Wipro CFO on policy needs for hiring women

Wipro CFO on policy needs for hiring women

Companies need to hire more women at the entry level and nurture and retain them through the tougher years, said Wipro’s chief financial officer Aparna Iyer. In an interview to ET’s Rica Bhattacharyya, she said companies need to help women employees stick with the company through their critical life phases. She also spoke about the impact of workplace digitisation on jobs as well as the importance of creating career enablers to retain high potential women in the workforce. Edited excerpts:

Q. Despite efforts by an increasing number of organisations across industry sectors to improve representation of women in the workforce and build leadership pipeline, the representation of women at CXO level and in P&L roles is still abysmally low. What are the challenges and what can companies do about it?The percentage of women (in leadership) in organisations is fewer, but it is representative of the fact that the overall percentage of women in the workforce is low. It is crucial that companies have more women at the entry level and then they are able to nurture and retain them through the tougher years. We have got to make sure that we help them stick through with the company through their critical life phases and that can pay off.

The technology sector may be well represented in terms of gender diversity but it is better only compared to other industries as the gender representation is still not 50:50. We would like it to get even better. And at leadership levels, also, I prefer to look at the glass as half full. We’re (the industry) seeing increasingly more women in leadership roles in almost all aspects sales, delivery, finance, HR and across the board.

Q. How important are flexible work options to retain high potential women in the workforce?Indeed, it is very gender neutral. In fact, hybrid allows people in general. For instance, in a city like Bengaluru, when you’re working from home, say, two days a week, it does give people that much more time, perhaps at their desk or clearing emails, etc. It’s the right balance, but certainly even more for women.

Many women are caregivers or primary caregivers and they would like to have that option. But that said, we’ve also seen women who would like to come into work all five days, because they feel that this is the place where they can work without any distractions. To each their own, but having that option really helps.

We have adopted a hybrid workplace approach, with the goal of prioritising the well-being of our employees while aligning to our clients’ evolving needs and ensuring our talent’s professional growth. Recognising the immense benefits of in-person collaboration and innovation, we are now requiring all employees to work from the office three days a week. This approach has afforded our employees the flexibility of remote work, while allowing our teams to exchange ideas and experiences in real-time, build stronger relationships at work and access new opportunities through expanded networks.

Women form 36.5% of our overall workforce and we remain focused on improving representation by being inclusive in our approach. This includes a structured governance, commitment and consistent focus from our leaders. This has resulted in increasing the representation of women at the senior leadership level considerably.

Q. How do you see the rapid advancement of technology and workplace digitisation impacting jobs? Can it be an enabler to a more diverse workforce?I think technology is a huge enabler. There’s just so much more that we can do, I genuinely believe that. Take the instance of right at the time of the pandemic when organisations moved to an entirely work-from-home set-up. Technology sort of enabled businesses to happen. And it also opened up a large window for women to continue at work. Technology has also brought many women professionals back to the workforce because now we are back to a hybrid working model, which enables women to have that flexibility. We could actually tap into a distributed workforce of women. They could all join irrespective of where you were working from. And now, hybrid continues to give them that opportunity.

Every technology incursion brings in a wave of opportunity. And we’ve seen that play out in several cycles. And that’s the right way of looking at it.

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