NEW DELHI: Reservation for women in legislature and boards of companies is needed in order to have a fair representation of them in top decision-making bodies, top women industry leaders Kalpana Morparia and Naina Lal Kidwai said on Friday.
Although women would essentially like to make it to the top level on their own merit, they said considering the slow progress made in India towards more women representation in decision-making, there is a need for a reservation.
"One area where we really need reservation is in the legislature and the Parliament because there the door is shut and the only way you can bang that door open is by insisting on a reservation," Morparia, the former chairman of JPMorgan South and Southeast Asia, said here at the annual convention of industry body FICCI.
Kidwai, the chairperson of Rothschild & Co India and former chairperson of the HSBC Group of companies in India, said, "I would be in favour of reservation in Parliament because we did it in the panchayat."
While acknowledging that there have been instances of women being simply put up as candidates by men to take advantage of reservation in panchayats, she said studies have shown that by the third time the woman is standing there, it is in her own capacity.
"So it is about change and there may be this dressing up initially but it achieves what it set out to achieve in the long run," Kidwai asserted.
On reservations for women on boards of companies, she said women do not like reservations because they want it to be known that they made it on merit.
"However, given the pathetic progress we were making on the board issue, the progress that has happened, from where we were to now, the 18-19 per cent on boards has only happened because of the reservation at the board level. So I think this needs to come," she said, adding at some point in time the reservation needs to go away when the significance of gender diversity is understood by companies.
Morparia acknowledged that she was wrong when she once resisted a proposal by a Sebi committee which she was a part of, to have at least one woman on boards of companies.
After the government came up with a mandate under the company law, things have changed and women are now on boards of many firms, she noted.
"How can we get more women on the board? So certainly, that kind of initiative by the government definitely helped," she said.
On the issue of women dropping out from the workforce due to marriage or maternity, Colgate Palmolive (India) Managing Director and CEO Prabha Narasimhan said companies need to take women seriously, giving them tasks that matter to the organisation when they return from a break, while also providing them with the flexibility to balance work and family life as long as they are getting the job done.
Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) Chairperson Soma Mondal said certain policy changes are needed to encourage more women to enter the manufacturing sector, citing the example of some states where women are not allowed to do night duties.
However, she said things are gradually changing and women are now allowed to go into deep mines, which was not allowed earlier.
Hindustan Unilever CEO and Managing Director Sanjiv Mehta said women's participation in the workforce is about 20 per cent and the country is losing seriously when it comes to economic growth because of it.
"If we were able to double this, from 20-odd per cent to nearly 40-odd per cent, this will have a significant impact on India's GDP growth per annum. I believe that the delta growth that we are looking at is from the historical growth of 6-6.5 per cent that the country has delivered in the last three decades, to 7.7 per cent...a large chunk of that delta growth will just come from increasing women's participation," he said.
Mehta further said, "The onus is on men to ensure that we create an enabling environment, where women could blossom and that would contribute not only to the household income, but they will contribute significantly...(to) the progress of the country."