Job description:
Profile: Sales
Male candidates only
Work Experience: 5 Years+
As a bona fide human being, and indeed a bona fide woman, it makes me angry. Not just the 'I am mildly angry because I am out of coffee' kind of angry. This is more along the lines of 'are you for real, you <insert Expletive 1 of the day>, <insert Expletive 2 of the day>' angry. It happens though. More often than you would think if you have not been noticing.
To not have this bias built in in the recruitment process is a low bar. And at Channelplay we made a promise to ourselves early on in our journey that we will not congratulate ourselves on clearing low bars. So yes, we do not have such job descriptions.
We cleared a slightly higher bar recently with 36% of our corporate employees now women. We shall not celebrate it because 36%, while remarkably higher than the percentage for corporate India, is still well short of the natural ratio.
So we will not be celebrating this data point.
In new hirings, the percentage of women has gone up from 28.6% to 41.6% over the last three years. Somebody thought we should celebrate this data point.
We will not be celebrating this data point. We will nod at it in an appreciative way, but the bubbly will be kept tucked away for now, because 41.6% is not a natural goal.
We will not celebrate all this because such celebrations make 'diversity' a buzzword, a KPI, a checkbox.
If you say 'diversity' to someone they are likely to say 'POSH compliance' within a minute. Like a word association game. Another low bar. It is a hygiene feature. It is legally mandated to have 'POSH compliance.' It is not something that companies choose to do, it is what they have to do.
In the journey to natural ratio, we have to go well beyond POSH.
We are working on it.
We are not celebrating.
If you share this worldview then we would love to exchange ideas. Write to us?