Today, India stands as the third largest producer of drugs and pharmaceuticals just behind the US and China. We've earned the distinction of being the pharmacy of the world. The sector is poised to move from $55 billion today to $130 billion by 2030. This explosive growth will lead to a lot of job opportunities. Yet, there is a striking challenge we need to address in order to tap into this explosive growth. Women's participation in the pharma sector is abysmally low. Only 11% women are employed in the largest of pharmaceutical companies in India. Why is that? Why does this gender gap persist in a sector that is growing so fast and is knowledge intensive? What are the structural barriers that hold women back? and what are the interventions that we need to make today in order to unlock the potential of half of our workforce. Hello and welcome to Uditi Dialogues on women and economic growth. A forum where we explore insights at the intersection of women, work and growth through conversations with leaders from industry, government, civil society to better understand what inclusive growth looks like as India progresses towards becoming Viksit Bharat. Joining me today is someone who needs no introduction. A leader and a visionary in the pharma sector, he has scaled Dr. Reddy's into a global powerhouse and also re-imagined what inclusive leadership and opportunity looks like across shop floors, labs and boardrooms. G Prasad, welcome to the dialogues.
Thank you. Thank you for having me on this show.
Prasad, a few months ago, I visited one of Dr. Reddy's plants in Visag. And what struck me was the number of women on some of the shop floors in the labs. I spent the day talking to the women and the men, the plant heads, supervisors, really understanding what are the different challenges of having women in these roles and what really struck me at the end of the day is it is very hard to build the pipeline for women and then to retain it yet Dr. Reddy's is the only pharma company in India that has participated in Bloomberg's gender equality index over the last 6 years and you have persisted in your commitment year after year. Take us through your journey of why you committed to it and why it matters to you that we have a gender balanced workforce.
Very interesting question. About 30 years ago, I had hired a chemical engineer who was helping me in my work. She was a very talented person, but she wanted to go to the plant and make an impact there because her background was chemical engineering. She went to one of the plants and said, 'I came back and I'm the only woman who was in the plant the whole day.' She said this and it really struck me that something is wrong in the work culture or work systems we have at this time. I requested my senior leaders to start hiring women in the plants. There was a lot of resistance. First they said women wear sarees and the sarees can get caught in the equipment and it could be a danger. I said that we can easily overcome that by giving them a uniform which works for them and is also safe. Then they said we don't have washrooms for women and facilities. So we created them. Like that we broke one barrier after the other. But still I must say that the attitudes are that women can't do B shift, night shift, they want to be treated special, which is not the case. Now we have women in all shifts. Slowly we changed attitudes, but we're still far away from where we should be. We do have a larger number of women than other companies, but if you look at where we are relative to the population, we have a huge gap.
Yeah. You have a huge gap everywhere. In fact the only place where we have good gender balance is our board.
We have three women on our board. But I realize that change takes time. We have to persist. We have to create the right conditions and we also have to understand the supply side.
We don't get enough women candidates signing up for work. We don't get enough women candidates for certain classes of jobs. We don't have enough women candidates for leadership positions. When we ask our recruiters to give us more women candidates for leadership, we don't ordinarily get them. Usually it is soft disciplines like HR, finance where we see women, even in science. But we don't get a lot of women candidates when we go out looking in many of the disciplines. So the demand side is a problem. I don't think it's just an issue of education or workforce. I think societal norms, societal expectations, in-laws, husband, children, women have a lot of other challenges apart from their careers which they have to balance out. Expectations have to change, spouses have to take on greater load, in-laws have to create conditions which empower the women. So there's a lot to change.
Absolutely. And it's not just the organizations that can do this. It is up to everybody. It is a complex socioeconomic problem. And to what you're saying, Prasad, when I spoke to some of the women, they said they are starting from home at 4:00 or 7:00 for the 7:00 shift, they're getting up at 4:00. I asked them, so they said we get up, we prepare our children's things, get everything ready before we get on the bus, and then it takes us an hour and a half to reach the place. I said, does anyone else at your home help you with making the children's things or waking them up? Unequivocally, not a single person said that sometimes my husband will do it or my in-laws would do it. So these women are effectively doing multiple roles, not just their career. They are running the household, taking care of the children, taking care of the parents. So it's quite a challenge for them.
Absolutely. And hence society has to change if we have to improve women in jobs.
Absolutely. And it is these gender norms that need to be questioned, but they will only get questioned when we see role models. Because these are not only in our heads and behavior. They are embedded in the infrastructure we have created, in the design we have made of our policies, urban infrastructure, and also our policies that sometimes hold women back. There were some 53 laws in the country that prohibit women from working, which now are being dismantled systematically across states. But Prasad, despite all of those challenges, you actually set some bold targets: 35% women in leadership, gender parity by 2035. When I talk to many leaders, they shy away from setting targets and say there are all sorts of challenges. Take us through your thinking on why you thought setting targets was important and more importantly how you convinced the different stakeholders to actually buy into that.
The 36% or women in leadership didn't appear to be a huge challenge to me because we have very good talent available out there. We just have to provide them the right environment to move up. Of course we are at 20% now, but the leadership is about 200 jobs. So the numbers can be easily achieved if we put our mind to it. But you need to put your mind to it. You need to focus on it. You need to have leadership committed to this gender parity goal. I thought we took a long horizon, 10 years plus, so we can achieve it. But as I see every year go by, I think we are not making that much progress, especially in India. In some of our global locations we are well past parity, in some countries we are 70% women. So there is something in our Indian environment that needs to change dramatically. There is incremental change, incrementally better conditions for women now, but we need more radical change to achieve parity in employment. I'm feeling a little discouraged by the lack of dramatic change in society. Even if we want to bring gender parity, we are trying in many entry-level positions, hiring more women than men. For some of our programs the slate is 60%. And in some jobs we are saying these are solely for women. So there will be an all-women batch in QC or an all-women sales force for certain products. But progress is very slow. We have to persist.
Prasad, in your mind, why should anyone care about getting more women into the organization?
So I can give you the historical disparity and the inequity that we had against women, but as a businessman I'll say it's a competitive advantage. If you have a pool of talent which is much larger than just the men, you have access to diversity of views, creativity, a larger talent pool. Overall as an employer, if your target base is much bigger than what it is, it's a competitive advantage. Apart from the historical inequity and inequality that women went through which needs to be corrected, but we're not correcting it, we're just making it equal. And at least on the decision-making side, in household decision-making, you actually see women make so many of the household purchasing decisions. So it makes sense for the leadership in companies to represent at least that perspective of the decision-maker, the actual customer who's making purchasing decisions.
You are probably most familiar with this tension that a listed company faces with the short-term quarterly goals and the long-term value of goals like gender parity and sustainable initiatives. How do you balance that eye on profitability and quarterly targets with keeping that eye on the long-term goal for innovation and gender parity?
Like I said, they are not incompatible. To meet your quarterly goals doesn't mean you sacrifice other things. You can do both. That's why we need talented leaders who can achieve both the short term and the long term, commit to values, and do the right thing for all stakeholders. It's not just either or. You can't just say I'm going to meet my targets and I really don't care about anything else. We don't have such leaders. All our leaders are committed to sustainability, inclusivity, equity as well as performance, and they achieve performance while doing all these things. And they are not incompatible. You can do both, and both equally well.
Right? And I sense that in my conversations, Prasad, at the plant, as I was talking to different people, pretty much everybody seemed to know the goals and they were like we want to get there, and they were very curious about what other companies in the sector or outside the sector are doing. They said after the conversations, if there are any ideas you can give us on improving that, please do let us know. So that was really gratifying to see how it has filtered all the way to the shop floor. There are four different areas when you look at the volume of people: women in manufacturing, women in sales, and both face different sets of challenges. In women in manufacturing, there are all sorts of physical demands, infrastructure needs, again gender norms that you talked about, but I think there more progress is being made. How have you addressed that in your manufacturing plants?
So firstly, I think man or woman, we don't want work to be a drudgery. We want work to be value-adding, should be easy. Muscle power should not be used. People should not carry heavy weights, should not put physical effort in their work. We must make the workplace easy for getting things done easily. Things which are repetitive should be automated or mechanized. That's a philosophy we have in manufacturing and also in our R&D and labs. When you do that, the human being focuses on other value-added stuff which machines cannot do, which need creativity, problem-solving skills, ability to diagnose, understand, and improve. So our philosophy is to move work to that level both for men and women. There's no such thing as men are stronger so they can do the physical lifting, women are weak, they cannot do it. Nobody should use their muscles for doing work. They should use their whole personality, their creativity, their brain power, and some skills you need which are psychomotor skills, but not muscle power. Coming to women in sales, I know a large part of your workforce is medical reps, and there the problems are much more challenging.
What would you say are the problems and what can be done to address them?
