Tech Mahindra, Wipro and Dr Reddy’s Labs — only 3 Indian companies made it to Bloomberg Gender Equality Index

• IT giants — Tech Mahindra and Wipro — are the only Indian companies after Dr. Reddy Laboratories to make it to in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index (GEI).
  
• The GEI index is based on five parameters — female leadership and talent pipeline, equal pay and gender pay parity, inclusive culture, sexual harassment policies, and a pro-women brand.
  
• This includes parental leaves, lactation rooms at the workplace and education programmes dedicated to women.
  
• According to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report, it will take 257 years to eliminate the prevailing gap on women participation in the workforce, globally.

Homegrown IT giants — Tech Mahindra and Wipro — are the only Indian companies after Dr. Reddy Laboratories to make to the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index (GEI). The pharma multinational retained its spot for three consecutive years.

The GEI index is based on five parameters — female leadership and talent pipeline, equal pay and gender pay parity, inclusive culture, sexual harassment policies, and creating a pro-women brand.

The report tracked companies based on their market cap and efforts to support and implement gender equality via policy development, representation, and transparency.

Tech Mahindra and Wipro made their debut for the first time this year. “At Tech Mahindra, we value individual differences and focus on providing equal opportunities to all our associates. For us, diversity of every kind is a priority, whether it is diversity of nationality, age, gender, thoughts, or abilities, and our constant endeavour is to build a workplace that is ‘intentionally’ diverse,” said Harshvendra Soin, chief people officer at Tech Mahindra.

The companies are also ranked based on parental leaves, lactation rooms at the workplace and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education programmes which are dedicated to women.

“We celebrate and learn from diverse ideas, backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. The essence of co-creating and being guided by our values, defines inclusion and diversity at Wipro,” said Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, CEO and MD of Wipro.

The report also highlights that the companies that have women in the boardroom and as CEOs also have more women at the senior management level. “Female-led organizations also had more women in the top 10% of compensation than male-led firms, and more women in revenue-producing roles,” the report said.

India has a long way to go before they attain gender parity. According to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report, it will take 257 years to eliminate the prevailing gender gap in the workforce, globally. India ranks 112th in the Global Gender Gap Index in 2020.

In fact, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) says that women around the globe work for a combined 12.5 billion hours for free.

The Bloomberg report includes over 6,000 companies across 84 countries. Of this, the 325 companies featured in the index have a market capitalization of $12 trillion.

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