Shoma Bakre, co-founder and managing partner of EmPower Research
There has never been a better time for the fairer sex to work in Asia’s information technology (IT) industry. Several years of economic boom in the region, led by China, India and the APEC countries, have helped the expansion and feminisation of the workforce. More women are entering the professions, including the technology sector, and the economic downturn is unlikely to change this.
In India, for example, women accounted for 26.4 per cent of the total India-based workforce in the IT industry (excluding business process organisations) in 2007, up from 24 per cent in 2005, according to New Delhi-based newspaper Mint. In Malaysia, about 30 per cent of the 70,000 IT professionals are female, estimated Microsoft Malaysia managing director Yasmin Mahmood during a forum for women IT professionals in September 2008.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, the government agency Department of Statistics notes that more women have joined the workforce since 1988—from 531,500 to 807,000 in 1998. And from then, the rate went up to 54 per cent in June 2007. Out of the total workforce, 36.6 per cent were women employed in the information and communications sector.
Compare this to numbers in the West. The European Union’s (EU) information society commissioner, Viviane Reding, wants to make up the shortfall of 300,000 skilled information and communications technology personnel in Europe, by encouraging more women to enter the industry. Women accounted for 58 per cent of all graduates in the EU in 2004, up from 55 per cent in 1998. However, the proportion of female computer science graduates fell by four per cent during the same period.
Girl power
The numbers for Asia are also driven by a change of societal attitudes. “Asia has experienced an uptrend in women in IT as it becomes more and more widely accepted that women work after marriage or childbirth,” says Yeo Gek Cheng, director, IT&T, Hudson Singapore, an executive search agency.
For women who have children, organisations are offering family support with benefits such as childcare facilities, extensive medical coverage and insurance, as well as flexible work hours, adds Yeo. “This has helped in ensuring women have more and more reasons to stay in the IT workforce.”
Even conservative Asia is unable to resist the power of economic development, resulting in more women climbing up the corporate ladder. “In Thailand, I even saw the number increasing not only in IT, but also in the top level like CEO [chief executive officer] and MD [managing director],” says Saipin Kittipornpimol, executive vice president, head of IT group at Thailand’s TMB Bank. “IT careers are quite broad and open for both men and women to be able to select their preference path. So the number of women in IT is changing naturally.”
No limits
It would seem that in rapidly-growing Asia, organisations are more focused on the competency of their workforce rather than mulling about gender. The region’s companies, relatively young compared to their counterparts in the developed world, are less likely to have notions about male superiority or hang-ups about employing women.
Kittipornpimol says the work philosophy of her bank is based on competency alone. “There is no limitation on how far you grow as long as you can create value to the organisation and shareholders,” she adds.
Shoma Bakre, co-founder and managing partner of EmPower Research, which has offices in the US and India, says she has never felt discriminated against in her workplace because of her gender.
“I think gender bias is something that, although real to some extent, can also be played up quite a bit in the mind,” she says. Her firm offers off-shore research services to clients in a number of sectors including technology, healthcare and retail. “I have never felt any less able than my male colleagues to perform on the job. Perhaps that is why I have never worried about being, nor felt that I was being, discriminated against at any given point in time.”
But despite riding on an economic boom, Asia’s diverse make-up of numerous countries means that some societies still remain resistant towards women in the workplace, resulting in discrimination. “I’m a mother of three and you are perceived as a woman; ‘you should be doing certain things’,” recounts Hong Kong-based Christine Cheung, director of IT at engineering group AECOM’s Asia operations, from her previous work experiences.
Gender challenge
At the end of the day, addressing the gender challenge becomes just another issue that these female IT professionals skilfully solve in their daily work. For Cheung, it is very much about the delivery of work. “You really have to let your stakeholders feel that you are sincere about solving their problems,” she adds. Women have to ensure that their performance and productivity is visible in the workplace just like their male counterparts’, points out Bakre. “I think women should stop worrying about having to prove themselves in the workplace and rely on their performance to be testimony to their ability to do equal or better work than their male colleagues.”
Ranjani Ranganath (picture), general manager, technology strategy and business management, ANZ, a banking group that is headquartered in Australia, struggled with the discrimination when she first started working. “I felt, ‘Oh gosh, this would have been different if I’d been a man’, but over time, I worked myself out of that, and I don’t allow myself to think in that way, because if you feel like a victim, you’re going to end up being a victim,” she recalls. She shares her time between India and Australia.
Ranganath then took a philosophical approach as a solution. “It’s a set of circumstances that you deal with as part of your career—some people have some advantages and some people have some handicap and in some environments (fortunately not so at the bank), being a woman is a handicap. Then you have to deal with it, just like you deal with not having some skill or something like that,” she says.
Family vs work
Working in the IT field can be affecting towards the relationship between the women professional and her family. “It is very demanding as technology is involved in almost every part of the organisation. Banking services have expanded extremely to gain competitiveness and customer satisfaction,” explains Kittipornpimol.
“However, I think work-life balancing is manageable as long as you put enough effort and set the right priority for the tasks in your life,” she adds.
Kittipornpimol spends her average working days on numerous meetings, addressing a wide scope of issues from problem-solving to management briefings. Time is also spent on monitoring the progress of projects, coming up with innovative ideas, mentoring subordinates and giving information or policy updates to her team. And time for her family is spent over the weekends on dinner gatherings or short-distance travelling. For Bakre, work-life balance is about how individuals can refine both to suit one’s lifestyle and aspirations. While acknowledging the key to professional success is plain and simple hard work, as well as personal sacrifices, she feels that the key to maintaining a happy family life is being able to spend quality time and paying enough attention to family members’ needs.
“Earlier, my idea of work-life balance was to have a cushy nine-to-five job and spend every evening at home playing with my children, tucking them into bed every night. But I am quite happy now if I can do these even just once or twice a week.”
Her solution to the lack of time is creativity without making compromises on work and family. Mundane family activities such as grocery shopping or house cleaning can be made interesting by involving all members. “We can spend a good deal of time together doing things that need to be done while enjoying each other’s company and catching up on all the things that happened during the week,” she says. She also takes music and art lessons with her kids during the weekends, which again gives her some additional quality time with them.
Prioritise and Plan
“The amount of commitment that is required to juggle both ends is phenomenal. Prioritising and planning has been the key to my being able to successfully fulfil both my roles,” she adds.
For the region’s economies to expand, the companies here need to be able to reach out and conduct business all over the world. Having gender diversity goes a long way in helping organisations in their efforts to globalise.
“Till yesterday, your customer was a person who could walk to your shop. Now, you have to provide much more innovative products and services that appeal to diverse customers all over the world,” explains Ranganath.
“If you have workforce that is not diverse, you’re not going to be able to fuel the innovation that is required to engage customers across the world,” she adds. Bakre explains further that since consumers of all goods and services produced by any organisation comprise both men and women, diversity in the workforce of IT companies will certainly help the management to be aware of what the female half of the population of customers really need and cater to those needs.
“Just as the world would not be complete with just one gender dominating in numbers, an organisation has to have an equal and diverse mix of men and women to ensure healthy generation of ideas with a holistic view of the customer universe,” she says.
Unique touch
According to Ranganath, ANZ CEO Mike Smith is fond of saying that there is a very strong correlation between organisational diversity and business performance. “If you look at the kind of board which has large numbers of women, you’ll see them performing much better on the market than those that don’t have diversity,” she says.
In fact, Cheung feels that she is able to bring a refined presence to the workplace. “Because I’m a woman, I’m able to do a little bit of ‘soft-selling’,” says Cheung.Bakre explains further that women can bring in complementary perspectives and work styles to the office and allow for a more balanced approach to everything in an organisation.
She points out that women tend to be very task-oriented and efficient, due to the fact that they have to juggle multiple roles at home and in the workplace. She also notes that women can be loyal employees if they realise that their organisations are providing them with working conditions deliberately designed to help them perform well on the job and grow while not having to make huge personal sacrifices at the home front.
The management plays an important role in providing gender diversity. “Sometimes team dynamics can be a challenge especially if male colleagues have preconceived notions about women not being able to deliver. Therefore it is very important that gender inclusivity in an organisation be a top-down mandate with buy-in from across the board,” says Bakre.
Do it right
Apart from offering female employees with benefits such as flexible work timings, work from home arrangements and long leave post-child birth, there is a need to spread the message across the organisation that anyone availing these facilities is in no way contributing less to the business. In fact, working from home allows the organisation to cut down on the seat costs, adds Bakre. Such offerings also cut down attrition rates among women employees, create a pool of loyal employees who are proud to be part of the organisation and aspire to contribute as much as they can.Indeed, organisations offering these benefits thread a fine line of providing support to female employees and portraying them as a group of handicapped people. Ranganath suggests offering help to both sexes.
If organisations offer employee-friendly policies to everyone, it becomes a level-playing field where women are more likely to use these facilities. Ranganath has encountered several companies in India where benefits were created only for women, because they felt they would be seen as disadvantaged. “I’m not a huge champion of a philosophy that says you should offer [benefits] only to women. That’s always counter-productive, because then you’ve either created women as a special class of people, or you say women in some way are handicapped,” says Ranganath.
On the whole, the IT profession mostly promotes gender diversity. Kittipornpimol likens the IT office to a jigsaw puzzle. “If we can put the right pieces on the right positions, we will get the beautiful picture.” Also, women in IT can be less marginalised compared to other sectors and can outperform their male counterparts, points out Ranganath. “Because you’ve got a mouse and monitor to compete with, you don’t have to be like in the heavy industry, where you need brawn. In some sense, I think we have an advantage rather than a disadvantage,” she concludes.
