As someone working in the sustainability sector in India, it is par for the course to be the lone woman at a round-table or a panel and sometimes, at an entire event. The percentage of women working at climate and energy policy think tanks is 36% at the employee-level, 33% at the leadership level and 21% at the board of trustees level. Those numbers don’t look so bad, do they? That was our first reaction too.
Never mind the fact that more than 50% of the graduates from sustainability and climate-related degrees in India are women. Never mind the fact that 40% of all science graduates and 37% of all science PhD candidates are women. They make up only 16% of employees at government-run scientific research organisations and only one out of the 39 directors at Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories. These numbers exemplify two major issues plaguing the country — insufficient number of women being promoted to managerial positions and women permanently leaving the workforce.
These two issues are not unrelated: women are often passed up for promotions due to perceived familial duties and may quit the workforce when their careers are not progressing. Equally, women often quit the workforce due to social pressures and insufficient support mechanisms and therefore, there are fewer women left vying for leadership positions. In the last two decades, female workforce participation in the country has declined by 11%.
The ones who remain face significant barriers. They are likelier to rate themselves lower on performance appraisals, are less likely to volunteer to lead projects and have to work much harder to ‘prove’ their worth.
Obviously, these problems are not restricted to the sustainability sector alone but we believe that it is important for organisations in this sector to have this conversation. We are in the business of thinking about social justice across income groups, genders and geographies. We emphasise the importance of data collection and research to forward these goals. Yet, most organisations have failed to turn a critical eye upon themselves. High attrition is put down to the woman employee’s individual circumstances rather than systemic issues. Failure in getting promotions to leadership positions is explained away as ‘lack of credentials’.
There is much that organisations can do to change the status quo — taking affirmative action like including gender equity as a key performance indicator; discouraging interruption during meetings; and adopting a more holistic, transparent approach to promotion criteria. Organisations also need to put in place gender-diverse policies that support men who have family commitments or wish to work from home.
We believe that women should not be better represented in the sector only because of perceived gains like them ‘bringing in a different or diverse point of view’. Women are half the population and that is the only reason necessary for us to be dissatisfied with a mere 36% of the sectoral workforce being female. No woman in this sector should have to leave due to reasons other than her own choice and least of all, due to institutional hurdles.
Lekha Sridhar is programme associate and Kanika Chawla is senior programme lead at the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water
