Fireside Chat with Anuradha Aggarwal, Amazon Pay at Convergence India 2025

Because customer obsession is true for all. We're talking about women in technology and like I face this when we talk about women in media or we talk about women reporting war or conflict, and a part of me is like I don't want that prefix. A part of me in my 50s is that prefix has been part of my journey. Gender as an identity and in the workplace and difficulties that come with it are very much part of the journey and one has to live with it. Women are dropping out of the workforce, highly trained, highly accomplished women, because my phrase for it is we have trapped women in chains of gold. We have a responsibility as society for all these women who are stepping out and doing things outside the comfort zone of the first 20 years of their life.

So I think, hey, first of all, thanks for having me here. This is an amazing platform and how amazing to see so many people sitting here listening to women in technology as a topic. So thanks for being here. It's an interesting question you're asking, and I think we're a result of the choices we make along the way, but I don't think every choice is made with some end destination in mind. Very often, I think for me, I've made the decisions at a point of time keeping things in mind in front of me: what are my choices and what was exciting at that point of time. It so happened that I've now worked 15 years in FMCG, in telecom, in media, and now in payments. So one often wonders what's common between them. And for me, what's common is just that they're all serving consumers and they're businesses which keep consumer needs in the center. So I don't think I made choices thinking that I'm going to do five industries or five companies. I found this common red line or thread between them, which is first principle: the same first principles apply because customer obsession is true for all. These are great organizations to work for and I will learn something new in all of them.

I started my journey 26 years ago. I was the first sales woman, sales manager in Uttar Pradesh. I think everyone was trying 25, 26 years to try and welcome women into the corporate world, and some organizations more so than others. In the last 25 years, at least the places I've been in, I've seen organizations become very open to women. In fact, they all have an agenda for diversity. They want to have women both at entry levels as well as leadership levels. But the industry that you're in does matter because some industries and some jobs they say are women's jobs, like they say advertising and marketing are women's jobs, and I used to keep saying I'm doing this job despite the fact that I'm a woman, and not because I'm a woman. So yes, some industries are more male dominated because women have entered some industries earlier, but I think that is equalizing as we go.

My toughest professional moment was when I decided to step out of a really tough interface with a senior, and I decided after four and a half years in some organization that this isn't working for me. But it took you four and a half years? I mean, I knew it wasn't working, but I felt like I was climbing Mount Everest and I'll get there. I actually used to say this to my friends and family that this is my Everest, I will climb it, I will get to the top, and then I'll say never again. And then I'll say that it was all worth it. But somewhere along the way, maybe at the Hillary Cliff, I decided that I wasn't going to make it. And then mutually separated, sat out for 8 months without working for the first time in 24 years. I hadn't done that when I had two children, I hadn't done it when there were other challenges in the family. So why did you do it then? I won't say it was entirely out of choice. It was just that I felt like it wasn't giving enough to me and what I was giving to it was way more. So the reason I'm introspecting here is because these are really tough choices, and sometimes as we are taught to just stay the course, just put in one extra hour, or just put your head down and keep working. That decision was a hard one, but a good one. It gave me a lot of introspection time. It also told me that I'm a big organization person, I want to take businesses from 100 to 1,000. I'm probably a person who likes to give structure to organizations, and I also realized that I wanted to work in a new age industry. So that discovery got me to Amazon Pay.

It's really hard to separate. I mean, it is, and I think sometimes we speak of gender as very neat and clean, as if it exists outside of us. It's a bit like being short is a part of my identity, and so is being a woman. I can't separate those out. So my experience, would it have been different for a man? Who knows. It was my experience.

That's a very interesting question and one that I've pondered enough in my life. So I'll give you two examples. I was at Vodafone and the global CEO was very diversity focused, and I asked him this question saying, 'You're putting women in the spotlight. The spotlight makes us feel like we're different, maybe sometimes special, but also as if we have to do something different and something more than what other people have to do.' But don't we? We have to do more, but it doesn't mean we have to deliver more. No, we have to work harder. We have to work harder to deliver the same. Correct. We have to deal with a different set of environments. His answer to me was, 'Yes, I don't disagree with anything, but you are blazing a trail, and for a long time the women who will be coming into the corporate world will continue to blaze this trail. So maybe you're the tip of the spear. You will create a hole. Some 10 more people will follow. They'll all feel like they're in the spotlight, and that spotlight is necessary because only then does the spotlight grow. Maybe it'll become 50/50 at some point of time.' So in that sense, gender as an identity and in the workplace and difficulties that come with it are very much part of the journey and one has to live with it. And like I said, I've always told people that I'm here despite the fact that I'm a woman, not because I am one. Sometimes you feel like people are given jobs because 'I want a diversity candidate' or 'I want a woman in this job,' but I feel like no one's going to put an ineffective person in a job, and you don't last if you're not going to do a good job. So you may have worked very hard to get there, you'll still have to deliver what you have to deliver. But we were talking earlier before you came about enabling environments today for equity. The conversation needs to go a bit deeper in the sense that we keep talking about work as if it's separate from home. I think you take your home to your work and you take your work to your home, and that's just the way it is. Now if that's just the way it is for women, it's also that way for men. So if we want our generation of men to be equal parents, to be hands-on dads, to sometimes be single dads, to do their share of the PTA meetings, then they are also entitled to the flexi hours or the crash or the family leave that women get. But have we reached that mindset? Have we embraced that? Are we too caught in an old version of enabling environments? I think it's a continuum, and yes, we're reaching there. Some organizations like Amazon that we work for do have leave for similar leave for men and women. They have child care leave, they have paternity leave. We have the ability to take a break whether you're a man or a woman. So I think a certain amount of reaching par, like what they say equal opportunity, is happening. Is it happening on a large scale? I think like I said, it's a continuum. Some people will form like the early adopters and some others will follow. But the larger problem is a societal mindset. I've always believed that sons of working moms, wives of working mothers, husbands of working mothers, they tend to be greater allies of this. In that allyship, they create an environment which is more equal opportunity for men and for women. Not just for women, but also this ability to say, 'My kid is sick.' I have a team member who messaged me in the morning saying he's got two young children and every time his kid is sick, he's the one who takes leave. And I never asked the question of why are you taking leave, why can't your wife take care of it. It's the same way that it shouldn't be asked of the woman or expected of a woman. I think when you reach that place is where it becomes a little more organic.

Yeah, of course. And I started like I said at a time when you know... But this sales manager role in UP, where in UP? What happens? Tell us more. That's very interesting. So I started off as a management trainee in Andhra Pradesh actually. I didn't know the language. I'm married to an Andhraite now, I didn't know anything about Andhra at that time. And when I went there, the experiences that I had are worth writing a book about. But interestingly, what I came across was intrigue, curiosity, sometimes disbelief that there's a woman on the street doing sales. I've been asked questions like, 'Can't your father afford to feed you?' Why were you asked that? Because why are you on the street selling soap? I was with Unilever, I was selling soap. So why are you in the wholesale market selling soap? One interesting experience in a really small town in Andhra Pradesh called Miryalaguda, where I was breaking for lunch while the salesman went for lunch home. So I sat in a restaurant and they had these booths like trains, with curtains that close. This guy came and he put two glasses of water in front of me, closed the curtain, and went away. So like 7 minutes later I was like, 'Where is this guy?' And I peeped out and he looked at me and said, 'Gents.' So I was like, 'No, I don't want gents, I want food.' So he says, 'Gents.' Then I realized he was asking me if gents are coming to eat with you. So then I said, 'No gents, only food,' and then somehow figured out how to tell him I wanted to eat. So I'm saying a lot of my experiences at that time were societal, not professional, but societal spills over into professional. It spills over in making you feel like this also will come your way. So maybe the guy wouldn't have had to have this experience. Maybe the experiences they would have is slightly different. I remember being in the sales team and my amazing sales force, all men, 40 mostly 40 plus, trying really hard to take care of me because we would be on the road from Ghaziabad to Meerut to Bulandshahr to Etah, and they wouldn't find a single washroom that I could use. These are very practical things. When you start working for blue chip companies, big organizations, technology organizations, you don't even realize that there is a part of the workforce who's still struggling with all this. So I'm going back to a time where there was a men's lavatory on every floor of the office but a women's lavatory only on every second floor. I think those things luckily have passed. Organizations have realized that they have enough representation, so they have to have equal facilities. Now we're talking much greater equality in that sense. But my initial days were full of experiences where I was like, 'Oh my god, what am I doing here?'

Yeah, I mean, it's the same sales example. I was very young, I was 23 or 24 years old, and at that time I was still very much out of my parental home into a college, from college to the first job, and I happened to be in a really again very small town where the car broke down luckily near a motel, and I had to stay in a shady motel on the side of the road in UP. It was 42 degrees, it was really hot and no air conditioning. I was literally taking buckets of water, wetting my bed and sleeping on it. And I was sitting inside saying, 'What have I educated myself for? What am I doing here?' And there were people walking outside my door, people knocking around on the door. The guy who dropped me, my driver, said, 'Don't open the door. Anything you do till I come in the morning, don't open the door.' I didn't know what kind of establishment I was in. These are like I said, it's what I can write a book about. But I think I went through that. It's like a chrysalis. You come out to the other side feeling like you can do anything. We talk a lot about safety. I have to give a lot of kudos to my parents for having not coddled me after I did all this. And they were like, 'Okay, I trust you and I trust the organization you're working for. So fine, you can go alone at 5:00 a.m. in the morning with this fog in the car to Bulandshahr or Meerut or whatever.' So I think that we have a responsibility as society for all these women who are stepping out and doing things outside the comfort zone of the first 20 years of their life to help them make this journey. And whether it was 26 years ago or it's my children, my daughters are both adults, even as I send them out into the world, I don't think I am as strong as my parents were. So I have to be stronger. I have to make sure that I'm... I mean, that urge to protect, it's very hard. It's very hard to give up, and it's very unfair to your daughters. And it's a constant discussion we're having, saying, 'The same restrictions don't apply to the guys, so why do they apply to us?' And I try very hard to have a sense of equality, but the safety, the urge to protect, the desire... So the only thing I tell them is, 'Listen, every parent wants Life360 or some Find My Phone sort of application to find out where you are. So I want it too.' But to come back to what this is doing to organizations, we are getting girls from all walks of life. This is now Amazon, and even other organizations we've been part of, right from small towns in the country, from big cities, from big colleges, from small colleges. They all have different life experiences, different lived experiences. And as organizations and as leadership, we have to be aware that it's not the same as what we've gone through. So some people are all ready to lean in, raise their hand and say, 'I want the next job.' Whereas some other women or some other girls are still being diffident, saying, 'The fact that I'm here itself is good enough, and do I really want to do more? I have so much responsibility at home, I'm not getting equal partnership.' So I'm going back to this question of is gender important. I think gender is important to say that it's not one mass. It's actually a heterogeneous sort of mass. Even all women who are in the world, apart from education, I don't think their lived experiences are all the same. So organizations and leaders have to realize almost situationally that this woman requires this kind of help whereas another one requires a different kind of help.

I think the biggest unlearning for me is that this is not a homogeneous mass. All men are not the same. All women are not the same. We don't all do the same things. We don't all think the same things. So there is an element of, like I said, this person in my team is very family oriented, wants a break for every family event and takes care of his daughters, and I'm very proud of that. But that doesn't mean I go light on him when I need delivery. On the other hand, I have some women in my team who are so driven, they have this thing of 'I will manage my life, leave that to me. You tell me what my next career objective is.' So for me, the way I deal with it is that I deal with them at an individual level. But that needs an emotional energy for which there isn't always time available in a role like yours. But if you're a leader, you have to have this emotional energy. And if anything, I've had the good fortune of having mentors through my life, male and less female. I didn't have too many female mentors because the space was like that.

Definitely a lot of men. A lot of men that I've worked with, a lot of men who were leading my organizations. I gave this example of the CEO globally, very important. Nitan Paranche at Unilever were very important for how I think of work and what is important at work. From a women perspective, I keep saying my mother was my role model. She did her PhD when I was 13 years old, and she had three children, and she went to the US to present it. And she had some huge family supports. So I think being able to see these role models in the world is very important for young girls to say, 'I can do it. I'll get there. It's possible.' It's not like... I keep telling people, 'I have two children,' and they're like, 'How do you manage it?' I said, 'See, it'll happen.'

My simple answer, which I tell myself and tell my children and I tell all the people I mentor, is this Gita statement that people talk about: the dharma, this too shall pass. It's true. I would write it in big bold letters in my life, saying when I'm feeling super happy, I know it'll pass. When I'm really feeling stressed, it'll pass. And it sounds very cliché, but that is the reality. So when you're not feeling motivated, is that what you tell yourself? Yeah, I do. I mean, don't take a decision based on this sentiment right now. This is just the now. It's not your continuity. It's not your future. It hasn't even been your past. And I think as you age, as you do more experiences, you can find the spaces where, 'Oh, this happened to you 7 years ago and now you're okay.' So I do this for my sister. She's a managing principal in a consulting organization, and she's much younger, and I'm constantly coaching her. So finding a mentor or a coach who's invested in you in some fashion really helps, and it doesn't have to be the same gender. It doesn't have to be the same gender at all. I mean, very often my family says my husband is my coach. We are batchmates. We grew up together. We met when we were very young. But when I'm going through a traffic snafu that I had for calm, I call him. So I think having a person in your life who can look at your reality from a distance and call you out for what you're feeling and call out the BS that's going on in your head, the self-talk. I've been saying to people that sometimes you have to stop and stand on the balcony and watch yourself. It's called balcony behavior. And my kids have learned it. They'll be throwing a tantrum, and they're not really kids anymore, but I'll be like, 'Okay, go to the balcony for a while.' I think it helps if someone else is in the balcony with you, looking down at the problem and saying, 'Yeah.' So it's not easy. People keep talking about networking as if it's a bad thing. I think for me, networking has been the joy of getting to know people, just knowing people, getting to know their motivations, having them invested in your career, your success, your life. For me, that's networking. If I get to know people, and the questions you and I are talking about tell us about each other, I think that helps to form connections which are lifelong. Agreed. But women, because of conditioning, are often not out there in the way that men are. We sometimes come from the mindset that our work will speak for itself. We are worried about appearing too aggressive, too ambitious. Again, I'm not, but I'm saying many women are. But I think that's the stereotype.

That's true. Actually, I'm from one of the IIMs, and we have a really large community of women from the IIMs, and you'll be amazed at how many of them are sitting outside the workforce. That's crazy. We all worked so hard to get that degree, to get in. So I think that conversation has to be judgment-free because it is being made in the cauldron of stress. It's not like you want to do it. It's just that you can't manage your life or environment at that time. So for me, I've had these conversations a few times saying, 'Okay, let's decide that it's fine to go.' So first, put the guilt of leaving a job and leaving a career aside. I keep telling people guilt is the one emotion in our life that we should bury and not feel, for men and women both, because guilt does us no good. Regret and guilt have no value in life. It's hindsight. But if you put the guilt aside, I think the question is you have to really dig deep to say what do you want. I think half the problem is we don't know what women don't know what they want. It's funny, the 8 months that I spent at home, I realized that for me, being productive is a really important value. I didn't realize it till the 8 months. Just to give you an example, I've painted furniture, I've done DIY, I've done craft, I've learned a language. In those 8 months, I've done consulting, I started learning Kathak, I learned for 5 years. I needed to be productive in that time while of course looking for what I wanted to do next. That discovery of self and staying in that discomfort of self is necessary. It sounds like psychobabble, but being able to find what you want to do, for me I had the clarity of I will be a terrible mom if I don't work. I've said this to my children. It is true. I keep telling women you have to first be happy to be anything else to anybody else. My 5-year-old once told her teacher in school, 'My mother has to work, otherwise she'll be a very bad mommy. She has to go to office.' So I say this to people saying I know this about myself. And I must say this about my mom as well. My mom, when I was going through various tough situations of 'I can't manage this, I have two children, I have no help, you're not here, you're working,' she'd be like, 'Listen, imagine this life without work in it. And imagine this life with work and stress in it, and choose work and stress.' Work and stress every time. So I think that choice is very personal. It's very hard for me to say what I would tell the person. If I realize that the stress is overwhelming, take a break. It's okay. But why does that stress exist? The point that we're not going deep enough into is that stress exists more for women than it does for men. Although the reverse patriarchy is that the role of man is provider, key earner, it's not easy for a man to leave a job even if he wants to. No, you're right. Then I think this is a very complex topic. If the woman is leaving because of a structural support system being missing, then I tell people that the one thing you have to do in your life, and that's networking again, you have to create a support system. I lived in Bombay all my life. I have no family in Bombay, none. My in-laws passed away early. My mom's been working till very recently. I couldn't call parents to take care of my kids. My network of women friends from school, from college, from building, from university were my village, my community. And they weren't just my friends, they were also my husband's friends. So I think that is necessary. And if the societal constraints are pulling you down and it's not your choice, I think that solutions exist. You just have to be strong in the choices you make. I have to send my child to a daycare and it's okay to do that. It's okay if I'm being guilted by the older women in my family. I think so. That's the problem. Women have to be harder and stronger in their choices than men, and men don't have to justify them. And that is societal. I think that's the problem. If a man wants to step out and not work, and my husband was doing the same thing for 8 months and he's the one who gave me the strength to take my 8 months. So I think there is an element of societal differences, judgment differently for men and women. And if a woman is stepping out because she doesn't have a support system, I keep saying choose your partner carefully. If you're going to have a family, if you're going to have a structure, if you're going to have children, please choose your partner carefully. I say this to the working man, I say to the working woman. It's true because this desire to change people, to bring them into a mold, all this doesn't happen. I don't believe it happens. I keep telling mothers of boys, please imagine if this boy was the one you will be married to and make that, what would you want there? So I think there's a lot of societal change that needs to happen before women in the corporate world start feeling like this is an equal playing field.

So first, I don't think it's about a day-to-day. I think it's first structural. I think the important thing is to say put your money where your mouth is. Make sure that you are indeed recruiting a diverse team, and I don't mean diverse only in gender, diverse in thought, diverse in which part of the country you're coming from, diverse in backgrounds. Just to give you an example, I lead a team where there are so many people who are all technology, they're all engineers and they're all doing product management, and I've not done, I'm not an engineer, I've never done this job, never done technology, never done fintech, never done financial services before, never done e-commerce before. And yet I'm leading them. So having diversity of thought and being respectful for that diversity is very important as a leader. So you can't recruit someone who you think will give you a complimentary point of view and keep trying to change that person's point of view. The leadership responsibility here is structure your team in a manner that it is diverse, but make sure that you show up in a respectful way for diversity of thought and a difference of opinion. And it's a tough one to do. I think a lot of the leaders who do it become really good leaders. I have very good role models in that sense. And you have to be able to hear, truly listen to what's being said, and then make up your mind and move forward. On a day-to-day basis, I would say that everyone has off days and on days. But if you're genuinely not genderizing your day-to-day interaction, I think it's fine. If a person blindly tells me my child is unwell, I can't come today, I don't even look at what that person's gender is. Fine, this is what you need. You need to be there. If someone raises their hand and says, 'I want this job,' I'm not looking at their gender and saying should I promote them because she's a woman or because he's a man. I'm just saying is this person good enough for this job. Appraisal work. Being blind to gender when you're taking these decisions is another thing that leaders can do. It's not easy because we are all taught to recognize it. But I think the new buzzword has become gender friendly, not gender neutral. I've come from a mindset of neutrality. I think that's enough. But not everybody thinks like that. It's a difficult one to say because what does gender friendly mean? I think I would say people friendly. I keep saying it's human friendly. That human being has a certain requirement. That human being is a certain kind of human being. It sounds a bit trite, but I think this point of individual leadership, situational leadership, servant leadership is necessary because what it does is that you treat people like people, like individual people, not as stereotypes, not as cliches, not as numbers in a 2x2. So when you do that, I think it helps being a better leader. I don't know if women do it more intuitively. I've worked with many men who do it intuitively, and it's really just about the person and how you develop them.

What do you mean? Like, is there something that the class... You know, we all... I went to arguably the best journalism school in the world at Columbia in New York, and I can see today that my lived experience would challenge some of those things that I was taught in the classroom because lived experience taught me something that I didn't know till I lived it. So textbook teaching and life's teaching are sometimes the same, sometimes you build on what you learned in the textbook, and sometimes you say, 'What I thought then or what they taught me then, that's not how it happens.' It's an interesting question because I went back to one of the IIMs for a week course, and I found myself challenging everything that the professors were talking about. But I think I was challenging the recency of their thought and not so much the structure of their thought. So I felt like what management school does well is giving you super structures to think in. They allow you to work for organizing your thoughts, picking up the information and putting them in some sort of structure to consume, to communicate. They give you like a universal translator language, so everyone can understand. And I think that's what fundamentally they're able to do. What I feel like they're not doing enough of, and some are really trying, is being current because this world is changing so fast. And the professors, I go and meet the professors now and they're really young, they're younger than me, and I'm looking at the fact that if you haven't been in the industry and you're coming back and teaching, have you had this experience? So the industry-education partnership becomes really critical, and whoever is doing that well is maybe making more strides forward. There's recognition that they need to do a lot more, but I don't think the industry has the time to go back and teach. So it's a combination of that. I think management schools definitely need to be more current, more skill oriented, more tech oriented.

I think I'm more secure in who I am. And I think that comes with age and gray hair and experiences and all that. But it's also the fact that you feel with time you have lesser to prove about who you are and what you can do. You have more the desire to make a difference because that's what you will leave behind. I think it might be age related, it could be experience related, but that's where I'm at. I think I got recruited because I was this maybe insecure under-overachiever or very hardworking type A personality. I don't think I've changed too much as far as that's concerned. But I think I've reached a place where I'm saying that I'm only as good as the people I'm working with. And again, I'm hearing myself say it, it sounds like I'm giving some dry Gyan, but the reality is that I can't do it by myself. And it's not about me, it's about the outcomes, it's about what you leave behind. So yeah, I think that's the biggest change. It's not for me alone that I would say.