Monday, June 12, 2000
First Things First: An Indian Woman's View of Workplace Challenges
- Gita LalA native of New Delhi and an Industrial Scholar from IIM, Ahmedabad, Gita Lal is currently President and CEO of Daman Consulting, a leading provider of enterprise business intelligence and enterprise integration solutions for major U.S. corporations such as The Pillsbury Company, Bear Stearns, Boeing, and DaimlerChrysler as well as emerging Internet companies such as Living.com, Garden.com and Ineto.
Gita started her sales and marketing career at Hindustan Lever Ltd. in India, where she had responsibilities that included regional sales and brand management. In the U.S., she has worked as a consultant for organizations such as Sears Roebuck, Advanced Micro Devices and Microsoft in areas that include media usage, market segmentation, sales forecasting and advanced econometric modeling. Gita was working on her doctoral thesis in marketing (on the sale of information systems and the associated impact of implementation and deployment life cycles), when she decided to 'drop out' and found Daman Consulting.
Gita has a BA in Economics, with honors, from St. Stephens College in Delhi, India, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and was a doctoral candidate at the George Kozmetsky School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
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When I was invited to participate in a seminar and panel discussion on Workplace Challenges and Career/Lifestyle choices Indian Women face in America, organised by NetIP, Austin, TX. My spontaneous reaction was "sure" . . . probably a reaction stemming from a pretty deep desire to be active in the Indian community and perhaps even provide students or others in this audience, who may be just starting out in their professional careers access to those of us who have assimilated, at least in some part, into this environment.
My next reaction, after I'd had a chance to think about it, was 'what the hell was I thinking'! What am I doing talking about issues I face as a woman who is an entrepreneur and professional, when in fact if there's anything I have consistently tried to distance myself from, its the fact that I am a woman in a very male world! I have always defined myself as a professional, an entrepreneur, then probably as an Indian and finally, if that, as a woman.. . . its something I don't think about very much, and definitely not on a day to day basis!
On a day-to-day basis my big issues are the issues that relate to running a company, issues relating to being very young and relatively inexperienced and having the responsibilities that are typically held by people older and more experienced than I. These are the issues from which my ongoing challenges stem rather than from the fact that I am female or for that matter Indian.
I'm spending a little time highlighting this, not because I want to diminish the importance of being female and Indian, but because I want to put these dimensions of my persona in perspective, particularly with regard to their importance in determining success or failure. Personally, I tend to focus on the things I can change and make better . . . I consciously focus on my skills, my experience and knowledge. . . the things I can do something about. It's a perspective that I believe has served me exceedingly well. I rarely think about being a woman because that's just who I am . . .and fixating on it or attributing success or failure to it is not particularly useful to me or anyone else.
Having said all this, I need to concede that I have had my share of experiences where I've been mistaken for the junior sales associate, the secretary or someone else less significant to a business interaction. Sometimes I impishly enjoy the case of mistaken identity', other times the situation is simply an irritant. But the fact is that everything I just said about 'distancing myself from my female identity' goes towards minimizing such incidents. You learn to develop a professional identity that is gender neutral, you balance that with your knowledge and competence and you build a credible persona. The fact is that I do try harder because I am a woman.
There are other issues that are unique to being firstly an Indian and then female entrepreneur in the US.
In India, I went to the best schools: first St. Stephens College, in New Delhi for Economics and then IIM A. Every where I went, whether to a social or business event, your credentials were automatically recognized, there was an instant camaraderie with the many alumni these schools have produced and doors opened for you. Frankly, it also didn't hurt that I was usually one of just a handful of women who were my classmates. In Stephens we had 10 women in a class of 50; at IIMA 20 in a class of 210. Add to this the network you might have access to thru friends and family and suddenly you have wide infrastructure.
When I started here, I knew no one and I mean NO ONE. No network or direct access to clients, no mechanism to introduce me to them or for that matter to any infrastructure providers: lawyers, banks what have you. It took me a while to get to the point where I am today where I actually have some kind of network to access. What I believe took me longer was learning how to actually build and maintain a network and then finally leverage it. Part of the delay was a rather natural professional maturation process, but part of it was, I quite honestly believe, related to being a woman.
In my mind this could really be one of the more substantive issues relevant to what we're discussing today, and we can deal with it in a number of ways. We could just throw out the statement that women in general just don't network effectively . . . sort of talk about how the best business relationships are usually those that are founded on some personal interaction, some commonality of interest . . . and therefore "everything would be easier if I you were a white male"; or we could drill down into the contributing factors and figure out ways to becoming better in this area. I hope we're going to do the latter and have some warm discussion in this area, because quite honestly, I believe the underlying causes are much more fundamental and meaningful to address.
Issues such as the ability to integrate the many aspects of your life together, seamlessly blend the personal, professional and human, while allowing each facet to contribute to the other.
Issues such as relying on people, not fearing calling for help due to some misconception of being perceived as weak, working seamlessly in teams.
In terms of other choices . . . clearly, I don't have children, I also have not preserved many of my interests, and I had a lot . . . art, dramatics . . . those are things that have fallen by the wayside as I continue to make the choice to devote most of my energies to my business and a career. Although I admit that I retain one passion . . . gardening. It's a passion that preserves balance for me and gives me an outlet at the end of a hard day or week. I enjoy the nurturing and 'building' aspects of the hobby as well as the fact that nothing happens quickly in a garden . . . everything is done with at the shortest a one year view! I am in fact rarely happier than when I am grubbing around in the dirt, starting yet another project in the wilderness I call my garden!
Coming back to the mundane, there are other issues of balance and integration as well . . . day-to-day ones . . . who's going to feed the dogs today, who's going to do the laundry . . . on those ones, my only advise is marry wisely, which I did, let some things go, which I'm learning to do, and for those you can't let go, hire help.
Until we connect again....
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