Importance of Fair work place?

If I narrate you story of an interview where the candidate negotiated hard for incremental compensation and higher incentive, what would be your first impression? What would be your assumption of this candidate’s gender, nature and working style? Or consider yourself on the panel of promotion board and you have to make a choice between a man and a pregnant woman, who would be your preferred candidate for promotion? These situations are not hypothetical neither uncommon, we witness many such events in a day-to-day working life. A recent survey undertaken, by International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) states, around two in five men in India – nearly 40.7% held rigid and discriminatory gender views. This segment believes women to be inferior. 

Now don’t be very worried if your answers in both the above situations were ‘male’. These are the result of the unconscious biases that we all have, which have been deep-rooted through our culture, people at homes, educational institutions and now workplaces. Everyone has biases... but this statement should not make you complacent, and let you justify in accepting it as a norm and continuing to live with it. It is important that you become more aware of these biases and be ready to challenge them in self as well as in others.

Our workforce demographics are changing, and as per one of the reports on gender mix in education in India, almost 47% of the total graduates, 48% of engineers, and 40% of MBAs are women. However, as per Oxfam’s report this year, India ranks second lowest in the Group of 20 (G20) economies when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. It is above only Saudi Arabia, a country that does not even allow its women to drive.

This depressing figure doesn’t culminate just here, as per World Economic Forum (WEF) report from last year, India ranked 124 out of 136 nations in a tally comparing women’s economic participation. Embarrassingly, all the BRICS nations rank much higher than India. The 12 countries below India include countries riven by political instability, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Syria.

Observing all these startling, yet real data points, one is forced to ponder over reasons which are resulting in leaking pipeline, inhibiting women from establishing their position at the workplace and exploiting their own potential. Whilst, there are several social and economic factors that play an important role in augmenting or deteriorating progression and advancement of women. The environ of a workplace and the prevailing biases have an equal vital role to play in attracting, retaining, engaging and promoting women.

With the new Company’s Act coming into being, organizations are certainly forming policies, setting up internal committees but most seem to only tick the compliance, focused on ensuring how ‘men don’t get into trouble’ and how organizations can insulate themselves from potential complaints and negative publicity. However, this psyche in corporate India needs to change and they need to take up challenging programs for sensitizing employees about gender stereotypes and their unconscious biases that intercept in capitalizing advantages of diverse workforce and achieving greater participation of women at workplaces.

With more and more women acquiring higher education, and entering the workplace, it is imperative that organizations are well prepared to accept and include women and leverage their strength for collective advantages of people and business. Instead of teaching men or prescribing suggestive appropriate actions or conversations to them we need to make them understand the impact of their biases and insensitivities. They need to realize that sensitivity is not by exceptions, it is an expectation. The business case and imperatives of having more women in organizations have been illustrated several times in various reports, surveys, seminars and forums but now we need to take ‘affirmative actions’. We need to weed out the unconscious biases and preconceived notions about gender. We need to show respect and dignity as professionals. We need to appreciate and be conscious of people’s background, preferences, appearance, and ancestry.  The power of inclusion and specially gender is such that it can increase India’s GDP by more than a quarter if it can match male and female employment rates (according to a report by consulting firm Booz & Co.)

Woman and the City

A lone woman.Walking down a deserted, dark street at night.With broken pavements. By now you're primed to hear about a crime or attempt at one, right? Let's try another one. A lone woman.Walking down a well-lit, populated street at night, with broad sidewalks.The image it conjures is totally different. Whether or not we make a conscious connection between the two, the fact remains that there is a very close link between our urban environment and the manner in which urban spaces are utilised and safety. Gender safety, in fact, is a great entry point to study this, since women are particularly vulnerable to acid attacks, kidnapping and sexual assault in large Indian cities, particularly in the Delhi NCR. A recent study in Kerala reported here also busts the common myth that women are treated better in public spaces "down South".
Simple things make a huge difference. For instance, in a safety audit conducted by several groups in Gurgaon a couple of months ago, it was discovered that there were no operational street lights on MG Road for a nearly 3km stretch, dubbed the "Mall Mile". Few of the pavements were usable, denying an escape to relative safety for a woman on foot, forcing her to use the same road from which she can be dragged into a passing car. And so on.
A simple fix: usable pavements of the correct width and height and operational streetlights, can create a far larger measure of safety for women frequenting this stretch. There are, of course, other issues to be dealt with, chief amongst which is the difference between private security and public safety. Indians who can afford it, tend to concentrate on the former and don't bother about the latter. It is the already marginalised who are left to bear the burden of increasing privatisation of security – particularly in cities like Gurgaon where the private security guards outnumber the police force by as much as five times – which translates into reduced public safety. This interesting piece by RakaChoudhury throws more light on the paradox.
Apart from fixing the obvious, like streetlights and pavements, we need to call for a conscious rethinking of our cities from the perspective of all, rather than the privileged few who feel that "good walls make good neighbours" and build them ever higher.
Encouraging beginnings have been made in transportation at least. Admittedly, though only for the privileged, Sakha Cabs offers the services of women for women and was featured in Aamir Khan's popular TV show on social issues in the episode on violence against women. In various parts of the NCR groups like Jagori, Gurgaon Girlcott, IUDI, Let's Walk Gurgaon, Saksham Gurgaon and others are campaigning for a safer city through public spaces.
We wish them all the very best 

Niiti consulting partners with Gurgaon Girlcott and Jagori for its Gender in the City campaign and is in the process of formalising an MoU with Jagori. Richa Dubey works with niiti consulting and started the Gurgaon Girlcott campaign
A history graduate from Delhi University who believes in "more is less". Richa loves writing on a wide spectrum of topics from textiles to Sufism to technology. She has anchored web communications at Cisco India, led public affairs for a prospective national innovation university on urbanization, and is presently building an advocacy strategy for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative’s India office. In her 16 year career in communications, she also has dabbled as a content specialist for print, new media and television. Richa is also a self-confessed textile lover and a voracious reader.

Tech-sec

When it comes to issues of security, technology and new media get a bad rap. Something to do with the internet making people too anonymous and locations too visible. Something about how sites like Facebook have us willingly spilling the most sensitive information we own on a public forum. Something about how apps like Four square have us exploiting our phones' GPS to show off how well-travelled and finely-dined we are. And, let's not forget, something about how even the simplest of cell-phones aren't safe from incessant SMSes after a single poorly-thought out, socially lubricated decision.
The reports don't do much to quell our fears. There was the notorious MySpace case where a woman managed to get her next door neighbour's daughter – the high school rival to her own – to commit suicide by posing as a boy she had (or developed?) a crush on and then breaking her heart. Or the one where a group of kids web-camming across different cities egged on a peer to OD in front of them. Back online, Something Awful stands as a testament to how far the most basic of information can go in the hands of a couple of teenagers. Think of all the information about yourself you've ever revealed when creating a profile on the internet. And think about how all of it is owned by somebody else – several somebody elses. With all this in mind, it seems pretty evident that the internet is a scary place, and now that it's invaded our phones, we should be downright terrified. No?
No.
The internet is not a scary place. It doesn't exist in a vacuum free from the laws of the realworld. Sure, the legalities concerning online activity are more sketchy that most given that the speed of the latter's development far outstrips the former's incurably sluggish pace. There is nothing inherently dangerous about the internet or technology. If there's anything to fear, it's our own (limited)capacity to consider the consequences of our actions online. The internet iseasy – it's fast, it's convenient, and it's tempting. It now lives in our phones and follows us wherever we go. It's also solitary, and there's your problem. You never know how many people are 'watching' you, where they are from, and what fraction of them are perfect strangers.
But how is that the internet's fault? Who twisted our arm and forced us to share pictures of one 'crazy' night out with our friends, our friends' friends and Mark Zuckerberg, but our own ego? How many of us use Four square to reap rewards from the few venues that are privy to its concept of specials, and how many of us just for the satisfaction of being in a trendy place and making sure people know we're there? And - for all our own lurking on perfect strangers or high school strangers on social and professional networks, how many of us could honestly be bothered to track them down IRL? Not none, sure, but not many. If we wouldn't, what are the odds that anyone else would?
For me, the implications of technology and new media are far more positive than negative. I WANT my friends and family to know where I am. I want them to know which cafe I was last at. I want them to send me a message when my Twitter account falls silent for over 18 hours. I want them to be my friends on Latitude. The internet is a wonderful thing because it puts you in control of what information you want to share, whether you want to share it or not, and who all can see it. The most insecure component of technology is the human being using it.

Ed - RadhikaTakru (who, amongst other things, handles digital media for Bell Bajao, one of India's most popular campaigns against domestic violence) shares her perspective on the Internet and technology and how they can be either used or misused from a safety perspective.

Radhika recently started work in the NGO sector as an online strategist, but has been moonlighting as an online music journalist for years. You'll find band interviews and album reviews by her here. Also look up the tweetathon moderated by her on Technology for Security #techsec on Twitter.