‘Make your presence felt with your personality and the value that you bring to the table’

The sixth session of the second edition of the e4m’s Women Achievers Summit observed panellists who shared their insights and real-life experiences on their success and failure as women leaders. The topic for the discussion was ‘The Journey to perfection: real-life stories on success and failure of the women leaders.’ This summit is exchange4media’s one-of-a-kind initiative to salute the women leaders in the communication industry. 

The panelists of the sixth session were Rakhee Lalvani, Vice President Public Relations and Corporate Communications at IHCL; Jyotsna Ghoshal, Executive Director/Enterprise Lead Government Affairs and Policy India at Johnson&Johnson; Shravani Dang, Independent Director on boards; and Ruby Sinha, Founder, and MD at Kommune Brand Communications. Ruhail Amin, Senior Editor at BW BusinessWorld and Ruchika Jha from exchange4media had moderated this session.

The discussion started with Ruhail Amin asking about their stories and their challenges before they became recognized leaders. To this, Dang said, “There were many. I think most important thing is to act and behave as if it doesn’t matter if you are a woman or a man. You are there to do a job and you do the job. Gender has nothing to do with the work I have been given or my responsibilities as I do what I have to do and that’s the way I have dealt with it at all my workplaces and with all my supervisors.”

Amin further questioned the gender biases at workplaces and asked the way they overcame those obstacles. On this, Lalvani said, “I am fortunate that I am a part of the Tata Group, which has always been an equal and fair organization and gives women an equal environment to grow. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t encounter stereotyping and prejudices. I just realized that I just need to be accepted the way I am, and I need to be authentic, and I don’t have to pretend to be a man or prove to anyone that I can do anything. There were individuals that were constantly judging me. But I overcame that by just believing the fact that I am in the minority. But I can still make my presence felt with the personality that I have, with the value that I bring to the table and with raising the level of my competency and skills.”

Ghoshal said, “The challenges that I faced were also to do with the fact that a bit of stereotyping and just it because you are a woman and you have to do so much but also because of the choice of the career. Somehow the career itself was stereotyped as a women’s career and into a good-to-do thing that was not part of the decision-making of corporate culture. But with time, we were being appreciated as leaders, and to me, that is the initial part of my challenging career.”

Speaking about mentoring women at the workplace, Lalvani said, “At a personal level, I am mentoring a few people through various organizations. One of my biggest goals or objectives is to increase the participation of women at all levels and not just at the entry level, which is actually fairly high in the industry. Unlike every other industry, they drop off in the middle, and at the senior level, it is a huge challenge. There is a huge potential population in our country that is waiting to be tapped. I think it is very well known by women that they have many natural skills to bring to the table.”

Sinha talked about gender diversity where she said, “This is a very important topic, and when you look at it, there are two aspects. I have been through such experiences where I have seen different gender diversities in India. After starting Kommune, I felt that there is a lot of mentorship required for women especially in the tier-two and tier-three cities. So for me, I feel if you bring in more entrepreneurs, women will bring more jobs by 2025. Men do have a very important role to play in this entire conversation, and we can only do our best to bring in more and more women to this role.”

“There is discrimination, but you can’t just spin it to take it back. So we need to grow the numbers. We need to mitigate parallelly and also realize the gender balance which everyone has spoken about and is very important today. The fact that women will bring very important and different agendas, whether it’s to the country or organizations. To realize the importance of facts that women can bring that change and have them in the decision seat and the decision-making table. I feel that we need to do a lot as a unit as well as an organization,” Lalvani added.