Executive Interviews: Interview with Vandana & Vaishnavi on Women Executives
August 2007 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Vandana & Vaishnavi
Founders - 'The Banyan', NGO

• So, what's the role of leaders and organizational policies in preparing women? Who should anchor the role of a cheerleader, a mentor and a coach?
  Nobody. Discrimination starts there. If one just behaves that equality is expected or assumed, things flow smoother.

• There were enough women movements across the globe, using radical rhetoric and legal action to drive out overt discrimination. But most of today's barriers seem to be insidious. Gender discrimination now is so deeply embedded in organizational life, as to be virtually discernible. In a so-called "flatworld", what needs to be done to wipe out gender discrimination?
  Deal with it paradoxically. Ignore. And sue.

• Who are to blame squarely for gender discrimination? Are men to take the whiplash?
  No. No one canmake you feel inferior without your permission.

• Midway in life, between a thirdand a-half of all successful careerwomen in the US do not have children. In fact, 33% of such women (business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics and the like) in the 41-to-55-age bracket are childless and that figure rises to 42% in corporate America (as per a study conducted Sylvia Ann Hewlett in partnership with Harris Interactive and the Nat ional Parenting Association). The findings are startling and troubling. They make it clear that for many women, the brutal demands of ambitious careers, asymmetries in male-female relationships and difficulties of having children late in life, conspire to dismiss the possibility of having children. Why has the age-old business of having babies become so difficult for today's high-achieving women?
  Because it is. And it doesn't stop with having the baby they're mostly left holding it!

• Is it true that most successful men are not interested in acquiring an ambitious peer as a partner? Should the reverse be also believed?
  Yes. Just insecuri ty not necessarily chauvinism. Women, however successful, on the whole, don't seem to ever let such trivialities affect a relationship.

• Let's now look at wage disparities. The persistent wage gap between men and women is mainly due to women being penalized for interrupting their careers to have children. In a study, economists Susan Harkness and Jane Waldfogel compared the wage gap across seven industrialized countries and found it was particularly wide in the US (for instance, in France, women earn 81% the male wage, in Sweden 84% and in Australia 88%; while in the US, women continue to earn a mere 78% of the male wage). Why such disparities when job expectations (and outcomes too) do not differ gender-wise? What can help prevent such disparities?
  Go to court when it comes to any discriminatory injustice if you don't have the energy or resources to mobilize public opinion or campaign on this. Sue PhirMilenge style.

• How should working-women (more sowith achievers and super-achievers) strike a balance between their work and life?
  Stop functioning as superheroes for a start! Just be "normal" behave like any man in a similar position would. There's no need to feed the general unfairly high expectations!

• What can women managers learn from 2002's Time magazine's "Persons of the Year", Cynthia Cooper (Worldcom), Coleen Rowley (FBI), and Sherron Watkins (Enron)? Which of their experiences, do you think, are quite crucial?
  Quite truthfully, we unfortunately haven't read that Time and don't know enough about them!