A vicious circle in the workplace

At first look, the tragedy at R G Kar Hospital and the revelations from a report on sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry may have a tenuous link with the latest Fortune India list of India's 500 largest companies.

- KANIKA DATTA

But there is a connection. The first two highlight the lack of basic safety for women in the Indian workplace. The second probably explains why it's likely to stay that way for some time to come.

The clue lies in the gender of the chief executive officers/managing directors of India's largest companies by turnover. There is no woman heading even one of India's 100 largest companies. Checking further down the ranking was too dispiriting an exercise but a White Paper by Fortune in collaboration with SPJIMR helpfully reveals that barely 1.6 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in India have women MDS and CEOs. Expanded to 1,000 companies, the number improves slightly to 3.2 per cent. It's not as though the record elsewhere is stellar. In China, for instance, just 10.4 per cent of Fortune 500 companies were run by women, roughly the same proportion as in the US. Still, India underperforms on this metric by some distance.

There is no shortage of surveys to suggest that corporations run by women are more successful than those run by men because they tend to create more inclusive work environments. There is somewhat dubious logic to these conclusions since none of these surveys can present the counter-factual: Would these same corporations perform worse if they were headed by men? But the link between weak women's safety in the workplace and the shortage of women leaders in companies is obvious and direct.