Shakti Consulting-The D & I Specialists

25/01/2016

Men and women should not be afraid to use the term feminists to describe themselves.

14/11/2015

Good to know of this initiative by Genpact

Genpact is consolidating most of its maternity benefits,which already existed, under what it termed the 'Returning Moms Programme'.

29/08/2015

“Amazing Grace” Hopper — also known as The Queen of Computing, The Queen of Coding, Admiral Grace, Grandma COBOL, and The Grand Old Lady of Software — is recognized worldwide for her pioneering work in programming the first large-scale digital computer and for creating the first compiler. The latter paved the way for the first programming language that didn’t require a PhD in mathematics. "
“Grace Hopper was a trailblazer for women like me to follow,” said Rahima Mohammed, a principal engineer in Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, who has five patents and more than 100 papers in her name. “She broke through gender and corporate barriers and inspired a new generation of technology developers and entrepreneurs to follow their own paths to bring new important concepts and products to market.”

Grace Hopper’s accomplishments revolutionized the computing world for decades, but her wit and foresight continue to inspire innovators today. Grace … Continued

12/08/2015

While India Inc. has made much progress in removing the explicit barriers to a woman's success, the subtler and more implicit forms of discrimination in the form of damaging assumptions and stereotypes about women remain, and these are ultimately much more dangerous. Good to see more companies making a conscious effort to overcome these.

A host of them are going a step ahead and training their managers in what they call "unconscious bias" — the prejudices that develop because of factors such as background and experience.

21/07/2015

My friend Suman Rudra makes a case for promoting Diversity by introducing Paternity Policies.

Though Indian companies are increasingly waking up to the need to introduce paternity leave policies, the question is are they doing enough?

02/07/2015

Thumbs up Flipkart! Six months of paid maternity leave (as against the government-mandated three months offered by most companies) + the option of four months of flexible working with pay for new mothers. Or one year of extended maternity leave without pay. Plus, Flipkart offers to pay 50% of daycare at high-standard facilities for the first 4 years of the child's life. Finally some Indian companies are waking up and leading the way to retaining working mothers.

Flipkart said it will now offer 24 weeks of paid maternity leave.

20/06/2015

Our powerful neighbor has still managed to outshine us with more women in corporate board rooms

04/06/2015

Maternity leave rules in India need to be looked into again, under the changing socio-economic circumstances. 12 weeks of paid leave is hardly sufficient.

28/05/2015

All 100 Powerful Women have the power to shape our world, but 18 stand out in 2015 as entrepreneurs -- the women who built their status from scratch.

21/08/2014

In this small software company in Oregon, every day is Take-Our-Daughters-and-Sons-to-Work Day. The CEO Sabrina Parsons says that the juggling work and parenting is tough for all parents, but the physical and societal demands placed on women hold particular challenges. From getting pregnant and giving birth to the disparity in many caregiving situations, she says parenting puts women’s careers at risk more than men’s. “You’re in the prime of your career with all of this experience, when you get mommy-tracked. They get ‘concerned’ that you can’t do your job. That’s a huge reason why we’re not seeing women in leadership roles across Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies and in politics,” she says. A staunch voice for women leaders, Parsons has instituted several family-friendly policies that are not the norm in other companies. While still a small firm, Parsons says that her policies have had real bottom-line benefits. First, Palo Alto enjoys a loyal workforce with little turnover, she says. Fully one-third of her development team is women versus Silicon Valley’s average of 7%. Revenue from the company’s flagship product has grown 106% over the past 12 months, which she attributes to the contributions of loyal, happy employees.

The woman at the helm of an Oregon tech company has instituted unheard of family-friendly policies including baby-wearing in the office.

21/08/2014

Chris Myers co-founder and CEO of BodeTree, shares the lessons he learned on cultivating a culture with many diverse perspectives. Among the many reasons that startups fail, a culture of obstinance and narrow-mindedness are some of the most prevalent. That is largely because there is no diversity of perspectives that reflect the diverity of the customer base, with most start-ups being male dominated. "When we set out to bring a variety of perspectives to the business, we didn’t specifically set out to hire more women. Instead, we worked to create a well-rounded culture that bore little resemblance to the Red Bull-fueled frat house startups we’re all so familiar with. Our goal was to match the diversity of our team with the diversity of our customer-base, so that every customer felt that they were being represented. By articulating our commitment to true diversity up front and constantly stepping back to ensure that we’re reflecting the perspectives of our customers, we found that the right candidates continually rose to the top of our list. It wasn’t a matter of affirmative action for women; instead, we transformed our company into something that people from a variety of backgrounds wanted to be a part of. We rallied around our mission to better serve small business and our commitment to intellectual honesty, rather than a boys club startup culture. As a result, our product has improved, our marketing has thrived and our business has entered into a major period of growth." A big Thumbs up to Diversity!

Chris Myers, co-founder and CEO of BodeTree: Throughout much of my company’s history, we had a completely male-dominated team. This was not intentional, and as the CEO, I was committed to cultivating a company culture where diverse opinions were valued. As such, there were many instances of team ...

21/08/2014

Development Dimensions International (DDI) and The Conference Board have recently released a report, “Global Leadership Forecast 2014|2015. While the report is chock full of fascinating data on top Leadership challenges, it has been getting wide attention for a particular section of the report: the section on gender diversity. The report indicates that organizations with better financial performance have more women in leadership roles. Organizations in the top 20% for financial performance report 37% of all leaders are women vs. organizations in the bottom 20%, which report that only 19% of all leaders are women. The bottom line is that this data supports what we know about diversity in its entirety: fostering and encouraging diversity in the workplace is always something to strive for as it inherently leads to more diversity of ideas, problem solving, productivity and financial success!

Development Dimensions International (DDI) and The Conference Board have recently released a report, “Global Leadership Forecast 2014|2015.” This report, the seventh of its kind published by DDI, i...