The power within

Women achievers share their life stories and beliefs for a gender-equal world

March 17, 2017 12:49 am | Updated 07:17 am IST - Mumbai

Mumbai 16/03/2017:  L-R: Tanu Mehta, legal council, mediator and conciliator high court of mumbai, Nidhi Lauria (C), business head Assam and North east, vodafone india service pvt ltd, Namita Vikas,Group President and Managing Director,Climate strategy and responsible Banking,YES bank LTD, Gauri, editor, The Hindu, Bollywood actress Dia Mirza, Rupa Naik, Director World Trade Centre, Anna-Carin Mansson, country HR manager for India, IKEA Business, and Kiran Manral, writer, author and columnist,during the conference on Women's Achievers at World trade centre on Thursday. Photo: Fariha Farooqui

Mumbai 16/03/2017: L-R: Tanu Mehta, legal council, mediator and conciliator high court of mumbai, Nidhi Lauria (C), business head Assam and North east, vodafone india service pvt ltd, Namita Vikas,Group President and Managing Director,Climate strategy and responsible Banking,YES bank LTD, Gauri, editor, The Hindu, Bollywood actress Dia Mirza, Rupa Naik, Director World Trade Centre, Anna-Carin Mansson, country HR manager for India, IKEA Business, and Kiran Manral, writer, author and columnist,during the conference on Women's Achievers at World trade centre on Thursday. Photo: Fariha Farooqui

At a packed house at the World Trade Centre on Thursday, seven women gave insights into what made them who they are, and how they became what they had set out to do.

The event was the “Power Women” seminar, organised by The Hindu group as part of its International Women’s Day celebrations, and achievers from fields as diverse as law, entertainment and telecom, to banking, human resources and writing, spoke about the challenges they faced as women, how they overcame them, and how they see themselves in a gender-agnostic world.

Breaching male domains

The Power Women seminar, sponsored by DHFL, the home loan and housing finance major, and hosted by the World Trade Centre, Cuffe Parade, became a virtual learning place for the by-invitation-only audience, thanks to the experiences shared by Bombay High Court lawyer Tanu Mehta, Vodafone’s Assam and North-east Business Head Nidhi Lauria, Yes Bank’s Group President & Global Head of Climate Strategy and Responsible Banking Namita Vikas, World Trade Centre Director Rupa Naik, actor and environment activist Dia Mirza, IKEA’s Country HR Manager Anna-Carin Mansson, and author and blogger Kiran Manral. The panel was moderated by The Hindu’s Associate Editor Gauri Vij.

Ms. Lauria, the only woman business head in India’s burgeoning mobile telephony sector said she is no stranger to what are considered traditional “male domains”. She went to an engineering college where she one among the only six women students in a batch of 1000. “When I began working as a marketing executive, many distributors and retailers asked me whether my family was under any kind of financial strain,” she said. “It was assumed that women worked because of financial compulsions.”

According to a World Economic Forum report, Ms. Vikas stated, it would take 165 years more to achieve economic gender parity at the urban workplace. The report, released earlier this year, says that gender equality in the labour force would add $28 trillion to the global economy by 2025. “But there are several options open for women when it comes to pushing them into becoming entrepreneurs” she said. “For example, my bank has instituted a Gender Financing Facility in collaboration with the International Finance Corporation, which helps create women-led businesses and encourages women empowerment at the grassroots.”

Right environment

But for all of this to happen, the panelists agreed, society needs to create an an environment of encouragement and engagement. Ms. Mirza and Ms. Mehta both felt that school education, combined with value-building by parents at an early age helps women build the necessary confidence to take risks. Ms. Mirza recalled how she, as a young 18-year-old, was encouraged to leave her home town Hyderabad and relocate to Mumbai.

Ms. Mirza said. “A producer and a director had come home to convince my parents that I had a bright future in the Hindi film industry. Since we were not from the film industry, they felt that they need to convince my parents of the safety aspect of Bollywood. However, my parents gave me total freedom to choose my career. I had that freedom, that millions of Indian women don’t. We need to change that first.”

Ms.Mehta spoke about how she became a mediator. “I was inspired to become a mediator after listening to another woman lawyer who had become a mediator.” Mediation is a niche area in law, and is one of the sunrise sub-sectors of the legal field. A law graduate from Mumbai University, she studied mediation and conciliation from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel, before returning to Mumbai. “The responsibility of making women successful lies not just with society, but mostly with themselves. It is not just about good teachers or good parents, but also about how confident you are as a person.”

Which is where, perhaps, an engaging and an encouraging family comes in. Ms. Naik recalled how her mother became one of the first women pharmacists in India and took over her father’s business just 15 days after his death. “I had my mother to inspire me. I lived and grew up in Karwar (in coastal Karnataka) where the challenges were far greater than in Mumbai. Yet, my mother succeeded. Her story is truly inspirational for me. I need not look any further.”

Looking beyond gender

Ms. Mansson said that our society needs to look beyond gender and how her company, the world’s largest furniture retailer, gives equal importance to men and women. “For example,” she said, “we have six months paid parental leave for both fathers and mothers of newborns.”

Ms Manral, who has written several books, is a blogger on multiple platforms and also a newspaper columnist, said how, in this conversation, we should not lose track of safety of children. Ms. Manral, who ran initiatives such as Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Month for four years, said, ““We tried to organise workshops for children on personal boundaries and recognising their space,” she said, “but many schools did not want to organise them because they thought it would be dangerous for children. We need to change this mindset.”

Ms Mirza had the last word on how the objectives could be achieved. “You just have to push ahead and not respond to those with patriarchal mindsets.”

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