Startups in India: No place for women?

They might be boasting of a trend they have rightly caught up with. But they aren’t really ready to set the equilibrium. The start up culture in India has given India an entrepreneurial identity in the global map, yet none of the companies has a single woman employee in its executive leadership.

India's biggest, most funded and perhaps the fastest growing startup, Flipkart, is beginning to reflect the problem haunting the country's much bigger technology industry that of gender diversity at the top, informs a news report by The Economic Times.

Not only Flipkart, Myntra Ola, Quikr, Freshdesk and several others have long ignored the need to achieve gender diversity at the top. The ET report believes, perhaps the founders have been too busy building their startups.

But building an equitable culture and at least trying to put together a diverse leadership team is a responsibility they cannot shy away from, especially if more than third (and in some cases nearly half) of their employees are women.
During Women’s day and other ‘seasonal’ events, these companies bring out a hyped gender diversity debates. But this issue is far too important to be raised only during the season, and secondly, March is too far, far away to wait, states the news report by the financial daily.

The ET lists out some dynamic founders of startups such as MapMyGenome (Anu Acharya), Limeroad (Suchi Mukherjee), Tracxn (Neha Singh), Mad StreDen's Ashwini Asokan and Trucksfirst (Gazal Kalra). But other than this it's really difficult to spot women entrepreneurs and top startup executives. Some of them may lack experience in managing large, complex organisations. But that's an area of improvement for many, many professionals of the opposite gender.

The ET asks the right question- if founders and startups can spend so much of time debating, arguing, calling each other names, about issues of hiring, evil investors, intellectually challenged boards - why not set some time aside on solving the global tech's oldest problem?

Perhaps somebody in India could put together "a list of boss ladies" the way Silicon Valley veteran Sukhinder Singh Cassidy did with this Boardlist.

For its part, Flipkart seems to have realised that it needs to do better in terms of gender diversity. Couple of weeks ago, it announced an attractive maternity package to retain its women staff across the company.

But a detailed questionnaire sent on last Friday to Flipkart, Zomato, and several others remained unanswered. In fact, Paytm was the only company to have responded.

Some would argue (and perhaps rightfully so) that with the rise of new breed women founders at startups such as Trucksfirst, MapMyGenome and several others, things are much better off and there is no need to demand gender diversity at companies such as Flipkart.

But the real issue is not just about having a good number of women founders in the ecosystem. It's more about ensuring diversity at startups such as Flipkart that are no more small; employ thousands of staff, and are seen as role models for the entire ecosystem. They need to urgently address the aspirations of their (potential) women leaders and set an example, suggested the news report.