Jobs reserved only for men
Why are several top corporates asking only male candidates to apply for jobs?
Recently, prime minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a gathering at Facebook’s headquarters at San Jose, California, laid emphasis on the role of women in the economic development of a country, saying that achieving economic goals would not be possible for India if 50% of its population was imprisoned at home. However, corporate houses across the country certainly don’t seem to be on the same page with the prime minister.
This is obvious from various job advertisements posted on popular employment websites. Vodafone, Indusind Bank, Larsen and Toubro, Zoomcar, Max Healthcare, IDBI Federal Life Insurance Company, Omaxe Limited, TÜV SÜD among others, have asked only male candidates to apply for job openings in their companies.
What’s more surprising is that even for positions of HR executives and managers, secretaries and office assistants, where women usually dominate, companies only want male candidates to apply. To cite an example, Vodafone recently posted on its home page and employment website a position for a male executive – HR (HR operations). The candidate was required to “act as the first point of contact for all Vodafone India employees providing first class HR advice on all matters of HR, especially focusing on policy and process queries received through e-mail, and ensure (that) specific individual and team service-level agreements are reached,” reads the job posting.
When contacted by this correspondent, a company spokesper- son claimed that the organisation strongly believed in a gender harmonised workforce with 35% of all hires being women. “We truly believe in enhancing diversity in the workforce and work towards increasing representations from various walks of life. This specific instance, which you have brought to our notice, is a oneoff instance and the result of an unfortunate typo error on behalf of the recruiter. This has since been corrected. We would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention, which has helped us address this issue in line with our organisation policy (sic).”
Indusind Bank, in an advertisement for freshers in the HR department says, “Dear candidate, we are conducting walkin-interview in HR for male candidates (freshers) only.” The company did not respond when asked why it was promoting gender discrimination.
A number of prominent organisations requested this correspondent not to publish their names in this feature as they had “made mistakes” in their advertisements which had been “corrected” after they came to know about the errors. “I beg you not to publish the name of my company as the person who has approved the advertisement will lose his job,” pleaded a public relations executive on behalf of his client.
The question is, are organisations seriously giving women candidates the go-by and opting only for males? HR experts and leading women activists are of the view that discrimination against women at the workplace has been the practice for many years and these advertisements clearly show a deep-rooted bias in the minds of middle and senior managementlevel people in India.
Jappreet Sethi, a well-known HR consultant and CEO of Ideakatalyst, a start-up consulting firm, recounts an interesting anecdote. “Once a director-level incumbent requested me not to call female candidates for the interview unless they were presentable (read beautiful). I not only asked him to define presentable but also firmly reminded him that he could be sacked on grounds of gender discrimination if he was not careful. However, the boss promoted him and told me that to run a business one had to be ‘business focused’. For senior managers diversity is lip service, very few are actually keen to make it happen, unless there are personal repercussions,” he says.
Activist Ranjana Kumari, director, Centre for Social Research, is not convinced by the ‘typo’ argument. “How can there be so many typos and mistakes when several companies are openly putting up discriminatory advertisements? This is against the constitutional guarantee given to women in India. The state’s focus is on giving preference to women in jobs. The government must take action against such companies for violating the law of the land.”
Many HR experts agree with Kumari and say that denying jobs is a denial of the fundamental rights of women in India. “Why should gender become a basis of hiring? It is also common to ask female candidates during job interviews when they want to get married or when they want to build their family. This can lead to huge penalties abroad. But nobody bothers in India. Indian managers have become experts in discriminating against women. These job advertisements are one such instance,” says an HR head.