The Changing Role of Women in The Indian Society

“As the data from women's career studies and anecdotes from personal experiences of women professionals begin to accrue, one of the questions that arises is not `Why are there so few successful professional women?', but rather, `How have so many been able to survive the vicissitudes on each rung of the career ladder” – Dorothy Zinberg.

In an increasingly global economy, making full use of all of a country’s human resources is essential to successful international competition, world leadership in science and engineering, and an improved quality of life in every sphere. The participation of women in a vibrant economy in essential to bringing in diversity in perspectives, talents, and experiences to ultimately produce better ideas, goods and services to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and demanding global market.

Yet, unfortunately, women and minorities have historically been underrepresented in nearly all economies, occupations, and walks of life, including in India. They take fewer high-level mathematics and science programs in high school; earn fewer bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees and have conventionally earned less than their male counterparts, when in the same roles and positions at work.

For any progressive, pluralist economy it’s important to understand why women drop out of every bend of the “shrinking pipeline” and lose out on the opportunity to be financially independent. Why women lack in financial literacy, and indeed have all their financial affairs managed by their husbands or other male members of their family? Why women can’t seek equal participation in the financial affairs of their personal life and also contribute to the country’s gross domestic product?

Fortunately, post liberalization, this trend is gradually and Indian women have begun to contribute more in nation-building activities and are now occupying key positions in all spheres of life – politics, business, education, science, technology, and everywhere else.

Here is a short profile of some of the less celebrated, top names in the Indian business field, who have etched their mark in a male-dominated society. This list of women achievers, covered here, of course is not exhaustive.

Tanya Dubash, executive director and president (marketing), Godrej Group

Unlike her socialite mother, Tanya Dubash likes to keep a low profile.

It’s not surprising therefore that not many people, outside of her immediate circle of friends and family would know that the eldest daughter of Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej, who is the executive director and president (marketing) of $ 1.3 billion Godrej Group, has been nominated among 25 Indians in this year's list of 250 Global Young Leaders by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum.

She beat 4,000 contenders to book her place on the power list.

Three years ago, Business Today had picked her with a dozen-odd other business heiresses to watch out for in the coming years. The only problem with Dubash is that as an intensely private person, she doesn’t allow prying eyes to rip open her personal or professional profile. So what she does doesn’t quite make it to the newspaper headlines.

On the group website, her profile is simply etched with no hyperbole, although in practice she handles all Godrej brands, including their advertising, market research and new product development.

What’s top on her agenda at the moment is a strategy to re-formulate and re-vitalize some of her brands, for which she has already hired a global consultant, the U.K-based Interbrand.

Inducted into the companyas director when she was 28, Dubash jumped straight into the country’s most competitive markets --- the FMCG sector.

Two years ago, she made her intentions of expanding into the overseas market clear when she snapped up the Middlesex-based Keyline Brands in a $15.75 million (Rs 130 crore) deal to complement Godrej's domestic business in hair colour, talcum powder and shaving cream.

Since the hair colour market in India is still nascent (Rs 5 billion), Dubash wants to strengthen her hold in the UK, where the market is at least five times bigger. Hair colour is incidentally a strong category for GCPL --- it contributes 35% to the revenues and 65% to the Group’s overall profits.

Hopefully, the gamble will pay off and some of the huge brand equity that Godrej enjoys in India will spill over to create brand pull among the British Afro-Asian population.

Sulajja Firodia Motwani, Vice Chairperson of Kinetic Engineering Limited and Founder & CEO of Kinetic Green Energy & Power Solutions Limited

As joint managing director of Kinetic Engineering Ltd, part of the Rs 1,200 crore Firodia Group company, Motwani is in charge of its overall business developmental activities.

It is under her able leadership that the kinetic group graduated from being a manufacturer of mopeds and scooters to a full two-wheelers and motorcycle company (Zoom, Nova, and Marvel, Boss, Velocity, GF 170 City, Laser and Aquila, to name a few), targeted at a whole spectrum of customers. Over the years, the Kinetic group has a model at every price point, ranging from economy to luxury, to sports models. Its latest launch is the sports bike, Laser.

Motwani claims she has been applying what she learnt on the badminton courts to the Kinetic Group ever since she joined the company in 1996. Born into a business family - grandfather H K Firodia started Kinetic Engineering and father Arun Firodia founded the Kinetic group - Motwani is the second of Arun's four offspring.

Armed with a management degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Motwani’s first stint was with Barra International, a California-headquartered investment consultancy.

Within the two-wheeler segment, Motwani predicts that motorcycles will rule the market, while ungeared scooters will post higher growth than the geared ones. With moped sales coming down, Kinetic Engineering has anyways changed its production line to roll the Boss out of its Ahmednagar plant. When not launching new bikes, Motwani likes to play golf, ski, read non-fiction and watch movies.

"India Today" dubbed her the "Face of the Millennium" and ranked her among the top twenty-five business entrepreneurs of the country. She was presented with the Society Young Achiever's Award for Business in 2002. The same year, the World Economic Forum appointed her the "Global Leader of Tomorrow." She was chosen the Young Super Achiever by Business Today in 2003.

Dr. Villoo Morawala Patell, Avesthagen, founder and current Chairman and Managing Director of Avesthagen.

Until Villoo Morawala Patell came along, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw was the poster girl of the Indian biotech industry. Then someone discovered “The Black Swan”, Dr. Villoo Morawala Patell, the founder and managing director of Avesthagen.

Then fittingly, she was presented the Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 award at BioSpectrum awards function in Bangalore. The award was given in recognition of her propelling Avesthagen into a top-notch biotech company through an innovative business model that combines product development and services.

A first generation scientist-turned-entrepreneur, Patell founded Avesthagen in 2001, eight years after completing her Ph.D. from Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France, in 1993.

Today, the Rs 31 crore Avesthagen with a manpower base of 500 people and state-of-the-art facility in Bangalore focuses on achieving convergence of food, pharma and population genetics leading to preventive personalized healthcare. Its activities include, agri-biotechnologies product pipeline, development of clinically validated botanical bio-actives, derived from Indian medicinal plants, as well as the development of a pipeline of 11 bio-similar drugs. The company has spun off into four strategic business units namely bioPharmaceuticals, bioNutrition, bioAgriculture and science and Innovation.

Avesthagen was recently declared the Red Herring Magazine‘s Asia Winner for 2006 for practicing what the magazine calls “disruptive innovation.”

Not a mean achievement considering her early years of struggle. As an article on her in Forbes reveals, Patell faced her first obstruction from a clerk at the Bangalore registrar's office who refused to register the name Gengraine Technologies (not understanding gene and grain combination). Promptly she added Avestha, which means knowledge in Zoroastrianism and her company was born!

The 52-year-old molecular biologist's outfit, Avestha Gengraine Technologies (Avesthagen) has been profitable for three years running. It expects to close this fiscal year in March with $14.2 million in revenue.

With foreign investment at 31% and a patent portfolio of about 140 applications (in various stages of filing), Avesthagen has set a precedent of sorts among young companies. Nearly three decades after Kiran Mazumdar Shaw pioneered the sector in India with Biocon's industrial enzyme business, entrepreneurs like Patell are taking it up a notch, driven not by the trademark services mindset of Indian entrepreneurs but by innovation, notes the Forbes reporter.

Dr. Patell currently is a member of Advisory Board for Biotechnology at Mysore University. She is a key member of the Task Force and Vision Group for Biotechnology, instituted by the State Government of Karnataka and founding member of the Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises (ABLE). She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Woman Entrepreneur for the year 2005-2006 from Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI).

Mallika Srinivasan, the Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited

Mallika Srinivasan’s life and career proves that entrepreneurship has nothing to do with convention. The two can co-exit.

Born to a very convention-bound southern business family, she knew she wanted to work in her father's Tractor & Farm Equipment, so what if, before her, TAFE, the country’s second-largest tractor manufacturer, the flagship of the $630 million, Chennai-based Amalgamations Group was controlled only by Srinivasan clan’s male heirs, mainly Mallika’s uncles and father. Rarely if ever, was the dynastic control of a family run business ever left in the hands of a daughter.

But Mallika Srinivasan’s case is different. Armed with an MBA from Wharton, and with both her father and her husband (she married into the TVS group) by her side, she joined TAFE as a general manager in 1986 and within a few years, TAFE'S turnover increased from Rs 85 to Rs 700 crore.

In her two decades as director at TAFE, she has transformed the company through innovative products and processes, multiplying revenue by a factor of 30. For starters, Srinivasan invested hugely into research and development. TAFE introduced the trend of rolling out newer models of tractors and farm equipment into the market every year just as car companies do.

Indeed since 2002-03, TAFE has introduced over two dozen variants, which are key contributors to TAFE’s domestic volume. So if in 2002-03, about 40% of TAFE’s domestic sales came from new products, this statistic now stands at 63%. Even in the case of Eicher Tractor, the company that TAFE acquired in 2005, new products earlier contributed 39% to its total domestic sales in 2005-06; a statistic which has now gone up to 60%.

The gamble no doubt is paying off. Revenues have increased from less than US $20 million in 1986 to US $660 million in 2006. TAFE is now second in market share in India, generating brand loyalty among farmers who crave innovative technically advanced products.

Tara Sinha, ex-head of Clarion Advertising and founder of Delhi-based Tara Sinha Associates

The grand doyenne of the Indian advertising world is known inside and outside of her industry for her uncompromising stand. “It’s time to be businesslike in public service advertising,” she is reported to have told Shekhar Ghosh way back in 1987. Small wonder, she was hand-picked to direct the BJP's media campaign in the post Kargil parliamentary poll. Putting pen to paper, she came up with 'Atal is Atal' tag line. Not many would know that besides being a top advertising professional, Sinha has also been a long-standing BJP sympathizer and has informally helped the party through many-a- political campaigns.

Sinha, incidentally was the first woman to set up an advertising agency after she broke away from Clarion, the agency she headed. Before her or during her time, there were very few power women in advertising, with the notable exception of Rhoda Meha (OBM, Media Director), Nargis Wadia (Interpub, MD) and Usha Katrak (ASP for many years).

Sinha later founded Tara Sinha Associates (now McCann Erickson) to become the first woman to independently establish an ad agency in India. Tara Sinha Associates was a joint venture with McCann-Erickson Worldwide with the latter holding 40% equity stake in her business. The outfit has since been sold to McCann-Erickson.

In 2000, when Arun Jaitley was the minister of law, he appointed the “Queen Bee” as Sinha was known in the advertising circuit then --- Director of the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, a position that then was only assigned to senior journalists.

With her nearly five decades of experience in the advertising, public relations, external affairs, issues management and corporate communications industries in India, US and UK, Tara Sinha has literally been there and seen all. She has worked with and promoted leading advertising agencies at top management levels and been a key planning member, setting communication strategies for many mega brands, including Coca Cola, a company that she worked for during her stint in the US.