Who's behind the mask - a man or a woman? Does it matter! Pic for representation only

Key findings of the study

India could add between 16% and 60% to its national income if women joined the labour force in proportionate measure. Achieving this requires India to recast its outdated societal outlook substantially.

A transformational change in societal attitudes and beliefs is the need of the hour, to enable women with Education and Employment opportunities on par with men. The onus for such change rests as much on society as it does on policy measures.

Women are severely underrepresented in most well-paying sectors and, at the same time, they are disproportionately well-represented in subsistence-income occupations such as care and agriculture.

A transformational shift in the number of women at work could bring about long-desired outcomes of better parity with men across opportunity, role and rewards, autonomy and a strong voice in decision making and, finally, equitable sharing in household responsibilities.

The number of women in the labour force is substantially lower than the number of men, across sectors. The predominant theme is their overwhelming population of sectors that require process-orientation rather than engineering effort.

The labour force participation rate is significantly skewed towards rural women, so much so that the urban, well-qualified, working woman is more of a stereotype than a reality. Most urban, educated, women willy-nilly desist from joining in the labour force because of patriarchal taboos.

The workplace bias against women is multidimensional - it creates effective resistance against women's advancement in their career through stereotypical roles, inequitable wages, structural constrictions to progression and leadership.

The root cause of bias against women arises from the labour market being largely male-dominated and having nurtured a masculine characteristic in its DNA. We deconstruct this root cause as a framework of Privilege, Practices, Peers and Pathways women are up in arms against.

Survey findings indicate that there is significant divergence between employee expectations and organizational policies related to gender equality. Organizations are perceived by employees to be fulfilling compliance requirements more than actually effectively addressing inequality.

In conclusion we propose a comprehensive, three-layered, approach that includes a foundational layer of parity and advocacy, a mid-tier of effective performance review and leadership pipeline capabilities, followed with adequately funded policy implementation.

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