Understanding the Need

By Sidra Khan | March 2020

Ts Pakistan gets ready to celebrate this decade’s first Women’s Day, many questions linger in the nation’s mind – how much have we progressed since over the past year? Where are we lacking? Why is gender equality still a struggle? How much more do we need to do in order to get to a place where gender disparity is not something we need to worry about? As a Pakistani working woman, I belong to quite a few minorities and almost always seem to be on the opposite side of the tipping scale. I take the liberty of saying that we are not there yet. Strictly speaking as a professional, we haven’t reached the point where female employees don’t have to worry about losing their jobs over wanting to avail maternity leave or not getting the same salary raise and promotion just because they ‘might get married soon’ and ‘may want to leave their job thereafter’. A big part of the battle against gender disparity in the corporate sector is dispelling such biased notions.

Perhaps one of the most pertinent aspects, when starting a sensitive debate such as this, is to analyse whether we are headed in the right direction. Knowing that we are, certainly provides unmitigated hope and makes the struggle for gender emancipation bearable. In this regard a huge responsibility lies on multinational companies in Pakistan to set the right precedent for the small and medium-sized enterprises to follow. “Employers are wary of a high turnover with women as they feel women leave their jobs as soon as they get married and have children. The fact of the matter is that in this day and age, there is as high a turnover of men in the workplace as women. In fact, economic circumstances as well as higher levels of education are seeing more and more women entering the corporate sector in Pakistan. The real challenge still remains of climbing up the corporate ladder to positions of higher management,” Bond Advertising CEO Seema Jaffer says, pointing towards the changing trends despite the misconceptions.

On May 24, 2017, the Pakistan Parliament passed the Companies Act requiring women’s representation on public company boards in keeping with SECP requirements. This is a welcome step in the right direction and will encourage larger representation of women on these boards. However, the post-act performance of organizations leaves much to be desired. In the larger scheme of things, women are also being inducted in corporate boards as part of diversity drives and good corporate governance. However, the numbers are still dismal. A news report in Business Recorder says that only 21 out of 559 (a mere 4%) companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) have a woman director on their boards. Research shows that businesses with women on their boards perform better and deliver higher returns than those with an all-male composition. Moreover, businesses with women directors are also associated with improved decision-making and lower corruption.

An essential component in eliminating beliefs that are holding women back in the corporate sector is to set actual examples that go against such ideas and replace the fear of prejudice in working women with inspiration and motivation. Policies that are friendly to working mothers play a huge part in doing so. “The Nestlé Maternity Protection Policy is a comprehensive coverage granting all women a minimum of 6 months maternity leave. In fact, expectant mothers are also entitled to take reasonable time off for medical checkups during normal working hours for antenatal care,” said Waqar Ahmad, Head of Corporate Affairs, Nestlé Pakistan.

He said that Nestlé also has day care centres across Pakistan in most of its facilities with nursing rooms available. Flexible work arrangement is also an option available for working mothers.

“All these factors are the reasons many women choose not to give up their careers even after becoming mothers at Nestlé Pakistan,” Ahmad said, highlighting how these policies help support women at Nestlé, offering them the right opportunities to succeed in the workplace in line with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Research shows that businesses with women on their boards perform better and deliver higher returns than those with an all-male composition.

On careful consideration, one would notice that the benefits of providing a welcoming work environment are two-fold for the companies. “For most corporate [entities] there is a very strong understanding that in order to be successful you have to hire the best possible talent, and when you are talking about the best possible talent, you do not discriminate based on gender because it’s a fact that almost 50% of business graduates are women. That essentially means that all the corporate giants have had to review their policies to ensure that they are gender-neutral and, in fact, in certain areas, have gone the extra mile to make themselves attractive for [potential] women [employees],” explains Nausheen Ahmad, General Counsel, Company Secretary and Head Of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs, ICI Pakistan Limited. This is the reason many global brands, like Unilever, Engro, Khaadi, etc. have an exemplary daycare center at the premises. They have ultimately positioned themselves not only as progressive organizations but also ones that are able to attract more female employees and ensure that they retain them in the long run. Thus, such policies give them an enviable edge over others that do not offer the same services.

But the debate is not about having policies in place that help the employers to hop on a trend wagon to appear relevant – it is about being humane in practice and actually caring about employee welfare. “ICI, for example, does not have a daycare center. One of the reasons is that our head offices are located on our factory premises. Therefore, there is certain apprehension in place that it may not be the most appropriate environment for children. But because we know how important these facilities are, we have balanced it [the absence of daycare] out by offering four months maternity leave instead of three months. Secondly, we have offered a work-from-home option [for new mothers] and we also give our employees, men and women, the option that even though there isn’t a daycare center here, if their children want to come to work (with their parents), they are welcome,” Ahmed sheds light on some of the practices at ICI Pakistan that, she is confident, enable them to retain female talent in the company.

Ahmed explains the need for companies to move with the times is extreme, now more than ever, since “young people are extremely aware of the softer side of companies - are companies ethical, are they gender-friendly, do they have environmental values?” Hence, a multi-national company, in today’s time, can’t possibly stay on top of its game unless it has practices in place that deal with real issues of the current times and satisfy the need of the hour. In keeping with its corporate social responsibility, ICI Pakistan also works towards empowering women. “Under our diversity and inclusion head, we have set quotas for hiring of women, especially in our manufacturing plants, because we don’t have too many women [there]. [We are also] offering scholarships at top tier universities in order to enable women who are not from a privileged background and who do not have access to top quality education,” Ahmed says, adding, “We also have in place an internship program for women from less-privileged backgrounds who would otherwise not qualify for internship in large corporates. Under this program we also provide training. We ran one in Karachi and recently, we ran one for female engineers in Khewra.”

It is initiatives like these that will encourage small and medium-sized enterprises to join in, in providing a safe and welcoming environment for our female work force. I leave you, the reader and the agent of change, with these simple yet effective words by Malala Yousafzai: “I raise my voice – not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard. We cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”