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RUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC
RHEHAAA/NSC WASHINGTON DC
RUEHBI/AMCONSUL MUMBAI 2259
RHEHAAA/WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON DC

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 MUMBAI 000140 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PHUM KWMN KDEM IN
SUBJECT: WOMEN IN INDIA: BREAKING THROUGH THE GLASS CEILING 
 
MUMBAI 00000140  001.2 OF 003 
 
 
¶1.   Summary:  Traditional views of the proper role of women in 
society create the largest barrier to women's success in 
business, according to some of Mumbai's top female executives. 
In a roundtable discussion with women leaders from Mumbai hosted 
by the Consul General, they explained that  breaking through the 
"glass ceiling" takes perseverance-to balance a career with the 
continued burden of traditional "women's work" in the home, and 
the support of a non-traditional family.  This cable looks at 
the experiences of five successful female executives in Mumbai, 
the corporate capital of India, how they rose to positions of 
power, and their efforts to maintain successful careers.  End 
Summary. 
 
WHO THEY ARE AND WHERE THEY CAME FROM: 
-------------------------------------- 
 
¶2. On March 26, the Consul General invited five female 
executives to a roundtable discussion on their struggles to 
develop successful careers in the largely male-dominated 
corporate world.  The roundtable participants included women 
from elite backgrounds as well as those who rose through 
hardscrabble efforts: 
 
--Sushila Bhakar, Deputy General Manager for Communications at 
Essar Group, a mining and metals company.  In the village where 
she comes from, in the northern state of Haryana, girls were 
married off by age 11 or 12.  All of her cousins were 
grandmothers in their 30s. 
--Christabelle Noronha, Vice President of Publications and Media 
at Tata and Sons, Ltd., is the only female vice president at the 
company.  She attributes her professional drive to necessity - 
her father died when she was seventeen, her mother had no 
employable skills, and her sister had a medical disability. 
--Poorvi Chothani, President of the American Alumni Association 
and head of her own law firm - all women, by happenstance - came 
from a privileged background and was sent to college by her 
family.  However, her family married her off during her second 
year of college.  According to her, her mother told her future 
husband that he could stop Poorvi's education so as not to 
disrupt the family. 
--Roopa Purushothaman is an Indian-American who came to India as 
a co-founder of an investment firm, Future Capital Holdings, 
where she serves as Chief Economist.  She explained that her 
understanding of the cultural role of women came from her 
Malayali (Kerala) heritage where women have a much more 
prominent leadership role by tradition. 
--Dr. Indu Shahani, Dean of H.R. College and honorary Sheriff of 
Mumbai, attributes her success to becoming a teacher, a 
traditional women's occupation. (Note:  Sherriff of Mumbai is an 
honorary position with no law enforcement powers, but higher in 
protocol ranking than the Mayor. She is charged with raising 
awareness for selected city programs such as women's 
empowerment, domestic violence and encouraging youth 
participation in society.  End Note.)  She said in education 
men, rather than women, face a glass ceiling.  She attributes 
her appointment as honorary Sheriff of Mumbai to the support 
from students she has met over her 30 plus years as an educator. 
 
DAILY LIFE 
---------- 
 
¶3. More than any challenges at work, these women all described 
the demands of home life as the biggest hurdle to overcome in 
achieving professional success.  According to the women, success 
resulted from having the fortitude and perseverance to satisfy 
the traditional demands of family and then extra energy to 
pursue education and careers rather than by shedding their 
traditional roles.  They each spoke of being expected to fulfill 
the traditional role of women as caretakers, feeders, and 
nurturers for their families before heading off for work in the 
morning, as well as when they returned.   Even in a culture 
where domestic help is very affordable, the role of mother, 
chief of the household, and wife cannot be hired out, they 
agreed.  Chothani acknowledged that by foregoing after-work 
socializing and networking, she has missed out attracting new 
clients.  Shahani recalled the pain one day when her son had a 
fever of 104 degrees, but she had to go to work because she was 
the only person with the key to the cupboard where end-of-year 
exams were secured.  Bhakar and Noronha are single, limiting 
family demands on their time.  Noronha, though, has adapted her 
 
MUMBAI 00000140  002.2 OF 003 
 
 
career over the years to be able to take care of her ailing 
mother, resigning from a prestigious journalism job to be a 
freelance writer so that she could spend more time at home.  She 
said she "lost her safety net" when her father died, pushing her 
into a career at an early age. 
 
EXTENDED FAMILIES WITH A NON-TRADITIONAL TWIST 
------------------------------------------- 
 
¶4. For most of these women, there were two common threads to 
their success: supportive fathers or husbands and an extended 
family to help with child care issues.  Shahani credits her 
success to her husband who has been very supportive of her work. 
 She quickly clarified that he does not wash dishes or make sure 
there is food in the house, but at least when the family lived 
in London, her husband did help with changing diapers.  Shahani 
also credits her mother and mother-in-law who helped take care 
of her family so that she could focus on her work when needed. 
She lamented that for the current generation of young 
professional women, living in a mobile society with nuclear 
families rather than extended families, their mothers or 
mothers-in-law may not be available to help care for the family. 
 Similarly, Chothani lauded her husband who supported her 
education, even funding her two years of study in the U.S. to 
obtain her Master's in Law degree while her children were still 
young.  Her husband stayed in India with the boys.  Bhakar 
attributes her success to her father who was a military officer 
with a more worldly view of what women could become.  She said 
he never foisted village traditions on her, but instead 
encouraged her education and career.  None mentioned mothers 
encouraging them to success outside the home. To the contrary, 
Chothani's mother even gave her blessing to curtailing her 
daughter's education once she was married off.  Rather than 
seeing men as guards preventing entrance to the higher echelons, 
for these women, the men in their lives opened the gates while 
women were the torch bearers of tradition. 
 
NO WOMEN MENTORS, BUT THE OLD RULES STILL WORK 
---------------------------------------- 
 
¶5. These women had no mentors to teach them how to negotiate 
through a male-dominated arena; each represents a first in their 
field or in their company.  They did not have other women to 
observe, no one to teach them how to adapt to an all male work 
environment, no vanguard to open corporate doors for them. 
Twenty years ago their success in corporate life would have been 
unheard of, they said.  Though there were no female mentors 
within their corporate structures, the women credited Indira 
Gandhi and her strength as a leader for giving them hope of what 
women could achieve.  While they acknowledged that Gandhi became 
Prime Minister as a result of dynastic politics in India, they 
believed that her strong leadership and the example she set for 
what women could accomplish softened their path to success. 
 
¶6. With no one to teach them how to compete in male-dominated 
arenas, they have relied on the skills they learned within their 
families.  Shahani, in her role as Sheriff of Mumbai, heads an 
all-male board.  What she finds most useful, and most 
appreciated by her colleagues, is her excellent organizational 
skills which come from years of juggling family, home, and work 
needs at peak efficiency.  While having a female leader is still 
a new experience for her peers, she believes that they all take 
pride in improving their effectiveness under her leadership. 
 
¶7. Noronha was reminded that, as in many families, male 
co-workers are more comfortable with a woman in a nurturing, 
backseat role rather than in command.  Noronha related having to 
challenge her male peers shortly upon her arrival at Tata and 
Sons, refusing to launch a website they had created which she 
believed was professionally unacceptable.  She took her concerns 
to her manager rather than directly confronting her peers, and 
argued for improving its quality.  She told her mother that it 
might be her last day with the company, but she was willing to 
risk her job rather than accept lower quality work.   In the 
end, her managers supported her and ordered the website to be 
re-done.  The price, however, was that she encountered hostility 
from some of the men she had challenged.   To earn the favor of 
her male colleagues, she quietly helped them with their writing 
without letting others know.  Over the course of time, her work 
group has become all women.  Despite a lower salary than her 
 
MUMBAI 00000140  003.2 OF 003 
 
 
male peers, Noronha takes pride in the work of her unit. 
Overall, she said, Tata and Sons is a meritocracy and promotes 
those who prove their value to the company; her secondary status 
is still better at Tata than it might be elsewhere. 
 
¶8. Several of the women mentioned that it is not uncommon for 
male corporate officials to ask about a woman's child bearing 
plans, and refuse to hire those who say they plan to have 
children.  There is still a preconception, they said, that women 
will drop out of the work force when they have children - a bias 
they concede is borne out in practice.  Unanimously, the women 
insisted that India would be a far more developed society if it 
harnessed the collective intellectual capabilities of so many 
women who leave the workforce due to family demands. 
Discrimination does exist, the agreed, but there are also 
shining examples of progressive corporations such as ICICI bank, 
which has a nursery/day care on the premises to retain 
exceptional women employees. (Note: Interestingly, ICICI's 
current CEO is a female. End Note.) They hoped that this model, 
if widely adopted, would help India capitalize on the knowledge 
and talents of those sitting out of the workforce. 
 
WOMEN'S ROLES EXPANDING, BUT STILL LIMITED 
------------------------------ 
 
¶9.  While the experience of these women is proof of the widening 
opportunities for women in corporate India, our interlocutors 
were still aware that women are exceptionally rare in certain 
traditionally-male bastions.  Bhakar said that while there are 
now more women on the corporate relations team, women remain 
largely in secretarial positions in the manufacturing and mining 
divisions of ESSAR.  Noronha noted that while Tata and Sons is 
generally a very progressive company, there were no women in the 
upper echelons in the manufacturing branches of the company. 
(Note: Indeed, Congenoffs were unable to locate a female contact 
in the manufacturing sector to invite to this discussion.  At 
least in Mumbai, finance, economic, communications, education 
and nursing are the new "pink collar" jobs in India.  End Note.) 
 One new field opening up for women is sales.  Purushothaman 
suggested that studies have shown women to be  more successful 
at selling insurance products than men, largely because the 
customer base is primarily women.  In pharmaceutical sales, a 
far more technical field, however, there were rarely women. 
 
 
¶10.  Comment:  While this glimpse into the lives of women in 
corporate India is only a tiny fraction of the experience of 
women in India, it provides a cross section of the vanguard of 
women breaking the glass ceiling.  For today's young women in 
Mumbai, India presents a much wider array of female role models, 
including the country's President, two Chief Ministers, several 
members of Parliament, movie directors, Air Force pilots, and 
CEOs.  Though today's aspiring women executives may suffer the 
lack of extended families to help them manage the competing 
demands of home and family, tomorrow's corporations may be more 
women-friendly and adapt, as ICICI bank has, to keep the best 
and the brightest employees in the workforce. End Comment. 
FOLMSBEE