An ongoing survey — titled “Women on Work” — seeks to find out how the workplace and allied spaces and their culture can be made better for women employees. Conducted by the National Committee on Women Empowerment and Indian Women Network of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), it invites women to respond to a set of questions at www.surveymonkey.com/r/CII-WoWSurvey
At the end of the exercise, the answers will be collated with the objective of offering insights that would help shape workplace policies and programmes for women.
Questions are based on six different areas — the impact of gender on career; experience of sexual abuse; gender-related facilities; safety and security for working women in a city; the impact of family and children on career; and a career break.
Phase I of the survey has been covered, and some of the collated responses run counter to popular perceptions.
Bhairavi Jani, chairperson, CII National Committee on Women Empowerment & Indian Women Network, says that 56% of our respondents said that gender had no impact on career.
Bhairavi adds that most of us would actually expect fewer people to make such a statement.
Close to 26% of respondents say gender plays a role when it comes to whether someone is entrusted with challenging tasks.
Feeling unrepresented in promotions; getting the desired salary and benefits and a good support system at work were among the questions that the survey sought to find answers to.
On the subject of sexual harassment at workplace, Bhairavi says 11% said it existed.
The survey shows that married women showed more boldness in filing complaints.
“This only shows that we need to work with companies to empower women with the correct knowledge, so that they have greater confidence,” she says.
There were more respondents who wanted more and better washrooms at the workplace than those who chose crèches.
“For us, the big learning is that we need to create diagnostic tools, which we are launching on March 8, for companies to assess themselves in terms of their gender-related policies,” says Bhairavi, a data scientist by profession.
“Our vision is to co-create an eco-system for women to live up to their full economic potential. We want to do this through advocacy, knowledge creation and on ground intervention that promote equal opportunity for women to participate, grow and flourish,” she says.
A varied group
Close to 2,700 women took part in the first phase of the survey.
Bhairavi says the team is happy with the sample, as it represents good age and geographical variance, including position and sectors.
“This survey will be kept open for some more time. Meanwhile, we are launching another set of questions to get the views of both men and women,” says Bhairavi. With the support of its member companies, CII will be working with policy makers to bring about more solutions.
Lighting up Gurugram
Good street lights do have a role to play in helping women make an assessment about how safe they are in their work commute, and this factor can even influence whether they want to continue with a company or not.
Based on the inputs from the survey, the CII team has been in a discussion with Safetipin, a social enterprise that runs a personal safety app, to find out how street light infrastructure can be improved in Gurugram.
“We are open to working with anyone who is committed to seeing this transformation happen and ensuring safer cities for women,” says Bhairavi.
