Last week saw me in Delhi, Bangalore and then back to Delhi once more, before returning to London at the weekend. My week was busy, frantic, noisy, crowded, chaotic – and fascinating, insightful, educational, a privilege. I met so many great people and was made very welcome by both NASSCOM and my PwC colleagues.
(And a big “namasté” to the many wonderful women I met last week who have signed up as new blog subscribers. Poor Matt, who runs this site for me, wasn’t quite sure what had hit him on Friday!)
Here are my highlights, in no particular order:
Showing the trailer of “Closing the Gender Gap” and discussing the film and the implications for women in India;
Speaking on the opening NASSCOM panel, on the business imperatives which surround gender diversity, and being referenced in the Times of India and the Bangalore Business Standard the next day;
Meeting my colleagues in the Delhi office and hearing them talk with great honesty, frankness and passion about their hopes for their careers, their families and their futures;
Learning about the particular challenges faced by people in Indian business around the whole “work life balance” conundrum – and how different this is for women in India, where “flexible working” can be taken to mean “part time working”;
Realising that, for some Indian women, it’s not just about the man that you marry, it’s about his mother; several women said to me that they were glad to have sons because it would give them the opportunity to be “a different kind of mother-in-law in the future …”
Helping Maureen Frank and her Emberin and Interweave colleagues launch “My Mentor: Challenging Indian Women to Step Up” – and seeing how eagerly the product was received by the women in Bangalore.
Hearing Pramod Bhasin of Genpact urging women to “Speak up! Rock the boat!”. Here he is launching “My Mentor”:
Particular congratulations to Rashmi, who won a copy of the “My Mentor” toolkit in the prize draw – I hope you find it to be a help in developing and advancing your career. Let me know how you get on!
Having some really creative conversations with Maureen and my PwC colleagues about how, where and when we will launch “My Mentor” for our women in India – watch this space … we have plans and we are cooking …
Participating in Thursday’s panel discussion around some of the lessons within “My Mentor” – and sharing my personal stories around the importance of having an honest and authentic personal brand, of being visible and of networking. For those of you who were at that session: the book I mentioned, “Brilliant Networking”, is referenced in the “Recommended reading” link to the right of this article. I also recommend this article on The Glass Hammer website, entitled “Networking for Introverts” – and not just because they also ran a great profile on me last week!
And mentioning books …
… I would also like to say a huge thank you to Rashika, who, having heard me talk about my love of reading and how I use books both in business and in pleasure, approached me after the panel discussion and gave me a list of reading recommendations for books with Indian context, as follows:
Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity – Amartya Sen The Glass Palace – Amitav Ghosh The Inscrutable Americans – Anurag Mathur The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
I am hugely touched by her generosity in sharing these recommendations and am very much looking forward to reading them all – and to then discussing them with her when I am back in Bangalore.
From Bangalore, Maureen and I flew back to Delhi where we crammed ourselves into two tiny seats in row 30 at the very back of the plane and spent the entire three hour journey working out how best we can continue to work together, obtain world domination and so on. Like I say – watch this space. We already have some very exciting ideas for Mumbai and Bangalore in early February. If you gave me your business card: I’ll be back …
And here’s a competition for you. For a chance to win a copy of “Closing the Gender Gap” on DVD, a copy of the DVD companion guide and a “You Go Girl” t-shirt from Maureen Frank (size medium) – please email me by close of business (any time zone!) on Friday 28th November and answer this question: what is the common link between the title of this blog entry and the two previous entries?
My next blog will be about a couple of London-based events which are on my schedule this week.
India. Diverse. Hot. Dusty. Crowded. Chaotic. Noisy. Colourful. Teeming with people. And animals are everywhere – dogs, cows, monkeys, goats.
An eight hour flight, a five and a half hour time difference. A world away.
A world in which there are many forms of transport: bicycles, motorised three-wheeler rickshaws, cars, taxis, lorries (with cargoes of people rather than goods), buses, carts pulled by horses – and motorcycles. Two wheeled motorised bikes of all sizes are everywhere, from mopeds to larger motorcycles. And one thing I noticed? Helmets are mandatory – unless you are a man in a turban or, and herein lies a theme: a woman. This may be apocryphal (I can’t access the internet to check …) but apparently, when the motorcycle law came into being, women were exempted on the grounds that they wouldn’t be riding bikes anyway so hence need not be included in the legislation. And so on my way into the office this morning, I was driven along a four lane stretch of motorway – and witnessed a number of sari-clad, bare headed women riding pillion, all clinging precariously to the back of a motorcycle, whilst their helmet wearing male riders wove in and out of the chaotic traffic. I felt terrified just looking at them, as they perched on the back, fragments of fabric blowing furiously in the breeze.
Tata are everywhere too – yesterday, I was driven (past a Tata hotel) in a Tata car, and given a bottle of Tata water to refresh me. I’m currently enjoying a rather delicious cup of Tata cinnamon tea.
Here in the office, my male colleagues are dressed alike in standard western business dress, but the women are far more diverse – some in business suits, some in saris of many hues, some in the tunic and trousers known as the shalwar kameez. In the lift on the way up to the eighth floor, I was the only woman but was still taller than every single man – and that actually made me feel more aware of my race than of my gender. My height and my blonde hair make me a very visible outsider here; going back to the traffic, we spent some considerable time in traffic jams on the way in this morning and I noticed how every pause in the movement of the cars is a commercial opportunity, both for beggars and for vendors. From the latter, I was offered the chance to buy tea, water, various snacks, newspapers, flowers. From the former, there was endless tapping on the window, mostly from women holding up their beautiful, wide-eyed babies to me with one hand and holding out their palm with the other.
So far today, I’ve spent time on the phone learning about Tata’s SCIP initiative – which included the project manager telling me that she herself found out about the programme when she was yes, stuck in traffic and saw it advertised on a billboard – and I also spoke to an English colleague, Emma, who is currently based in Mumbai and is setting up a mentoring programme and a women’s networking group. Later on I’ll be participating in a conference call with my Delhi colleagues before I fly to Bangalore this evening for the NASSCOM event tomorrow.
More later this week – now I have to prepare for my panel discussion.
A brief update before I head off to India this weekend, and a bit more information about what I’ll be doing over there. Since I last blogged, NASSCOM have come back to me and changed my speaking session around – so I will now be on the CEO panel (an interloper!), discussing the business imperatives of gender inclusivity. As this ties in incredibly well with the themes we explore in the “Closing the Gender Gap” film, I’m more than happy to discuss this topic and am looking forward to doing so.
Mentioning the film – I’ve been back at the editing desk again over the last few days, working on producing a shorter version of the key messages so that we can show it at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. Our global CEO Sam DiPiazza is on the World Bank Group’s Global Private Sector Leaders’ Forum and, as an official WEF partner; PwC always has a strong and active presence at Davos, so it’s very exciting that our film will be shown there next year.
We’ve also been picking up some coverage and feedback on other websites and in the media; Alison Maitland [www.whywomenmeanbusiness.com] referenced both the film and the blog in her newsletter item for International Women of Excellence:
“ … in my experience the best leaders are people, male or female, who combine “typically” masculine and feminine traits - who can act with courage and decisiveness while encouraging participation and displaying a high level of emotional intelligence. There aren't too many people who have all those qualities. So it's crucial is to obtain a good mix by putting together a top team with complementary strengths. In male-dominated companies, that probably means having at least a critical mass of women at the top – and vice versa in female-dominated companies.
Demonstrating how this is becoming a really big issue for companies, two heavyweight organisations have taken it up in a very public way. McKinsey has just published a new study, Women Matter 2, arguing that female leadership can give companies a competitive edge in the challenges they face in the future. PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a film (in which I appear briefly) called Closing the Gender Gap: Challenges, opportunities and the future, which argues that tapping women's underused talent could be the key to business surviving and thriving in the future. Learn more about the film by visiting executive producer Cleo Thompson's entertaining blog: http://pwc.blogs.com/gender_agenda/2008/10/going-live-the.html.”
“… for companies who have started on the journey, there is no doubt that the economic crisis will provide a temptation to cut back on gender initiatives in place currently. Don’t wait until it is too late; share the link to the PwC film with whomever holds the purse strings in your firm. You may be able to help them to stave off a bad decision with the solid information the film offers.”
And there’s also a good article on the film and its key messages on The Glass Hammer from a few days ago. Incidentally, when I spoke to The Glass Hammer, they also asked me about my career path and thus will be profiling me on the site sometime next week.
Those of you who have watched the film will know that one of the participants is Mr Gopalakrishnan, an executive director of Tata Sons. You’ll hear him on the trailer, talking about how “women at the top act as a lodestone” and, in the full length feature, he talks about the SCIP initiative which Tata runs. Next week I’ll be catching up with SCIP’s Mumbai based programme manager in order to hear more about SCIP and then write about it on here, but, in a nutshell, SCIP is Tata’s Second Career Internship Programme, aimed at women who have stepped out of the workforce for a variety of reasons but who now wish to take steps towards returning. SCIP offers them a flex-time based project environment whereby they can work for 500 hours over a six month period and regain their skills and confidence in the workplace. And, as Mr Gopal comments, it helps Tata to
“… Pull back the [female] leaders of tomorrow – back from the leaking pipeline.”
So I’m looking forward to hearing more about SCIP, to working with my colleagues in PwC India, to presenting at NASSCOM and to helping Maureen Frank launch My Mentor – India. Quite a busy week!
It’s even rarer for me to say, publicly, that I am delighted to be wrong.
But both instances occurred on Wednesday 5th November 2008, when I awoke to discover that Barack Obama had won the US election – thus making my then-quite-viable prediction of February 2008 (that he would be beaten by John McCain) completely, totally and comprehensively WRONG.
Excellent news.
(And doesn’t February seem like a lifetime ago, given the global and economic changes which have occurred since then?)
Although I was pretty surprised to receive several hundred emails from people who had read my prediction on here and interpreted it as a “wish”, as in: “I want John McCain to win” – when it was actually – “I suspect that …” So, to those of you who emailed me to express your surprise that this was my apparent “wish”: not so.
I am delighted with the outcome on many levels: that the American electorate has been brave enough to vote for character over colour and for change over tradition. That America has a courageous new leader who embodies the hopes of millions. That 56% of Obama’s votes were from women. That so many of my female American friends and colleagues are pleased, happy and relieved.
And what of the women in the public eye? I do hope that the President-Elect can find a smart way in which to deploy Hillary Clinton and her undoubted talents - not only as a nod to the 18 million votes she won during the primary race, but also in recognition of her skills and experience. It will be fascinating to see what Michelle Obama brings to the role of First Lady; I suspect that, with her enormous intellect and personality, she will redefine that role just as surely as her husband will be a new type of POTUS. I’m sure that Sarah Palin will be glad to be back in her boots and jeans in Alaska while she considers her next move – and equally convinced that Tina Fey will be relieved of the need to deliver on her promise to “Leave Earth” if Palin became Vice President.
I’ll be blogging towards the end of the year on my books of 2008 – let me know if you have any recommendations to share. One novel which is sure to make it on to my Top 10 is “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I started over the weekend. It’s a lightly-fictionalised story of the life of Laura Bush and is a compelling read, although I was annoyed to read a review of it in my recent Sunday paper which essentially gave away a plot twist – so no link to said review here. I also saw the film “W” a few weeks ago and it was actually, retrospectively, quite helpful context on the life of the real Laura Bush, although I doubt she’s delighted, as an essentially private person, to be portrayed either on screen or on the page, by Oliver Stone and Ms Sittenfeld.
This time next week, I will be in India, and I started taking my malaria tablets today. I will be attending NASSCOM’s annual Women in Leadership Summit and speaking in a panel debate on creating competitive advancement through female inclusion. I wish I had been organised enough to get around to creating some world tour t-shirts for Maureen Frank and I, as she will also be in Bangalore, launching an Indian version of her excellent “My Mentor” toolkit. To date, Maureen and I have worked together in New York, South Africa, Washington DC and now India.
Here’s the NASSCOM logo, which they have kindly allowed me to share:
So my next blog session will come to you from either Delhi or Bangalore, where I will also be talking about the GAC film “Closing the Gender Gap”, as copies of the DVD will be given to all 500 of the summit’s attendees. This is an interesting time to be visiting such a fascinating and vibrant country – we have two Indian participants in the film, from Tata and ICICI Bank, and the Gender Advisory Council’sBharti Gupta Ramola has just been named one of “Business Today”’s 25 Most Powerful Women.
Today is not only Election Day in the USA but also the 89th birthday of my grandmother, after whom I am named (Cleo is short for Cleone, which is her middle name; my middle name comes from my paternal grandmother). We call my grandmother “Mamma” (a long family story behind that one); she lives in an eighteenth century cottage on three acres in the countryside and keeps geese (on which she is something of a rare breeds expert), chickens, and rabbits; she grows much of her own fruit and vegetables, makes jam and bakes fantastic cakes for both her family and to sell on charity cake stalls. Happy Birthday, Mamma!
As I mentioned before, I was in New York last week for a variety of meetings, including Working Mother’s Annual Work Life Congress - which celebrates the top 100 companies in America for working mothers. I met some incredible people, including two women from GE, Sandy and Nancy, who have job shared for the last eleven years and have a great story – I’m hoping to be able to interview them for the blog and share it on here with you at some future point. I also met Carol Frohlinger, a previous blog contributor, when we sat together at the WM Gala Dinner. Carol is just as great in person as I sensed that she would be from our telephone interview last June and I’m already looking forward to re-connecting with her next time. Read more of her views on women in business at The Thin Pink Line.
And I was interviewed by the website The Glass Hammer for a number of forthcoming articles; we talked about the PwC film, “Closing the Gender Gap” and also about my own career and path before and then within PwC. Towards the end of the call, the journalist asked me about my career-based travelling and if I found it stressful or unpleasant.
“No”, I replied, cheerily.
“I love to travel – I get to see some great cities, have wonderful experiences and meet some of the most interesting people … what’s not to like?”
I also mentioned how terrific it had been the previous evening, walking back from the WM event down Lexington Avenue and seeing the Chrysler Building illuminated against the night sky. Beautiful.
Of course, I was tempting Fate by saying all of this, as my return journey back to London was massively disrupted the next day; I arrived home TWELVE HOURS later than scheduled, which was, if not stressful, deeply boring. Thankfully, I had plenty of reading material (another travel tip).
I’m keeping a close eye on the various websites which are tracking the US election results today; I’m still not convinced that the result will be as clear cut as the polls are indicating. I was on holiday in Florida earlier this year and discussing the then Democratic primary race with my husband. At that point, I wrote down my end result predictions and sealed them in an envelope. The piece of paper reads:
Obama will beat Clinton.
McCain will beat Obama.
Believe me when I write that I take no pleasure in being 50% correct to date; this time tomorrow, we will all know if the second statement is right or wrong.
In the interim, here’s a fantastic piece from guest blogger Pinky Patel of Pfizer. Regular readers will know that I spent some time on PwC business in South Africa earlier this year, together with my colleague Dale Meikle (also a guest blogger) who is based in Belgium. At the end of the business trip, Dale stayed on for a few more days (a smart idea – wish I had done the same) and went on safari. Whilst she was out game watching, she met Pinky, who had also just come to the end of her time in South Africa, where she had been working on one of Pfizer’s global philanthropic programmes. Upon her return to Belgium, Dale told me all about Pinky and how fantastic she is, and what a great article she had written for Pfizer’s in-house journal about her experiences helping women and children in South Africa, Kenya and Rwanda. I immediately asked for an introduction to this amazing person, and then asked her to write me a piece for the Gender Agenda.
Here is Pinky’s story.
“My name is Pinky Patel. I am writing to tell you about a journey that took me across the world from a small town in South Carolina to the middle of Cape Town, South Africa where I was blessed to meet and learn from some of the most amazing women I have ever encountered. These remarkable women invited me into their lives and opened my mind, my heart, and my eyes to the power of the human spirit to not just survive, but to thrive and reach out to help others do the same.
My journey began in February 2008 when I became the recipient of the Pfizer Global Health Fellowship, which is a philanthropy program created by Pfizer in 2003 as a way to work with non-profit organizations around the world. Pfizer loans out its trained and skilled employees - doctors, nurses, human resources, and other experts - to help local NGOs overcome operational obstacles to growth. The program is open to all Pfizer employees who meet tenure and performance criteria, through a competitive application process. After several years of success as a professional healthcare representative, I had earned my chance to apply and I did.
I chose to work with an organization called mothers2mothers, an HIV prevention organization started in 2001 by Dr. Mitch Besser, an American OBGYN who was working in some of the most under-resourced clinics in South Africa. While there, he discovered that many pregnant women were testing HIV positive and then being sent home with little to no PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child transmission) education or training, thus creating an unending cycle of death that has already wiped out an entire generation of people in Africa. In an attempt to help, he began enlisting the services of mothers who had gone through the PMTCT training and counseling to return to these clinics to work as “mentor mothers” to new women coming in.
These mentor mothers are the actual miracle workers in the field, reaching out to newly diagnosed HIV positive pregnant women - giving them hope and care despite carrying heavy burdens of their own. This model of care by m2m has met great success and is currently in place throughout South Africa, Rwanda, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, and soon to be in Uganda and Tanzania.
Most of my time was spent in the head office in Cape Town, South Africa - a city of incredible beauty and diversity, but also of extreme disparity, which creates a very unique setting for a girl who finds it difficult to understand the extremes of the rich and the poor. With glorious beaches backed up against the striking fortress of Table Mountain, Cape Town offers a playground to many looking for fine dining, excellent wine, breathtaking views, and diverse cultures.
However, right beside those chic boutiques and gated homes roam the hungry, wide-eyed street children begging for a few Rands and trying to survive outside of the townships that line the outskirts of Cape Town. These townships are home to over 1.5 million people - except you do not see houses. Instead, you see irregularly shaped shacks formed by planks and scraps of tin as roofs. It is hard to turn a blind eye to all of this, especially set against the history of Apartheid, which delves into an entire world of repercussions that South Africa will long be facing.
As for my role at m2m, I served as a communications consultant which offered me some incredible opportunities - ranging from working on the 1st m2m e-newsletter, creating new sites for the m2m Intranet, and even making site visits to Kenya and Rwanda to interview and photograph the mentor mothers in the field. From some of these site visits I created a collection of success stories about these mentor mothers for m2m.
One of the most remarkable stories I uncovered was of a woman named Lillian. With her large dark eyes and round shy face, Lillian looks like any other normal healthy young woman. But, at the age of 22, Lillian has lived through far more than her years should have allowed. She survived a very short-lived childhood filled with constant family feuding, until she was sent to the streets at the age of 9 to begin fending for herself. Vulnerable and alone, Lillian became the prey of a much older man who repeatedly raped her until she was 12 years old. That is when she fell pregnant.
Despite her young age, Lillian had her son. However she only had a year with him until he was kidnapped by his father, Lillian’s rapist. She fought to get him back, but as an unmarried woman with very little rights, she lost him. She has not seen him since. He is around 7 years old now.
Eventually Lillian did move on through her despair. She did find love and marry and have two more children. It was her third pregnancy that led her to discovering her HIV positive status which she has fought long and hard to accept and learn to live with. Although she still struggles, Lillian is a testament to how one can rise above and beyond her tragedy. From a girl who never even had a chance to go to school, Lillian is now a woman who is educating others and helping to save future babies from HIV.
It is remarkable how many of these amazing women are out there all over the world surviving, growing, and reaching out to help others. It is a testament to me about what we as human beings and are capable of, if we only come together, believe in one another, and WORK to make a change. This is my greatest lesson from my time at m2m and it is a lesson that I will continue to grow from in my life.
I walked into m2m six months ago having never met a single person with HIV and knowing very little about the virus and the treatment. In fact, I had many doubts about whether anything could really be done to impact an epidemic that has already wiped out a generation of people throughout Africa. Through their stories, their courage, and their strength, the staff and mothers of m2m have shown me just what a difference can be made. I returned home a better woman with a renewed belief in humanity and of what can be achieved. I know that, whether within Pfizer or elsewhere, I will continue building on this experience to unlock the potential and opportunities not only in my life, but in lives all over the world.”
