Indian politics has always been more respectful of the value of women leaders than Indian businesses. Yet reservation for women in Parliament has historically been a rocky road, while reservation for women on corporate boards has been smooth. Of course, there was no voting on this issue, just a diktat handed out.
The first phase of mandatory representation of women on corporate boards happened in 2014, when the Companies Act, 2013 stipulated that listed and large public companies must have a woman board director. The appointments that followed were mostly women connected with the promoter/owner families, many of whom did not work in the business. So, compliance was achieved without much change in the overall governance system.
Five years later, regulator SEBI raised the bar and mandated that the top 500 listed companies must have at least one female independent director on their board. This paved the way for women professionals outside of the promoter/ owner families. Since then, considerable progress has been made — both the number of boards having independent women directors and the pool of women director-candidates have grown steadily.
Was there a lot of resistance to this mandatory representation? Not at all. There were several other issues that bothered India Inc more, including new regulations from SEBI and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which were more expensive, onerous and disruptive to the long-established comfort zones of boards.
What has the journey from compliance to acceptance of women in the boardroom been? Initially, we heard a lot of “but where are the women who qualify” (ironic, because qualification was not on the list of “must-haves” when the first round of non-independent women directors were appointed). Everyone pursued the same handful of marquee names.
The subtext seemed to be “if we are forced to appoint a woman, she must be held to a higher bar of track record, visibility, experience etc.” — the usual stance of having to be twice as good as the average male counterpart to be acceptable. As more search firms jumped into the fray, this complaint eased off.
More significant was the sudden explosion in “women director training” programmes. The message seemed to be that if you are to be appointed via reservation, then you probably need special training to get up to speed.
As someone who has served on listed, blue-chip company boards since the early 2000s, I had never come across such training programmes for men, despite many being first-time directors. It was presumed that men were capable of learning on the job while women needed to be trained.
Women went with it, hoping for a platform to network and improve chances of future board appointments. Those offering women director training were resistant to suggestions that they should instead offer training programmes for board and nomination committee chairmen on how to build more gender-inclusive boards and widen the pool of women directors.
Interestingly, these training programmes were not helping women figure out how to make themselves get heard and contribute in a room full of assertive men. They were mostly about things you could read in a book or learn on the job quite quickly.
In addition to training firms, there were several well-meaning, experienced male directors who started offering “women director mentoring”. Some of the discourse from them was strange, to put it kindly, and patriarchal, to put it belligerently.
Their idea was that women on boards were the yin to the yang of the existing boardrooms, or “house-mothers” who made discussions calmer and more polite. They frequently meted out advice to not be controversial and to “fit in”. None of this did much to help the cause of women directors or of diversity. Hopefully now, with more women as directors and in C-Suites, women will be mentored more relevantly by other women and taught the importance of seeking to perform rather than to belong.
Of course, women do get a lot of “mansplaining” and “he-peating” in boardrooms. Managements often deem questions from male directors worthy of more serious answers than those from women (especially if they have a softer, not “man-like” demeanour).
But then, what’s new? The main thing is that a seat at the table has been provided and it does not come with conditions of how to behave and what issues to engage with. We need more diversity — of values, world views and leadership styles in the boardroom. It is here that the next set of women on boards have to step up.
The good news is that many boards now have more than one woman to energise this.
The writer is a business adviser and independent director
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