-specific learning programmes using their CSR budgets, which helps women returnees re-join the talent pool. This not only creates a pipeline for the future but also generates employer branding and goodwill.

Women-in-tech programmes are also gaining ground. Many are built around mentorship opportunities, or having business leaders teach classes in colleges that target young girls exploring careers in STEM. Showcasing a company’s female leaders at such sessions can leave an impactful message. It also helps convey that a career break need not be a full stop, but only a comma. Some companies also employ International Coaching Federation (ICF)-certified external coaches for their L&D programmes or subscribe to external mentorship/training programmes. Siemens, for example, has trained ~1,000 people across the world on the ICF methodology and has created a mentoring/coaching programme with 3 free sessions provided to anyone looking to be trained in this methodology.

From a community point of view, incorporating cohort-based learning programmes encourage peer learning. Mentorship programmes (either led by the company’s internal leaders or tied to a women’s network) and sensitisation workshops help curb recruiter-level biases and facilitate networking. Siemens has created four levels of mentorship programmes for different levels of the organisation and their varied needs. It also has a ‘SponsorHer’ programme, which involves senior leaders, including at the Board level, short-listing, and mentoring promising women candidates from around the world.

Longer-term internship programmes, including those that recruit from tier 2/3 cities have seen considerable success in converting interns to full-time employees. They have also been impactful for returnees, helping to upskill/reskill them with the latest know-how while easing them back into the workforce. Rounding out the list of promising options that help to retain women employees include efforts to keep women engaged with the company during maternity leave; providing greater work flexibility after maternity leave; and instituting parental/paternity leave (rather than just maternity leave), which helps foster shared parental responsibility.