Future Of Work For Women Summit: Women In The Digital Economy In South Asia

>> Sakshi Shah: Good morning and a warm welcome to the Future of Work for Women summit. It is an honor to share this space with you all today. I'm really excited for all the new ideas, discussions and potential collaborations between the academics, corporations and grassroots organizations that we discussed today.

 

We're all gathered here today to really understand how we can tackle this daunting challenge of bringing this large untapped potential of about 250 million women into the workforce. I'm Sakshi Shah, your comparer for today. I've had the immense joy of working closely with Swahani Jalota over the past five months and more so over the past past five months to bring this summit together.

 

I lead Maina Mahala usa, an organization with a mission to support programs and initiatives focused on increasing women's agency in urban resource poor communities in India. To kick off this day, it is my honor to welcome on stage Dr. Swani Jalota, who a fellow and founder of Maina Mehla Foundation.

 

As you all know, she's the force behind this entire summit. Suhani's relentless commitment to bridging gaps between academia and grassroots initiatives has been instrumental in bringing this summit to life. And joining her is Katherine Casey, faculty director of the King center on Global Development here at Stanford. Her leadership, along with the support of the entire King center team have been foundational in orchestrating today's summit.

 

Welcome, Suhani and Katherine.

>> Katherine Casey: Thank you and welcome everyone. I'm Kate Casey, the faculty director of the King center, and we are so proud and honored to welcome you all here. The King center is Stanford's hub on global development. So we have pitched a very large tent across the entire campus.

 

So it covers all schools, all disciplines, all modes of inquiry. And we're united by this challenge of unlocking solutions to global poverty. So we work towards this goal along three main fronts. So we fund cutting edge research, we train the next generation of global leaders, and we help convene conversations and events on critical issues like the future of women in work that are key to to promoting economic development around the world.

 

So this event for me just totally embodies the spirit and ambition of the King center and the things that we like to partner on. So, you know, it starts with one person who has a bold idea, a vision, seeds a bunch of conversations across communities, across sectors, across stakeholders that have a very diverse set of experiences and intuition about what, what might be the problem and what might be the solution.

 

And then, you know, enabling these people with some funds and just a fantastic staff who work just way above and beyond the call of duty to make this happen. Of course, the person I'm talking about is Suhani. So I actually, I'm also a professor at the business school here, and Suhani was one of my MBA students, and she was in my classroom.

 

And then I went to a PhD seminar for development economics, and they were Suhani. And I was like, I swear that's an MBA student. I was like, she's in my class. What is she doing here? Because MBA students generally do not take PhD classes. And then I find out not only is she an MBA student, she's a PhD student, which is totally rare and amazing.

 

And now she's our colleague over at Hoover, so it's really fun to have her back and to be able to partner with her. So thanks, everybody. I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day. It's just a killer lineup of speakers and discussions, and I'm really excited to be a small part of it.

 

So Suhani, take it away.

>> Suhani Jalota: Well, hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. This really feels surreal. Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Sakshi, for making all of this happen. And thanks to the Hoover Institution for also really supporting this event. I feel like I'm surrounded here by my idols, by my friends and colleagues, and people whose work I've really deeply admired over many, many years.

 

And bringing everybody here today is really like a dream come true. We're here today with a shared goal to align incentives across different sectors. Government, private companies, civil society, academia, and funders to create pathways that can help bring untapped productive talent back into the workforce. And as an employer myself through MENA Mahela foundation, which is a women's empowerment organization in India employing about 80 people, I can deeply understand some of the challenges that employers actually face and experience in identifying and hiring productive talent.

 

The war for talent is real. We know that. And yet millions remain disconnected from productive opportunities. So today's discussion really focuses on women in South Asia because gender based barriers significantly limit economic participation, particularly in this region. And addressing these gender specific barriers will effectively unlock a huge amount of economic potential and talent for both employers and economies at large.

 

And the numbers are actually quite staggering. We know hundreds of millions of women, in fact, actually did not realize I could move this, I turned this off. Okay. Hundreds of millions of women are actually out of the workforce currently because this is not just a diversity and inclusion issue, but in fact, a huge business case for hiring and retaining women.

 

So we know these numbers are really, really large, right? And we see that out of the 1.41 billion women that are currently of working age, about 60% are actually not in the workforce at the moment. So this is 930 million women globally. So these staggering numbers, we know this is not a DEIC SR issue alone.

 

This is much bigger than that. It's fundamentally about harnessing economic potential to meet the critical workforce needs to drive economic growth. And today we will highlight solutions that not only show promise and identify gaps that currently persist, but also discuss the current state of evidence, the research on this, and where our understanding is still quite incomplete.

 

Now, let me briefly just share with you why we started this Future of Work for Women initiative. Now, I strongly believe in the power of partnerships between academia and on ground implementers. My journey started when I was 15 working in urban slum communities in India, and I've been doing this now for more than 15 years.

 

Some of our incredible team members from the group and team that we started Mena Mela, are here today. But when I first came to Stanford as a PhD student and for my doctorate, and then now also as a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, it's really opened my eyes to not just the role that we play in academia, but also the responsibility to bridge conversations between academic research think tanks and boardrooms with the practical realities faced by employers and people on the ground.

 

And today we're intentionally bringing together the thinkers and the doers, the people generating data and insights, and those applying those solutions directly on the ground. This initiative is really about harnessing the strengths of both academia and implementation and connecting, in this case at Stanford, Silicon Valley's innovation and technology and resources with these real world ground level insights and the feasibility of these practical, scalable solutions.

 

Over the past year, as we've geared up towards this event, we've conducted extensive research and conducting some direct conversations with many private companies. And we found a lot of insights from these conversations with companies about that have actually formed the basis of a lot of the business case for hiring and retaining women that we will discuss later today.

 

And I'm really thrilled to launch today our first research report which captures these valuable insights from these private sector conversations, highlighting some of the effective solutions, identifying these potential opportunities and also some pilot interventions that we could actually do along with different sectors to create the sort of cross sector collaboration as part of this Future of Work for Women initiative.

 

Copies of this report are available here, they're also available online. We really highly recommend that you check it out and we want to get as many ideas from you as well to see how we could really make this cross sector collaboration possible. We face a really, really large gap today, right now between today and between the employers that are currently hiring say even 10 million vacancies.

 

These number of vacancies are often not even understood fully to the women that are out of the workforce. And these, as we discussed globally, those numbers are very large, 900 million plus. We're looking at in South Asia alone, somewhere about 250 million women. In India, 196 million women that are currently out of the workforce.

 

Now how do you really bridge this gap? Well, that's the role of a lot of the enablers in this space, the government, academia, civil society funders and startups. And if there's any other sectors that need to be involved in enabling this to happen. Today we will be specifically discussing five practical solutions that we know have had some evidence and show some potential.

 

These are first, changing social norms around men's responsibilities, around domestic and caregiving duties. Two, leveraging technology to create flexible work arrangements. Three, is reducing employment specific costs for women. Four is upskilling and educating women to enhance productivity and five, is establishing programs to lower childcare and transportation barriers.

 

And these solutions have shown initial promise. One particular strategy that I want to highlight here that we will be highlighting today as well and is highlighted in the report is around the theme of Today Women in the digital Economy, how we can leverage technology for these flexible work arrangements.

 

This is drawn out of some of the research that Lisa, who's here today and I have also been doing, along with now many other scholars and academics who have been focused on understanding how flexible work arrangements can bring women into the workforce. We have Pragya. We have many other people here today who are also implementing and enabling the implementation of many of these solutions.

 

There is growing evidence now that digital jobs not only help women enter the workforce, but can also serve as a stepping stone for broader career opportunities and the Future of Work for Women initiative. And all of you here today in the valley are part of the solution. We have access to digital technologies, AI resources, and knowledge that we can help use to bridge the gap with the people and the women that are out of the workforce.

 

So today our discussions will focus on South Asia and we'll bring in insights from multiple industries from digital economy, manufacturing, logistics, maritime, even. And these insights should hopefully help with more global relevance and insights beyond South Asia alone. So before I conclude, I want to invite on stage, I want to thank first all of the speakers that are here.

 

One particular speaker I'm really excited about now is Professor Rohini Pandey, as I bring her on stage to give our keynote address. She's the professor of economics and the director of the Economic Growth center at Yale University. She's also the faculty Director of Inclusion Economics at Yale. Formerly, she was a professor of International Political economy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

 

And Rohini's extensive research, which has really influenced policy in South Asia and globally, has been an inspiration to me. But so many others, millions of women have been able to be impacted by some of the policy changes and or discussions that her work has directly brought together. She's a guru in this space for female labor force participation.

 

And I say this for all the people here in the room today who've come here to see her, she. She's an incredible mentor and guide to lots of women, including myself. And I really, really hope that you get to learn more from her today. So, Professor Pandey, please welcome to the stage.

 

The floor is yours.

>> Rohini Pande: Thank you. Thank you, Sohani. I can only disappoint after that, but thank you so much and thank you for bringing together this group. Thanks to Kate and others as well for the space and Sohani, really, more power to you. I think I've just been so impressed seeing everything you've been doing since I first heard about you from Erika when you were an undergraduate at Duke.

 

So what I wanted to do today was really build on themes that Suhani had asked me to, but in a slightly, in some ways, hopefully narrower, broader and narrower sense. I want to more broadly lay out, I think, some of the issues we want to think about when we think about bridging this gap between what women want and what the economy is able to provide them.

 

But it's going to be narrower in that I'm going to largely talk about the context of India, since that's really where most of my work is focused. But I also think that India is an interesting context to look at, it's a very fast-growing lower middle income economy. It has, you know, on some aspects like education, done incredibly well at supporting women.

 

But we don't see this translating yet into the labor market. And it's also worth remembering that one reason for thinking about countries like India or more broadly lower income countries is that today, just demographics, but over 80% of the world's women live in these lower income countries. So as I mentioned, we've seen a dramatic reduction in education gaps for gender.

 

And I think in many countries the concerns now are about the reverse gender gap, about the fact that boys are falling behind in education at many levels. Yet where we don't see this translate, at least in lower income countries, is when it comes into job opportunities. And I think increasingly there's been a lot more interest and that's what I'm going to talk about in thinking not about an individual specific issues, but what may be the systemic barriers at the level of the society or economy that are holding them back.

 

Now, a first view you might take is maybe still the best thing to do is to focus on growth. That you just look across the world and you see richer countries, there are more women working often in wage labor than in poorer countries. And one example of where you can think of getting some inspiration of this is the US So if you look at either the black or the blue line, they're just differences in how the data series is constructed.

 

Before the census had the information, what you see is as the US got richer, so as its GDP increased over time, we see the gender gap in labor force participation reduced. And so I've superimposed on this graph in green India. And so what you could conclude from this is, you know, India doesn't look great right now, but that's just because it's poorer and it's to the left of the point at which its GDP is high enough that women enter the labor force in large numbers.

 

So a little bit inspired by this question and I'll talk a bit about it. We have at the Economic Growth Center, a group of economists thinking about gender growth gaps. And so we put together labor force surveys, both that have already been harmonized, some more that we harmonized, to really look at this question in the context of today's low and middle income countries.

 

This is around 150 countries for which we have multiple data points. So if you just look at some of the main countries, again the same thing just ask for what does the gender gap in labor force look against gdp? You find a very mixed pattern. So if you look at, in this one, if you look at for instance Brazil or Mexico, that looks like good news.

 

Each of those dots in the same color would be the same country in different years. You do start seeing a decline in the gender growth gap. But if you look at India, if you even look at China, you look at South Africa and you look at Indonesia, you really see no clear pattern.

 

And this holds up when you look at this in a regression framework. So as I said, you can look at it across countries. You can just ask the question of do richer countries have a lower gender gap in labor markets? And you see that. But then if you ask the question and changes, so you ask that as the GDP grows, so as there are changes in gdp, do you see changes in the gender gap?

 

And then if you look at it with all the caveats that you can have on data series and cross country regressions, you don't see any relationship and in fact some evidence that it is reversed. So if you look at the top panel, that's a typical cross country regression and you see some evidence that the gender growth gap in labor force participation or in employment or paid work reduces as you're a richer country.

 

But then once you start running the same in changes, the only thing that remains of similar sign is the fact that there is marketization of the economy so women will start working more for pay as the country gets richer, but you no longer see any robust relationship between labor force participation and growth.

 

So I think this is sort of a first motivation to say that, you know, maybe for some countries that we saw, like for Brazil and Mexico, growth has delivered returns for women. But there is no way we can take this for certain. And probably a lot of the reason that's going on is, is institutional or systemic barriers in these countries, which is what I turn to now.

 

So let me start by giving you some examples of, I think, the two main sides that people have talked about. So this is a film called Mrs In India that I think came out last year, which was an example of a woman who married into a working woman who married into a very traditional household, her problems and the fact that she just ended up leaving in the end rather than managing to change the system.

 

So these are what we would think of, and I think a lot of discussion in the literature has been on such supply side and normative constraints. I think more recently there's also recognition that sometimes this affects demand side behavior. So for instance, Nina Buchman, who was a student here, thought about how this actually changes employers willingness to hire women.

 

And an example of this is I think last year made the news that the apple supplier of Foxconn was not hiring married women in India on the grounds that they would face significant normative constraints or possibly because they were being paternalistic about it. So one could stop here and say that this is it, we can do the research.

 

But in terms of the bridging that Suhani talked about, maybe that's hard. But I'd say this is actually, I think right now an opportunity as well. Building on, I think years of activism by many groups, we have begun to see significant policymaker interest in actually changing this. So this is from a couple of years ago and I think very much what Suhani was talking about in her report.

 

There's a lot more interest not just in thinking about flexible work or remote arrangements, but also recognition of the so called economic power that women have. And so what I want to do in the next 10 minutes is really give you some examples of, I think where evidence can help sharpen what often is beginning to happen in policy but perhaps is not happening in the most impactful or cost effective way.

 

And that's perhaps that I think is an important way in which we can build bridges right now because there's certainly a lot of research going on in this area and I think there's increasing policy interest both within countries and internationally. So let me start by kind of first talking about I think the different types of evidence that are possibly useful for policymakers.

 

And I think this is certainly someplace where researchers like I am often guilty is that, you know, we focus a lot on really trying to understand causal effects. But when you talk to, you know, policymakers, often that what changes or what is willing to push the needle on policy is really much more basic data.

 

So I alluded to this earlier, but just as a 30 second advertisement. For the last few years at Yale, we've been bringing together people from both the macro and micro side to really think about what are the different types of evidence that can be useful. But before turning to that, let me just mention again just the two puzzles that we're going to be thinking about all of this in the context of.

 

So the first one is for South Asia in a lot of countries now, a lot of the discussion has been about the child penalty. So the idea that women enter the labor market, but when they have a child, they see a significant decline in their earnings after that in South Asia.

 

And this is from India, but this is true across other South Asian countries as well. The striking feature is there's less of a child penalty. It's rather that women are not entering the labor market. So what you see here, this is from the labor force surveys against age, just what activities they're doing.

 

So you can see for age 18, the Blue Bar is the highest for both men and women. So everyone, most people are unmarried and studying. But then what you see is that for men, the pink, well, I don't know, orange, pink area expands, which is to be working and married.

 

While for women, what expands is the yellow bar, which is to be married, but neither studying nor working. And you can see this very clearly in the data that women are getting educated at similar rates. They're not working. And when people therefore run simple decompositional regressions, they're left with the conclusion that the main return to education for women is in the marriage market.

 

And so then there's a lot of discussion about maybe that's good, maybe that's what you need to have children who are going to invest in human capital. But you can see from the perspective of women, it's a bit of an unending cycle. I have my daughter, she earns a lot, she gets educated a lot to then educate her daughter.

 

So I think somewhere we need to start thinking about how you actually, you know, think about the alternative, which is getting returns in the labor market. And that comes to this is that when you look at labor force participation in both urban and rural, but I think strikingly in urban areas, this is the flip.

 

So this is labor force non participation. So what you see is, I mean, this is true the world over. Men work, right? Roughly 80, 90% of the men work once they reach working age. But for women, we see very little to no gradient with education. If anything, in urban areas, women who have upper secondary education are slightly less likely to work than those with less education.

 

So as I said, sort of what we've been doing at the growth center, and this is broader than just thinking about India or South Asia, is really to ask this question of what are the different things that can help inform. So the first is really just thinking about basic metrics or indices.

 

So this work that was done by faculty, including those at Stanford, on thinking about how do you measure the growth effect of these distortions, what are the wedges it creates in the labor market? So some of my colleagues have been trying to construct this more broadly across different countries to really provide some basis, some numbers to the question of if you got women into the labor force, how much would productivity increase by?

 

I've been colleagues working on this on the macro side, on the micro side, and then also then trying to take this to policy forums and work with them on how they would operationalize it. And really the idea is that I think as researchers we've often focused a lot on just very specific what policies work.

 

But I think if you want to move the needle in terms of activity, you really need to also start thinking about what is that index that a policymaker can kind of shame countries on or things that we don't love doing often, but I think are important if you really want to try to effect change here.

 

So just to give you one example of this, I showed you some suggestive evidence of why growth isn't enough. But you can also, as I said, look at this in terms of just an index. And this is something that there's been a lot of work that has happened in economics, but very often what I think happens is we have an incredibly seminal paper that gets published on it.

 

I think that's used a bit, but then less is done to really bring it all the way to policy. So what my colleagues have been doing have been trying to take the methodology of Sheikh Leonard Jones and actually try to ask how we can apply this across countries using labor force data.

 

And the idea here is you're going to use differences in observed differences in wages, labor supply and sorting to ask what is the extent of misallocation? You see? And I think this is distinct from some of the most used measures, at least the World bank right now, which come from looking at just legal barriers, either de jure or de facto, which are important.

 

But this tries to tell you what's this effect on outcomes. So the first study they did was across Indian states and I think that was actually featured in the World Development Report last year. And what they show is that if you just equalize the distortions across Indian states and so you bring it down to the level of the lowest state, you will increase state level productivity by up to 15%.

 

And I think this is hopefully the kind of number that one can use to try to create, say, some competition across Indian states to improve women in the labor market. So I'm sure I will soon run out of time. But let me just tell you what I'm hoping to do and then we'll see how far I get.

 

I want to talk a little bit about what we know on kind of constraints for women. But then I think when we think about policy, one insight you can get from academia is really what you want to think about is who are the gatekeepers and how do we actually affect their behavior?

 

And that's some of the policy work I want to talk about. So in terms of what's happening, why do we see what's happening in women? So there was some earlier work by a couple of my colleagues, Michael Peters and Fabrizio, showing that India has had service led growth.

 

This service led growth has been urban biased and has has benefited those in urban areas more than rural areas. At the same time, what they noted in that, but didn't pursue till now is that there is rapid urbanization. So in this paper, what they ask is, they ask what are the gender differences in how urbanization, or rather how service led growth affects men and women?

 

And what they find is, urbanization is associated with women dropping out of the labor market. And so urban female labor force participation in India is significantly lower than rural. But then they also go beyond the fact of saying, this is just an income effect or you know, people are richer and so women are not working to show that it's a com, at least in the data, it looks like it's a combination of norms and discrimination.

 

So both supply side and demand side factors that matter. So when you have that, one thing you could think about, and I think Sohani alluded to, and I will come back to this, I think during the day, is that maybe we need to meet women where they are and if they're in the house, we need to meet them often through digital tools.

 

And this has been a focus across several countries and many states in India to try to just increase access to smartphones. So we've seen several governments, several state governments say let's have schemes where we just provide smartphones to women. So we studied one of these schemes in the state of Chhattisgarh, which was an early mover in this, and through a set of surveys and often the timing of whether we surveyed someone before or after rollout was randomized.

 

What we found is very similar to, I think what we found in the first wave of literature on microfinance, which is assets move or money moves within the household. So you can give a smartphone to a woman, but there's no reason it'll stick with her. It'll probably move to her son, it'll probably move to someone else.

 

And so what we see out here is the first graph shows you that in the very short run, like three to six months after smartphones are provided, you do see women state that they're more likely to have smartphones. And then in the longer run, this completely disappears. The phones are no longer there.

 

However, if at the time of providing the smartphone, you actually combine it with training or ways to make women both feel that they can use the phone and how they hold onto it, we find that in those cases, not only do they have phones, they use them more.

 

And perhaps in contrast to what we've seen in richer countries, it actually is positive on mental health. So the way you should think about it is a lot of these women are very isolated. They have moved at the time of marriage from one village to another. They've typically had their first child.

 

Even if fertility has fallen, they'll have had their first child very soon after they moved. They're at home with their husband's family that they don't know very well. And not much way to be in touch with, say, the natal household or others. And phones provide a link not just for that, but phones also just provide entertainment.

 

The number of women who say we just use it to watch things on YouTube is very high. And so I think there's a different way in which smartphones will work for this population. But it's not enough to just give phones, otherwise you're going to end up in the same place.

 

I think we ended up a lot in microfinance. I think another example is when it comes to phones, is really thinking about the use case. So very often, if you think about the use case that rural households are seeing, it's still seeing an urban woman on a large screen using the phone, apparently to do things that families don't want.

 

But the last one, I think, was an example of why the training helped, right? So it's like, I don't know how to save contacts, I'll just give it to my son who knows how to do it. But if you train them enough to start getting used to it, I think that is valuable.

 

The other thing we found, in the short run, I think this was kind of a bit depressing, but reminder for why you need this work is we randomized whether we surveyed people before the woman got a phone or after. And what we found was that that soon after getting the phone norms around, phone use actually became more conservative.

 

Men started stating much more that they had more needs for the phone, which is consistent with, you know, now there being a valuable asset that you can get hold of if you actually argue it's meant for men. So I think, I'm going to be a bit fast now, so I want to talk a couple of other things, but I think this just gives you an example of, I think thinking about where the constraints are important in designing policies.

 

So to not just think about I need to give phones, but really asking what are the barriers? And these are all examples of papers that try to do that. So let me spend the last couple of minutes I have is to really talk about something that I know Lisa is going to pick up among others is really unintended consequences of policy interventions.

 

I'm going to leave this as a teaser for Lisa's talk which is the idea that sometimes well intended policies like for instance maternity leave policies in India could have negative impacts which Ali Fundia tell us about. What I want to talk about for a second is this fact that what we've seen over the last couple of years, an incredible expansion of unconditional cash transfers to women across Indian states.

 

So you can see this and I suspect the remaining states will get it as soon as their elections come around is this aim of targeting unconditional transfers to women and very explicitly saying some states very explicitly say this is because we don't see women working, we need to provide them support.

 

And you can see there are two views, right? So there's one view to say that it gives women agency within the household. They're going to be able to negotiate for things including whether they're able to leave the household. But it's unclear because if there's another view to say that now you have some money by virtue of your richer stay at home, look after children can also strengthen normative constraints.

 

And I think this is the kind of place where we really need research to start thinking about what is the net impact on women's work when we give out these kind of unconditional cash transfers. So I'm going to talk about very briefly one study that we did. I'm out of town so I'll just say what we find was actually not providing unconditional cash transfers but strengthening women's ability to access pay that they should be getting under Enriga, which was going to joint household accounts but now we ensure that it went to their own accounts.

 

And when we did that we found not only did their work go up but importantly we also found that their norms liberalized for women and so they became more positive about working. We don't, however, see that men's norms liberalized. So I think that's something we need to change on similarly, just let me end with one more example.

 

There's been a lot of interest in entrepreneurship. So there's this Lakpati didi scheme that is going on through self help groups. But again, the question is, how do you target this? How do you target this effectively? Do you just give it out to every self help group member or should you give it more to some than others?

 

Yeah, and here I think again there's findings that suggest that, you know, one way of doing it is that at least some of it should be targeted towards women who have started to expand their businesses. So this is a very nice study by Gaurav Chiplunga and Penny Goldberg that show across the world, so each of this is Africa, East Asia and so on is they look at the ratio between male and female employees and they find that basically if you are owned by a woman, you're just much more likely to have female managers, a bit more likely to have female workers, a lot more likely to have female managers.

 

So if women hire women and that is productive, they show their productivity gains, then with these kind of schemes, at least some of it should perhaps be a bit more targeted. So let me just end with just saying that I think very much building on Suhani was saying, I think we want to start thinking a lot more about how we integrate these into policies and corporate strategies.

 

And I think for us as researchers, what's very valuable to hear what policies and corporations are trying to do, we don't hear enough about that. I think forums like these and others are important so that out of the thousand questions we can answer, we answer the ones that speak to what's actually happening on the ground.

 

And so let me just end with I think some of these questions that will probably come up during the day, but are I think, questions that I think different parts of both the policy community, research community and the private sector are thinking about, but perhaps more connections that would be useful.

 

So thank you very much.

>> Speaker 5: In one of your graphs in the earlier state where you were basically showing different countries and how the gender gap and the GDP was interrelated. Among the lower income countries, India was still showing pretty high on the gender gap. And this is like Mexico, South Africa.

 

And so does that tend to communicate that it's not actually about the money, but more about the behaviors and normative patterns and societal patterns, which are actually a differentiator?

>> Rohini Pande: I think, I mean, what it certainly tells us is that it's not as if as countries get richer, opportunities for women will rise and women will take them up.

 

Now, where exactly those institutional barriers come in, whether they come in on the supply side or on the demand side, and how they differently show up across countries, I think is exactly where we need to go. But I think what I wanted to do is kind of move us away from this view that we don't need to do anything other than just focus on growth.

 

And I think there's often, especially right now, when there are downturns or there are concerns, there's often you hear this claim then not enough jobs anyway. So what we need to do is first just expand growth and expand jobs and then women will get them as well. I think we have no evidence to see that's the pattern in the data.

 

 

>> Speaker 5: Thanks, yeah, and richer households actually are shown in India also to not have working women, which goes, yeah, thanks.

>> Suhani Jalota: We can take one more. Thank you.

>> Shreya: My name is Shreya and I'm a graduate student at the law school. This is such interesting work. Thank you so much for sharing it.

 

I was thinking how much of it is because of this psyche of a woman, not just in the lower sections of the society, but also like middle class and upper middle class women in India. I think there's some sort of, if I may say, complacency that develops over not working for a few years and then they decide that, okay, maybe we don't want to work now that we're in a comfortable environment.

 

I mean, I'm using, I'm playing the devil's advocate, I get it, but I'm just trying to understand how much of work also needs to come from women in order to get into the workforce.

>> Rohini Pande: So I think, you know, what you're saying economists will call the income effect that, you know, basically as a household, I get richer and I, you know, maybe I opt out because now leisure is more valuable or I have more advantage of doing housework compared to my partner.

 

And so I'm the one who stays home. I think that's certainly a possibility. It's not what we see often in surveys. So what you see in surveys very often, I think both among younger and older populations, a desire to work. And I think interestingly, a lot of what you also see in surveys is statements of boredom.

 

So I think, you know, I think it's a perfectly. I think what you're asking is a very reasonable explanation and one that economists would agree with. But it may be going on for some. But we also see a lot of women who want to work but aren't able to get work.

 

 

>> Sakshi Shah: Now we will hear from Mr. Rajiv Jalota, who is with the Indian Administrative Services in the government of India and the former chairman of the Bombay Pot Trust. Mr. Jalota will bring in the government perspective and talk about how the government can be an enabler in bringing women into the workforce, even in traditionally male dominated industries.

 

 

>> Rajiv Jalota: I have been given five minutes, so I'll be short. I'm truly honored to be speaking here about the role of government in enabling women's labor force participation. And I'll also draw upon my own experiences in public service to highlight how policy, partnerships and people first, governance can drive transformative outcomes.

 

I have the privilege of having served across departments from skilling and employment to managing city, municipal corporation, industrial corporations, providing lands to industries to maritime industry. Across my roles I have learned two key trends that are are going to enable women to enter the workforce in a country like India.

 

First, India has a huge growth potential. Manufacturing as well as services both are growing. And I think next 15 years are going to be India's years. And second, the type of roles and jobs are shifting across sectors. And when there is an imperative for growth, women have to be part of the workforce.

 

There is no other way. Now to harness these opportunities. Government can serve three roles. That of a regulator, a promoter and as a partner. And all these three roles will have to be complementary. First, as a regulator, India has more than 20 different acts. For instance the Factories act, the Maternity Benefit act which I think will be talked about quite frequently today.

 

The Posh Act, Equal Remuneration act and Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code which form the backbone of ensuring a rights based framework for working women. Secondly, it serves as a promoter. Through platforms like Eshram portal. With over 300 million unorganized workers registered and 12 welfare schemes linked and the National Carrier Service, the Modi government actively promotes women's workforce integration.

 

In fact, in this Eswaram portal, more than 54% are women. Notably, India leads developing nations in gender sensitive trade facilitation as well. Government has started schemes like working women's hostels and childcare provisions across the country. It's a very, very big step, a very ambitious step as well where lot of work needs to be done by various players.

 

This will have its ripple effect in years to come. In Maharashtra for example, government launched a scheme that offered engineering contracts to unemployed youth. A model that can be scaled for female graduates across sectors. Now we talk about my personal experiences to highlight how government can act as an effective partner.

 

While I was working in the Industrial Development Corporation in Maharashtra, being the most industrialized state, we were facing a huge investor demand. I introduced the policy of land acquisition by consent and making the landowners partners in development. While doing this, we also introduced skill training of the local population based on skill demand assessment of future industries.

 

This really helped both men and women among the population to start from ground zero in helping the industries set up while growing themselves economically. Women became part of construction. They worked as drivers, they were running canteens in industries. We also introduced financial literacy because the landowners can manage the huge sums of money they were getting from the industrial corporation as land compensation.

 

Women were made part of all these future investments and it had very brilliant effects. While working in the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, we trained women plumbers who were able to work in slums. More than 55% of Mumbai is in slums. There was a constant need of water pipeline repair and who better than women can do it because they are the most stressed for water?

 

We also ran a people led sanitation program placing women at the core of toilet design, construction and further operations and management of those toilets. While working as Commissioner Employment, we launched the modular employability schemes with industry aligned training and this increased the number of modular courses from 450 to 1500 in a matter of a year.

 

Initiatives like Rojgarh Katta matched local employers with women job seekers are precursor to today's gig platforms. Government's attempts at gender mainstreaming, moving away from gender neutral or gender blind can have profound impacts. I'll give you example of a mining sector in India recently where government started women in mining and such a sector which is considered as the fort of males.

 

We see that women are holding diverse roles as mine managers, mining engineers, geologists, maintenance engineers and even heavy earth moving machinery operators. This has seen good success. The present central government has also created skill sector councils where gender mainstreaming is a focused area. For instance, in the logistics sector we see that only 2% women are employed out of 9.5 million in freight logistics.

 

By 2030, this sector is going to add 5.3 million new jobs. A crucial opportunity to increase women's participation through formal training, targeted policies and more digitization coming in in the tourism and cruise sector. India is a rising power in cruise employment with more than 25% of global cruise crew being Indian and the number of women is growing.

 

Tourism provides vast employment potential to women. Digital work and automation. We are seeing a rise in digital infrastructure and remote work models. Women can increasingly access work from home. And we are seeing that non traditional employment is coming up in a big way as we move ahead in South Asia and those parts of the world where jobs will get created in large numbers for reasons known to all.

 

Empowering women in the workforce will not just be a policy goal, but also reinforces the country's economic foundation enabling it to thrive in a competitive global landscape. Thank you. And I sincerely hope that women focused narrative shaping the future workforce deployment is more than an economic shift. It's the dawn of a new era of empowerment and opportunity for all.

 

Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: So now to just give everyone a little context. The day is split up into four different parts. And each part will start with a research talk to ground us in data, followed by a panel discussion. And then the last part would be the lightning showcase that will focus on different organizations that are implementing on ground solutions around increasing women's agency.

 

So to dive into the first part of the day, we will focus on the supply side constraints around bringing women into the workforce. So I would like to welcome Professor Soledad Prillman, Assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford, to present her research on what really holds young Indian women back from joining the workforce and drawing on rich insights from vocational training programs across India.

 

 

>> Soledad Prillaman: Hi, everyone. So today I'm going to present a body of work thinking about adolescent women in India, and this is joint work with Charity Troy or More. But we are also going to see that a lot of the themes that came up in Rohini's talk are going to appear here, and that's in large part due to her advising and mentorship in many of these projects.

 

And so I want to start by really drawing focus to adolescents, particularly those between the ages of 15 and 24. And what we know is that one fifth of the population in South Asia is within this age group, and that this comprises about a quarter of the world's youth.

 

And yet, despite being such a large demographic, what we see is that this group accounts for about half of the unemployed across India. And in particular, we see this group is six times more likely to be jobless than older workers. And this, of course, is a gendered issue, women's labor force participation, as we've already seen, is much lower than men's.

 

This holds true in this group but we also see that women are much more likely to have unemployment. And related to what Rohini talked about earlier, about the share of women who remain at home without work, without education. What we see is that this really critically transforms right around the early 20s, where women leave school, get married, and end up in the home without entering the labor force.

 

And so I've spent the last decade thinking about the role of vocational training, which is often targeting exactly this group. And in particular, thinking about the role of Skill India, which is initiative, an Initiative launched around 2015 meant to capitalize on this demographic dividend. These huge inflows of workers in this age group, and train youth for industrial growth across India.

 

And by some estimates, about 2/3 of India's workforce is expected to need new skills or to be upskilled to achieve some of these growth plans. And so Skill India is an initiative that brings together skilling vocational training programs across 22 different ministries in the government and 36 schemes.

 

And in particular, we've been working with one of the largest of these programs called DDU gky, which is based at the Ministry of Rural Development. And this program in particular targets rural youth between the ages of 15 and 35 living below the poverty line and provides them with skills training.

 

But importantly, it's not just a skills training program. It's a program that really tries to match these unemployed or underemployed youth to jobs. And it does so by mandating that 75% of trainees get matched to work for any of the training agencies to get funded. And that those jobs must be contract labor at minimum wage or above, which often means that the jobs that they're getting placed in are in urban centers.

 

So it's really solving this problem of bringing the rural workforce into urban areas. And the program also includes quotas for women, with an expectation that at least one third of trainees be women. So I'm going to present you a lot of different data sources that I'm happy to talk about at any point in time.

 

But to try and think about whether Skill India is helping improve women's labor entry and what some of the remaining constraints are. So the first thing I want to highlight is that we see gender gaps in training take up across the country. Using administrative data from the program, less than one third, less than 30% of trainees are women, so meaning the quotas themselves aren't met.

 

But we then mapped through both surveys and administrative data the pipeline, the pathway that young men and women take in the program. And what this figure shows you is this leaky pipeline. So the light green is the share of men on the left and women on the right who end up placed in jobs.

 

So we see only 40% of women who enter the program end up taking up a job, as compared to 60% of men. And this pipeline is leaky at different parts, the sort of darkest shade of this is the share of men and women who don't receive offers. So we see about a third of women don't receive an offer, 32% of them who receive offers don't then accept those offers.

 

And then this translates into placement outcomes and these gender gaps persist even once jobs have been entered. So when we did this survey, within nine months, we found that 74% of the young women who had taken up jobs. Most of which had mandated or required urban migration with 74% had left those jobs after nine months.

 

And of those, only about 12% were employed elsewhere so we see this recalibration back to the statistics we've seen before. So what were the reasons for both rejecting job offers as well as leaving jobs? I'm presenting some survey data on job rejection, but you see the same answers mirrored in why we women leave jobs.

 

So on the left, what you see is that the number one reason that women say they didn't accept a job or that they left their job was because of their family, family concerns, personal constraints. Often this was revolved around the marriage decision. The second biggest concern was around migration and the challenges that come with urban migration and with the safety that is associated.

 

When we contrast this to young men on the right, what we see is a very different set of factors that shape their labor market decisions. Men are largely unhappy with the pay that they would be getting or the workplace conditions. So what is the family's role in all of this?

 

We've talked a lot about norms, it's something that is a big part of the conversation on women's work. And so we did a survey with both young youth, adolescent girls and boys, as well as both of their parents. And so here what I'm showing you are attitudes around women's work for fathers and mothers.

 

And if you just focus on the right, that shows you the share of mothers in blue and fathers in green that think that women should work. And so in some ways, you see evidence of what Rohini's answer to the question was. Women vastly believe that women should be working, more than 80% of women state that women should be working.

 

But we see this very large gender gap where fathers who serve as key gatekeepers to a much lower extent say that women should work. Interestingly, when you superimpose data from youth, so here I have young men in purple and young women in red, that gender gap doesn't just persist.

 

It in fact widens with young men showing even more or even less support for women's work than their fathers do. Which suggests that generationally, this pattern of attitudes is not changing, but also really highlights some of the marriage market concerns that might exist around women's work. I additionally wanted to highlight then, when you asked fathers and mothers about their support for women's migration, what we see, women's and men's migration.

 

What we see is that there's a lot of support on the left for allowing both young men in green, young women in blue to move to state capitals. But when you really think about movement to these larger cities like Delhi or places outside of the state in which they live, drop for women's migration is substantial.

 

And that's where this gender gap really emerges and thinking about this placement between rural and urban jobs is a constraint. And so I'm gonna talk about one program that we tried to evaluate whether it would solve this constraint and in particular whether it would help increase women's entry into vocational training programs.

 

And so DDU or GKY, this vocational training program that we studied typically recruits both young women and young men through private training agencies. Typically contract workers from outside of the community who by and large are men. And so we worked with a government innovation that thought about what happens if you localize recruitment.

 

If you put the identification of potentially interested youth into the hands of local recruiters, local, largely women. And the idea was that local recruiters would have both better information about who would actually be interested in moving. As well as could serve as role models to persuade families and the youth themselves.

 

And so the program that we studied was an innovation in ERISA that employed women's self help group members. So members of local women's groups to recruit youth, it trained them on the program, it trained them on job outcomes, and then it paid them to recruit youth. And they received more money the longer the youth stayed in the program.

 

And we're going to leverage the fact that the entire state was not eligible for this program because they didn't have these women's groups on the ground, women's groups were created in only some blocks. And so I'm going to show you evidence both from a difference in differences strategy to get the overall policy effect as well as an RCT that tries to isolate the effect of just the local recruiters.

 

Because I should have mentioned that in addition to these local recruiters, the program brought in block governments, block bureaucracies to provide recruitment fairs and other support. So what we see is this is just general overall effects of the program for young women. And what we see is this program did substantially increase young women's take up of DDU GKY as well as their placement in jobs.

 

In fact, it about doubled it and we see that it had very little effect for young men. So this program really was changing young women's engagement. But when we look at the RCT where we were really trying to isolate is it these local women recruiters that are having change?

 

What we find is that that was not what was going on. These local recruiters who we randomized, there was no effect on their presence on, on women's enrollment. And when we spent some time talking to them, what seemed to emerge is that they really struggled to convince families that this would be acceptable.

 

They didn't have normative authority to change the behavior of families. So what then drove this overall positive effect? We think and have some suggestive evidence that the recruitment fairs were a really important part of this. They provided and centralized information so that young women had more job opportunities available to them.

 

And, and that gave women more choice over both trade, job location and employer. And what we observe is that they're more likely to select into sex segregated workplaces. So essentially it allowed them to find work that fit norms. And so just to quickly conclude, what we see, like many others have shown is that norms shape parental support for young women's work skill.

 

India helps to address many of the structural constraints that we might imagine. Skilling gaps, rural urban labor market information gaps, migration support. But families still play an important role in limiting training and job entry. And what we find is that local women recruiters don't serve as role models and aren't able to address women's concern.

 

Though this may simply be because they didn't hold normative authority in these communities. But that providing more job options may allow women to opt into more norm abiding jobs. So thank you so much.

>> Sakshi Shah: Up next, we have our first panel discussion for the day. The panel explores a question that we don't talk about enough.

 

What role do men play in making gender equity possible? From family support to workplace solution inclusions, the conversation starts here. Moderating this panel, we have Dr. Shraddha Kale Kapale, Associate Director of Maina Mela Foundation Mrs. Smriti Irani. Cabinet Minister, Government of India between 2014-2024 and Chairperson, alliance for Global Good Alessandra Varenna, professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Sieper Center Zubeda Bhai, CEO of Grameen foundation and Anshul Tiwari, Founder and CEO of Youth Kia awa's and center for Public Insights.

 

Please welcome all our esteemed panelists.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I am Shraddha and I'm here to present the panel discussion on championing women's agency, health and family support. Role of men in caregiving. So when I truly think about what actually supports women's economic empowerment, I think more than offering job opportunities or policies, it's more about the what happens behind the doors, like, you know, in the everyday dynamics of our homes.

 

So, with one such powerful example through our work at Mena Mehla, what we do, we work with low social economic strata of women there and it's through. So to give you all a context, we work in an area where hygiene is really poor and the. What do you call.

 

I'm sorry, I'm just too nervous to talk. There's such big panelists here and Smriti ma' am, so I'm just

>> Smriti Irani: breathe. That's why I made sure I sit three seats away.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: So, I think I have everything in my hand and. Yeah, okay. So, opportunities of paid work, it often happens behind the closed doors and everyday dynamics of our homes.

 

So most powerful examples come from my own experience in Mana Mahila where we work with urban slum community women and their hygiene here is extremely poor. There is shame and stigma around the topic and like, you know, it, it is really difficult for a woman to speak, speak up about her own issues and speak up in their own household settings, right?

 

So, there were many women who would come up to us and tell us that please do talk to our husbands because they just don't get it, that we need support. And while we realized that, that we are supposed to work with the husbands and have interventions around it and you know, we also had initiatives and programs around it, but we also realized that it's more important to work with the women and help them to help themselves to speak up more confidently in their household settings.

 

So while we're working this and we had programs around how to speak more effectively, clearly and also being polite. So while women learn all of this, they gradually started taking small steps and, and we saw this like, you know, impact in the households where women used to like, you know, not tell the husband directly, like, you know, come over and cook the whole meal for us, they would take small gradual steps like, could you help me wash the dishes today?

 

Or, you know, wash the rice today? And it's because like, you know, it's more of a partnership and not like, like, you know, make the men look inferior because the power dynamics are also very strong. So one fine day, one Sunday, the MENA trainer happens to go for a follow up session in the community and one husband just turns up and he's very proudly telling the MENA trainer that, ma' am, I now do the dishes for my wife in those days of the month, referring to the periods very proudly.

 

And then mana trainer, of course appreciated him and then he left. And when the follow up session started, the wife says, if that's what I get during the periods, I would love to have it every day. So, yeah, but that brought a deeper conversation of how effective and clear yet polite communication helps bringing in men, role of men in the household, responsibilities and caregiving.

 

So, we realized that very soon, and we are, you know, having programs around it. So when men, when men enter, it just doesn't give time to women, but it like, you know, it just doesn't reduce the physical strain, but it gives time to her to have more opportunities, grab more opportunities, learn more skills, even if she wants to rest, I think it just buys her time.

 

So, it's not just about reducing the physical strain, but it's also about empowering her, not just economically, but also taking care of her own health. So, yeah. Drawing from this, Professor Wayna, I have my next question for you. So, based on your research, what does the current data tells us about the links between the role of men in increasing women's agency?

 

Where do we see the strongest correlations and where are the gaps?

>> Alessandra Voena: Well, I'll just begin thanking the organizers for this amazing lineup and I'm really honored and excited to contribute to this debate, but I'll jump right into this. Fascinating. An important topic which touches upon the fact that decisions about work are done by families.

 

Families are many components and these components have different opinions, are subject potentially to different norms, different incentives, different preferences. Thinking about decisions around work, both whether, say, a woman should work in the market for pay and how much she should work requires necessarily thinking about the organic decision making that happens at the level of the household.

 

Research has emphasized, I would say two important areas of gap that are relevant for different populations. One that has been discussed already to wide extent this morning, which is the notion that in many countries this is definitely we know from the data the case in South Asia, female labor force participation tends to be relatively low and potentially a source of slowed growth, limited agency for women, more limited economic financial independence.

 

The other one is that even when women work, and this is true everywhere, they still often do not achieve the same levels in senior leadership positions as men tend to do. Recently, Even in the US we celebrate the fact that 10% of CEOs are female. With this background, the use of time and the division of labor within the household has been highlighted for both of these domains to be extremely important in influencing what type of labor market participation and employment hours margin women make.

 

I was just looking at some numbers, for example, from India, from the Indian time use survey, where women tend to spend 10 times more of a percent of their time on home production responsibilities than men do. But if you looked around the world, this pattern will arise over and over again.

 

Women are obviously much more involved in the care. If you look now at research that has tried to understand why this is happening and what can be done to more equally distribute the care within the household, a theme that we've discussed a lot this morning emerges over and over again.

 

And this has to do with traditional gender roles and the important role that norms play in characterizing how we act. Since you've been asking about what research tells us about what's promising in leading to a more equitable division of this labor that then can open up time both in terms of pure hours but also mental time, we talk a lot about the mental load and so on.

 

I don't have extremely positive answers, but I have something hopefully Reasonably optimistic, which is obviously changing norms is extremely, or influencing norms is extremely, extremely challenging. What appears to be somewhat more promising are interventions that target the youth. So I'm thinking about the work for example of Professor Sima Jaya Chandran and her co authors targeting adolescents in India with school based interventions, but also say emerging work from Europe on paternity leave.

 

So paternity leave doesn't necessarily change so much the way in which couples, at least this is emerging research from Spain suggests what couples are doing, but it really changes what the children are seeing their parents do and it's affecting them possibly long term how they see the role of men and women.

 

So it's a more difficult battle to fight in the short run. It's more of a long term investment that needs to be made by all the actors that we've discussed this morning. Finally, I'll just discuss briefly something that touches upon also what Professor Pandey and Prilaman were discussing this morning, which is the notion of perceptions of norms.

 

I've been involved in data collection in 60 countries soliciting opinions and also perceptions of both whether women should be free to work outside the home among opinions of both men and women in our representatives sample, and also whether government and firms should be giving priority to women when hiring for leadership positions.

 

What emerges particularly very strikingly for India I would say, but we see that very clearly there, but many countries of our sample is that there is a very strong tendency to overestimate the degree of conservativeness on these matters. That for instance in our sample More than 80% of our respondents supported the notion that women should be free to work outside the home.

 

Yet they only believe that around 60% of others in their country agree with that statement. And in particular, these men's views are the most stereotyped. So men tend to be more conservative than women, but we tend to think that they're much more conservative than they truly are. And so potentially interventions that can promote dialogue around these matters that can be done at many levels can help bring men more into this conversation.

 

 

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: So I feel environment around the woman also plays a lot of role, like which environment she's been brought up in. Like if she sees other women around her doing the same kind of thing and then rather having a role model which inspires her more to like, you know, take it up.

 

Yeah, how so how do you see men's involvement or lack of it in caregiving household decision making affect the woman's health outcomes and workforce participation?

>> Alessandra Voena: So I would say research is emerging about the importance of, particularly for the second aspect, which is helping women achieve more equitable careers, careers more similar to the ones of men, but also to some extent also the mere entry into paid work, that care responsibilities are really an important factor of limitation in terms of the implication of that for health.

 

For example, we start seeing some evidence that, going back to the paternity leave discussion today, we'll talk a lot about maternity leave, but obviously paternity leave is also quite important to level the playing field potentially, but appears while it seems to have more limited effects on work, and this is again research coming from Europe, so obviously with all the necessary caveats, it does appear to bolster and support women's health in a very critical time.

 

So I think we're starting to see some empirical evidence suggesting that when women can access a more equitable distribution of family responsibilities, their health benefits, as well as their employment opportunities.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah. And what additional data or research would help us make an even stronger case for policies or programs that address the role of men in increasing women's agency?

 

 

>> Alessandra Voena: So, as I've mentioned, we start seeing more research that helps us understand what the role of norms is in shaping female employment and agency. I think more could be done in terms of exploring what promising channels can be leveraged so that we don't have to hope that in 30, 40 years, when the children of today have grown up, we can see change, but we can see more immediate change.

 

And so one notion that I think, for example is quite, quite fascinating is almost 70% of Indian respondents in a recent survey argue that children might suffer if their mother work. That's from the World Value Survey. We see that again in many contexts. We know much less about whether people think that children might suffer if their father works or if their father doesn't work.

 

I think thinking more about the role of fathers in child development and highlighting how important it has been and it is, might might be a promising avenue as well.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, yeah, that's great. So with that, I'd love to turn to the only male panelist here today. So, Anshul, you work extensively with India's youth.

 

What emerging attitudes or behaviors do you see among young men regarding women's agency and shared caregiving responsibilities?

>> Anshul Tewari: Thank you. Thanks a lot for that question, Shraddha, and congratulations, Sohani and team on this amazing conference. Very happy to be the token meal on the panel. Definitely need more of that, I think.

 

So, just for context, I run Youth KBAs, which is a citizen media platform. We have about 200,000 people every month who are writing and sharing stories, their lived experiences across multiple issues. Women in the workplace is one such issue. And as a part of the center that we run, we do a lot of rapid surveys to understand on a day to day basis what people are thinking, you know, particularly about women's participation in the workforce.

 

I think there are a couple of things that we've sort of noticed which others have of course talked about, you know, quite a bit already. But just to reiterate on some fronts, one thing that we've noticed about young men's attitude towards, you know, women in the workplace is that young men are actually very conflicted.

 

And I think that's, it's very important to highlight that. And they are conflicted not just because, you know, of the fact that there is, of course, patriarchal norms around them, around their upbringing, etc. But they're also conflicted because they're seeing these conversations happen, but they're also wondering how is it that they can actually participate or they can help when they're actually growing up in a culture that that discourages it, you know, through and through.

 

What we've seen in a lot of our data is that I Mean in a. In a very recent survey that we had conducted was that 37% of the men who participated in our survey, they said that they've participated in household responsibilities and sharing household responsibilities. But when we went deeper into what that really meant, it sort of, you know, showed what.

 

One of the examples that shaddha that you gave was that it's a couple of days in a month, or two days or three days in a month, which makes it seem like I'm doing my share. And that's enough, you know, that's enough participation from my side. The second thing that we've seen is that there is a very severe lack of relatable role models.

 

So what I mean by that is that you will find a lot of men who are, say, extremely popular celebrities who are really, you know, talking about the fact that we need more women in the workplace, we need mental health, participating a lot more in the household, but they're not as relatable.

 

They are not talking in the language, in the, literally the, the, you know, the literal regional language. For example, in many cases that we need to have these conversations, and they are not culturally contextual for a lot of men, you know, who are actually able to have some of these conversations as well.

 

And the other very, you know, important aspect that men themselves highlight is the cultural permission, so to say, that is given to them to participate, you know, a lot more actively in household responsibilities or in a lot of the kind of, you know, pressures that men themselves face.

 

There's a lot more conversation around men needing to be the, you know, financial, financially successful out of the. The, say, you know, in. In a relationship, for example. And that has a very direct influence on how men are looking at the workplace in general as well. What we've also noticed is that, of course, there are a lot more women who are very proactively having a conversation about this.

 

But social media, for example, is playing a very big role in creating communities of men that agree with each other very quickly on aspects of the fact that, you know, we need to be more financially successful, we need to have a certain kind of a job, women don't necessarily need that, and so on.

 

And social media is not built for a very equal conversation. I mean, the algorithms are not built to encourage you to have sort of a much more diverse perspective than you currently do. So I think there is a lot of that that we are noticing as well. Generally, what we've seen through a lot of our data is that agency for women is also being shaped by social permissions.

 

That women are being afforded, you know, in families and so on and so forth. And what often happens is that the treatment that you're getting, you know, in your house because of your household responsibilities and the treatment that you're getting at work, you know, because of your workplace responsibilities, the understanding between these two, you know, segments of your life does not really exist.

 

So your workplace colleagues, your bosses may not necessarily understand what challenges you're facing at home and vice versa. And that is also leading to a lot of dissonance in terms of, you know, the, not just the initiation of participation, but the longevity of a woman in the workplace, you know, as well.

 

So, yeah, broadly that's, that's, you know, sort of what we've seen through our data in India as well.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: So, Anshul Youth Kia Awas has gathered over a million data points on young people's aspiration and challenges. How can researchers, policymakers and employers use these insights to better tailor interventions or job opportunities for women?

 

 

>> Anshul Tewari: I think first thing is a lot of these data points indicate towards cultural norms. Something that we've all spoken about, I think everybody has spoken about as well. I think there is something to be said about understanding lived experiences of young men and women both. So of course, going beyond pure data points and trying to see what cultural context exists where in a country like India, but not just in India.

 

I think it's a global phenomenon, especially in the global South. I think we do need to pay a lot more attention to these lived experiences. You know, that's, that's the first thing. And I think that's what we probably need to create more urgent behavior change campaigns or whatever.

 

There might be this, the second thing that we've noticed is that a lot of this data can help us create very phase specific interventions. So what I mean by that is that, you know, in one of the surveys that we had conducted with young women, 72% of the women who are already in the workforce, they mentioned about, about the biggest barriers in the workforce for them being at the promotion stage where they're noticing that, you know, they are not getting promoted versus a male colleague and so on and so forth.

 

Even though they've put in the same effort, they've had the same outcomes, where I feel like, I mean, what that tells us is that there is a specific moment in a working woman's journey where an intervention potentially needs to be created as well. The third thing, you know, that we've noticed is that is around pay.

 

So pay we've noticed it's not just the only problem agency around how you're spending the money, how much you're getting to access is also a big issue. So I feel like pay equity, role clarity, those are areas of intervention where interventions can be created. And of course, I mean the last sort of aspect that we've noticed is that we need to create.

 

I mean this is the conversation to be had a lot more with men. And the way to be having this conversation is to not sort of go to men and say that, hey, you need to start thinking differently because that's not going to happen. In fact, what we've seen over and over again, we've done a mapping of podcasts, video series, films where there has been a direct conversation with men.

 

Somebody has tried to tell men, you should not do this or you should not behave like this, the biggest consumer of such content is actually women, it's not men. So I feel, and this is across the board, so I think we need to find a way to have these conversations.

 

With men probably in a way that men will feel like, okay, I am a part of this conversation, I'm in the room, I'm willing to understand and so on. Which is a, I mean, I don't have a solution for how to do it. It's been a challenge for us consistently but yeah, I think that's probably where one can get started.

 

 

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, I completely agree. I think what I've also seen is women sometimes are the barrier for themselves when they learn to effectively communicate. And of course like men are not like stone hearted or anything, right? They also have a heart but it's just that it's two different gender roles all together.

 

Sometimes it's more like they don't understand. Why don't they understand? That's what I've seen, especially from the context where I come from, so why they just don't understand. And sometimes we just have to give it back to the woman that maybe you need to communicate more effectively for them to understand.

 

 

>> Anshul Tewari: I just want to say one point which is that, so in our work, what we've realized is that the onus of this conversation should actually not be on women. I think men need to talk to men and I think that's a very important because otherwise, I mean, regardless.

 

 

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: But then we need to have more role models around it to start this conversation for sure.

>> Anshul Tewari: Yeah.

>> Smriti Irani: I'm waiting my turn peacefully.

>> Speaker 14: It was really exciting to see your response there to some of the.

>> Smriti Irani: Yeah, yeah. I know it's physically and facially very difficult to restrain myself, but you have to give the due respect to the token man on the panel and also defer to his young age, presuming he's young.

 

I'm 49, how old are you?

>> Anshul Tewari: 34.

>> Smriti Irani: 34, not that far off,

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: okay, so. Yeah.

>> Smriti Irani: Is it my dungeon? Okay,

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: yeah. So now that brings to policies and yeah, so.

>> Smriti Irani: So let me first level up in this room. I'm not here only because, of course, Suhani knew my role as a policy maker and met me at the World Economic Forum.

 

And that's why this lovely lady here is continuously goading me to speak, because I serve as the B20 co chair in South Africa for digital transformation. There are three faux presumptions and biases. And pardon me for saying this, that you're doing this entire conversation on one, that the only people who affect a woman her agency are men in the family.

 

The family unit is not only limited to men. The second presumption that you're suffering from is that only young men are the harbingers of change. Now, this is what I call inertia of all narratives. The third presumption and bias that possibly this conversation suffers from is that this is a global south or predominantly Indian problem.

 

It is not the fourth bias that you suffer from is that there has to be the existence of role models to bring forth change. Anybody who waits for a role model cannot be the harbinger of change, because not only is change a constant of life. But if change always waited for role models, you would not have a Mahatma to talk about.

 

So now ask me the question, yes another context to me apart from being a policy maker. I'm 49 today, at the age of 17 I used to sell cosmetics for $2 a day on the roads of Delhi. I'm the first girl in my family to work, I'm the first girl in my family to own my own capital assets.

 

So I come from being dirt poor to, yes, now being listed as somebody who's worthy to sit on this panel. So what I will speak will be from experiences which are not colored due to distinction in office, which is not colored because now I have money because there was a time when I had none, yes.

 

 

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, so, ma' am, to make this shift be widespread, what specific policy gaps or untapped strategies. Do you believe would be most effectively accelerate progress on role of men in championing women's health?

>> Smriti Irani: Firstly, we need to recognize again that the dichotomy we live in is that it is not only men who stifle growth.

 

Let me reiterate why I say this and let me evidence it instead of creating more fissures. Let's have conversations that can bridge the gap. It is not a young man who helped bring to fruition a legislation which gave women the right to medically terminate a pregnancy at 24 weeks in India.

 

Legislation that was waiting in the wings since the 1960s. It was a 74, 4 year old man who brought that legislation. It was not a young man who stood at the ramparts of the Red Fort to say women should have access to a sanitary pad at one rupee.

 

It was a 74 year old man, it was not a young man or a woman in high office who ensured 33% reservation for women in Indian parliament. It was a 74 year old man. So the bias or the presumption that change can only happen by men who are young is something that I don't suffer from.

 

Because I've seen evidence today in India we have close to 400 million women who are of the working age, 323 million women who work in the informal sector. But how do you look at the informal sector? The differentiations between the informal and the formal sectors are from the presumption.

 

That women who are in the informal sector will not have medical benefits and cover will not have insurance or will not have pensions. That is a presumption and I'll defer to the professor of economics to my right for all that that needs to be fact checked. Now in India today we have 130 million women who are informal in their vocation, however a part of the insurance and pension schemes.

 

Today we have close to 48% of women under the 100 million program family program of Ayushman Bharat, which gives you access to 32,000 hospitals across India. 48% of all hospital admissions and the number is 36 million women have received hospital admissions for across 1300 diseases, including surgeries under that program.

 

That is evidenced woman by woman, experience by experience. 240 million women have gotten themselves screened for the cancer of the breast and the cervix. Which means all these women who wanted to leverage their agencies with regards to health were waiting for an instrument which is funded, which is provided for by government so that irrespective of the men in their family, they could have and create access.

 

So, so while we are talking about championing the women's agency, we also need to factor in what happens when, irrespective of the role of men within a family unit, that if you have the access, if you have the opportunity to gain some support in the healthcare sector, how does that impact your life?

 

There are many who presume that in India when you talk about the lfr, the labor force participation, one needs to also reflect on who are the women who are not counted. So let me give you a small example. 90 million women in India work in self help groups.

 

Their average business every year is close to $37 billion they have received from the Indian treasury in the last decade, 8 lakh crore rupees. And the fascinating part is that their NPA on the credit that they have taken is less than 2%. It is evidence 10 years ago women had only 28% savings accounts in banks.

 

Today 250 million in Indian women have a bank account. But it's 300 million women from rural, semi urban areas who went up to banks, gave them a business plan, got a collateral free loan service, their loans, paid it back. And I'm proud today to say that when these accounts were looked at, it was found that one NP on women owned businesses is below 2%.

 

NP on male owned businesses is about 2 and a half percent. What banks found after 10 years of research across all accounts was that a bank earns a lifetime revenue of 12% more from a female account holder as compared to men. And this is happening in India. So to deny that, that women sometimes, irrespective of the role of men in their families, have the capacity to take ownership is genuinely to deny evidence which can be economically and very progressively being offered for scrutiny.

 

How do I say this as well? I as minister created the world's largest nutrition tracker which currently has 100 million beneficiaries, 25 million women who are pregnant and lactating and 75 million kids who are under the age of six supplementary nutrition when it's given at their doorsteps, vaccination calls that are made.

 

We do reach out to men and men do turn up many a times. Those who don't, well you have that challenge in geographies which are not limited to the global South. Let me contextualize it from the perspective of history in terms of the geographies that we belong to and we are currently sitting at Back home.

 

I have a president who's female back home. When I celebrate my constitution, I know it was written by 15 women back home. Yes, I do not say we live in a utopian age, but neither does everybody else across the world. The irony is there's a presumption that if you are an educated man, you would know better.

 

So when you talk about creating spaces where, let's say incorporates, you will have women have a larger agency who are the ones who are denying it. So I think the dichotomy, and I'm flummoxed by the fact that educated men who become leaders within a corporation then deny equal pay for equal work.

 

Which means for decades we were told education is the problem. Now it seems it's not. And what is the reality? Today we are living in the age of AI. Only 18% professionals in AI are women. 29% of all STEM based jobs across the world are women. But look at India.

 

Look at the CEO number. We have close to 8% women who are CEOs in India. The global average is 5.6. So while we, yes, talk about what happens to a man in a family and whether he cooks for those five days or doesn't cook, my issue is can we look at what we are doing right and also talk about those issues?

 

For I recognize that there is a lot to celebrate when things go wrong. To say my God and misery will beget a lot of financial support. But the issue is, so shall I think we should put that out there. Why can't change find money for impact? Why should misery always have conferences and not positive change?

 

So yeah, that's why I was fidgeting.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Ma' am, next question. From your vantage point in government, how can public agencies, private sector companies and civil society groups better collaborate?

>> Smriti Irani: So let me give you a heads-up. I'm the minister who was in charge when I not only helped write the National Education Policy, but when the Prime Minister of India spoke on the 15th of August in the year 2014.

 

Let's build toilets separately for girls across all schools of India. I was the person in charge. We built 400,000 plus toilets across the world, across India. But guess how many people showed up to fund it from the private sector? 99 of it was built by government. Not even 1%.

 

0.5% was built by somebody. I just had the last 40,000 toilets to build. I was running against time. So I called a female colleague in the private banking sector. She's now received a Padma which is the highest civilian award in my country. Her name is Arundhati Bhattacharya. I called her in panic to say I have 40,000 to build and that's the networks that we need to actually talk about.

 

I called her, she said on it. But the presumption that the private sector will suddenly stand up and rid you of all your misery. No, it's the government. At least back home. Which banks were always around in India? How come 550 million Indians not have a bank account?

 

Lending agencies were always available in India. How come nobody thought of this methodology of doing collateral free loans? Health institutions were always available in India. How come nobody thought of creating a network of health institutions and then creating access? How come nobody thought of creating 10,000 stores where you can get pharmacy support?

 

Where you can get a sanitary pad for one rupee? And why did we have to wait for six and a half decades for that? How come to happen? So I think those are the instruments. If I just looked at those who bring change. Are they young? Are they men?

 

Maybe they won't bring. I will suffer a bias and stifle that growth. And the more we create this fissure, the more we stifle opportunities to collaborate. So, yes, there is evidence that podcasts where you're telling men to change will only be heard by women. But that does not discount opportunity to have a sit down with men and have a conversation.

 

Yes, I have a father who said, the best thing you can do when I was 16 was to get married. But I don't grudge him that. I don't demonize him for it. I said, yeah, I know that. That's coming from a perspective of fear that let my daughter just have a home and a partner who can physically protect her.

 

I won't be around you. Don't begrudge that generation that value because they didn't know better. You sit down with that generation and prove a point that, yes, I'm a nobody, but I can be a somebody. And that's how you heal. That's how you bridge the gap. You don't need to light a fire everywhere, but you can light a fire only to light up a bath.

 

So I'm from the perspective, and like I said, I have lived that life. Yes, there are men who are beating down women, but is it only happening in slums? And it's only happening, let's say, in the global South. And we were told that if men are educated, they won't beat down their wives.

 

We were told women have a job and a check. So I think that instead of making a position very nascent, that this is the truth for all women, let's actually open it up for those women who said, yes, I met with a challenge, but I knew how to find solutions.

 

And then I could affect change. Maybe a role model, maybe not, but we need to recognize role models come with feet of clay.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, I think that was a very complete difference.

>> Smriti Irani: I know you got an indication from Suhani to move on, so move on.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, I'll just shift to Subita.

 

So. You bring years of grassroots experience and have seen the ships unfold in real time. So from a civil society standpoint, how can organizations like Grameen foundation foster support systems at home and in community that enable women to improve both health and employment outcomes?

>> Zubaida Bai: Thank you. And I know I'm kind of running short of time, but I appreciated everything that Mr Rani said.

 

The mere fact that this room is majority woman kind of troubles me a lot. And for decades, I've been in room talking about women and empowerment as if we have power to give women. I think the mere fact is that the world has women who are full of Power.

 

All we need to do is just get out of their way and not try to fix them. That's the role of civil society, I feel. I come from a background in mechanical engineering and I look around and say, the door that I opened this morning to enter is not designed for a woman.

 

The chair you're sitting on, the chair I'm sitting on is not designed for women. The world around us was meant for men and designed in a way that patriarchy was out there. And it was not just men holding patriarchy, it's women upholding that patriarchy. When I design products for women, I always think about, well, what is it?

 

Why is this designed this way? I remember being in a sugar cane farm in India about 15, 20 years ago. And I would go to these women and say, how can I design a detrashing tool for you? And these women would say, we are forced to remove our uterus to come to work so that we don't have to take breaks.

 

What can you do about it? So, we never asked these women questions that needed to be at Grameen foundation. The biggest issue we saw was yes, we created this microfinance movement globally. But these women were being charged higher interest rates than men. They were never given the full amount of capital that they asked for.

 

And almost always the loan would be taken but distributed, as Rohini said beautifully amongst the family. If you give a woman a phone, she's going to give it to her son, her daughter, her husband. She's not using that asset. How do we change that? And agree, we have three simple approaches that we have started implementing today, the first one is what we call the household dialogues.

 

We actually train a local agent that understands the family, the culture, the values, to go in and have a conversation within the family to say, how can we distribute power within all of you? Right, including this woman. Because we know data that shows as of by ILO as of last year that women globally provide $16 billion of UN unpaid care work every single day.

 

Every single day. We are holding. And this is not an India or a US problem. If you want to understand India, read this book Chup by Deepa Narayan who talks about how women are groomed to believe that they are invisible. And if you want to understand us, read the book called holding it Together, how America is, how Women Are America's safety net.

 

We're actually holding with our unpaid care work, America's economy in a way that that we don't want to make visible and make understand, right? So when we have this conversation, the biggest success that we saw was allowing women to sit with the family and have meals with the family at the table.

 

And if these women are pregnant, their nutrition uptake goes up by 70% just by the mere fact that they're sitting with the family and not eating after the family, right? When all these people understand the burden of care this woman faces before she steps out of the house and agree to do that, you know what happens?

 

The financial institution considers her less risky and thereby her interest rate goes down. When we talk to men. Exactly. Men are not bad people. Like I'm a mother to three sons. I have to be cognizant of the fact. And I speak to the woman, I speak to the world about why gender is important and by role of women is important, I balance it out.

 

But the important thing here is men feel threatened by a woman's financial independence, that's because they groomed to believe that way. The minute you have a conversation with these men, and we've seen with three conversations, you can make a man understand that he has peers to support him and that allowing a woman to bring in money is not a threat to his masculinity.

 

Because 70% of all gender based violence and domestic violence happens because of financial reasons. Doesn't matter if it's in the US in India or Africa. A man is threatened by her economic independence because he's groomed and raised to believe that he's the sole provider. The minute you can dismantle that myth and enable him to have a peer and a support group that will not look down on him for supporting a woman, then he's successful.

 

And that's our Male Champion program that's been very successful in India and Nigeria. And even in Nigeria and northern Nigeria, we are seeing polygamous marriages where men are stepping up and saying, maybe I made a mistake by having these three wives. Maybe I should change this in my future generation.

 

So just having conversations and understanding that we need to fix the issue and not the problem is a huge success factor. And I'll stop there. I think we really need to understand that patriarchy is rampant, that everywhere around us. It's in, even in the jeans that we wear, it doesn't fit our mobile phones.

 

Because women's jeans are designed for men, it's not designed for women, right? And so for us to understand that our everyday life needs to change and we need to show up as individuals, you don't need role models, you don't need successful people to follow. You just need to change yourself and everybody around you.

 

And those simple changes are going to be cumulative. And the last aspect for me is AI, right? The biggest fear for me today is these biases that we hold every day are being fed into a system, and we need to act now for us to be able to leverage such a technology at scale to not just enable men or women, but to enable us as a society so we can all be successful.

 

 

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: That was really powerful.

>> Zubaida Bai: Yeah.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: So I'd love to open the floor. To all of you if there are. Any questions to the panelists here. Yeah.

>> Speaker 15: Thank you so much. Incredible panel and love the perspective from everybody. So I host conference for moms in India.

 

In fact, something that has started post Covid because I'm like, how do we make the shift? Like, moms are not coming with manual. They're thrown into a system and there's social conditioning. And in even including their own buyers that they feed themselves, that makes it challenging, so I took it upon myself.

 

I live in Florida by the mom of three boys as well. So I started the conference, and one thing that we noticed is that you were talking about men. When we put it out there in the newspaper, we had men calling, saying that, how do I send my wife there?

 

Because, you know, the conversation, we were talking about everything, including parenting, relationship, nutrition, getting back to workforce, pretty much covering everything. Because I, you know, through my years, I've been mom for like 14 years now through three boys, and constantly I'm surrounded with moms. And those were the conversation we were having.

 

And we're like, all right, we need a space just for moms now. Women conversation is one thing. When you talk about mothers, they are the change maker and they are the one setting the future. So when you were talking about the next generation and, you know, how do we make the impact?

 

And nothing is instant. Everything is very subtle change. I feel mothers are in a position where they could create the next generation. Now, even with my three boys, that's the conversation we have. Because soon the way they treat their spouse, eventually it all starts from me, how my husband treats me, and now he's an equal partner.

 

Now he was born and raised outside, he was born in London, raised here. But then I'm like, how about men in India who are being conditioned otherwise to be like, no, it's women's job to, you know, raise children. So I think that's something that I wanted to kind of add upon.

 

And I'd love that, you know, such panel and such summit is really important. So, you know, I feel like, how do we come together between the government organization like yours and everybody to have this conversation in one place? So

>> Smriti Irani: I think that one aspect and just taking from what dweeda said.

 

In terms of technology and design flaw, as a mom, I think we need to bring out more and more attention to certain design flaws which are deadly. For instance, whether it speaks about, let's say, the age of AI in AI and whoever uses AI for car safety in the automobile sector, they always take the body shape of men, never consider the body shape of women, especially pregnant women.

 

And now technology. And there's a BBC report on it which showcases that in the same circumstance, because AI doesn't take into consideration the female body type, women in the same accident are 17% more likely to die than men. So I think that certain conversations need to be act out and there has to be a global opinion created on them because one is the issue of families and moms and the role of men within those family units.

 

Equitable distribution of power, as Zubeda says. But the others are urgent red flags that need to be addressed. Today, another issue with regards to moms, or for that matter, how AI relates to the same and the agency of money. Today, 33% and less chances exist of women who are on the Internet, especially on, let's say Instagram or any other E commerce platform, you are more likely to get less information on investments and you're supposed to get 70% more information on how to sell on FMCG goods.

 

So I think that there is a need and that impacts the everyday utility, the everyday impact of money with regards to family. Those are the red flags that need to be called out pretty soon.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah, I'll pass it out to you. Just one more last.

>> Speaker 16: Hi, sorry.

 

Awesome discussion. Quick question here. You know this during the morning we've had lots of presentations and a lot of data you shared as I would not say the token mail member, but representing mankind here very. You know, a lot of what has been shared is what we've known for years.

 

So is academia keeping up with societal change? Because what we are looking at, we're at an inflection point where, you know, the conversation is not about how do we get women into the workplace, but in the US as the global, you know, leader economy, the big driver of change is going 30 years back.

 

So do, do we think we need to do some research to understand what are the triggers? Why is that happening? What are the biases? Because research right now almost feels like it's 20 years old versus where we need to be now. And you know, I come from the private sector.

 

To your point about AI, 0.2% of AI patents are held by women from an Investment perspective. We have an investment portfolio of about 200 companies, we had one female founder, and we impaired the investment, which basically means we had to write it off. What is the gap? Why is the gap?

 

Should we not be doing lots of research into understanding what is mostly relevant today and why societal shifts are happening now? Sorry. Quick question for anybody who wants to answer.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Professor Hinaya,

>> Alessandra Voena: I'll briefly say that we're lucky that our colleagues, especially in political economy and political science, are extremely motivated to figure out what's going on right now.

 

I think what emerges, I think a lot from this debate is that economics and incentives are fundamental, but politics is also extremely important. We're fortunate that we have collaborations between all these angles.

>> Smriti Irani: I also feel there's a huge disconnect, anthropologically and sociologically, between how the Global north views academically, the Global south, because the templates are set by the Global North.

 

I think that we are at a precipice of time where we can become the glue stick between the north and the south, because we have the institutions of the north and we have an understanding of the South. And that's where the answers will come from. Because if the lens is not from a perspective of understanding the diversity that we live in, if that perspective is not understood, I don't think research will throw up something new.

 

And that is why you see the rigmarole of the old

>> Zubaida Bai: 100%. And I would like to point out to Dr. Rohini Pandey, who's actually been doing amazing research, not 20 years behind, but as it stands currently, today, and there is very little funding available to talk about women.

 

And like Mr. Rani was saying, the research around kind of seat belts and airbags and how they're not meant for women, I think that's been in the last five years is where it hasn't even come to implementation. It's just in the research phase. So I think we're really behind in terms of understanding that we want to acknowledge that women have been treated as invisible and that we really need to bring that voice at the forefront.

 

The more we start dismantling patriarchy as men and women in the world, the more we see research that is more relevant and to date. But I would say that it's still happening currently and there are many amazing researchers doing that, but it's very recent. We are not going back to the 1960s, but we are 20 years behind because we are still understanding the presence of women and the need for it in the workforce.

 

And that's kind of where the disconnect might seem like.

>> Shraddha Kale Kapile: Yeah. Thank you so much. I know there are more questions but we're really running short of time. And thank you all for being here and thank you amazing panelists for such deep insights into this. Thank you so much

 

 

>> Sakshi Shah: for our first Lightning Showcase. I am thrilled to welcome two incredible change makers from India. Dr. Sweta Kanavaje, Director of Myna Mahila Foundation, and Tanvi Divate, Co-Founder of Rani Jobs. They are on the front lines working directly with women in urban resource poor communities. And they're here to share what it really takes to create dignified, sustainable jobs from the ground up.

 

 

>> Sweta Kanavaje: Thank you Sakshi. Namaste everyone. I had privilege to leading Mennamela foundation operation. As you all are aware, Dr. Suhani Jalota founded Myna Mahila ten years ago when she saw a woman making a trade-off with their help for dignity. As an organization whom we work with we work with girls like Nisha who is 20 years old, high school educated, newly married and not able to leave leave her home figuring out with the career finding the options for the family planning.

 

The new responsibility of the household is confuse her to what to do next. What we do as organization we identify those women from the community. If those women not able to come to our place we go to their doorstep provide knowledge and also providing tools on their mobile phones so she can able to access knowledge on a fingertips.

 

Just wanted to underline 75% of the women in the community have access to the mobile phone. This help us to after having discussion with Manavilla foundation this woman able to negotiate with their family members and balance their career in a such a manner and they also have a good accurate information from the right sources have reliable support within the community and their household which help them to feel more control of herself and her life.

 

We have now worked with over 2 million women like Nisha over the last decade. Our vision to increase women agency their ability to make decision to ensure women are more confident, financially independent and healthy. But we don't just work with women, we also work with their husbands, fathers and brothers.

 

We leverage our deep rooted presence in the community we serve to create and train local champions and foster male support within the community for women. These male allies are now strong champion for their wives and even helping other men to understand their perspective. Over the next decade we are on mission to empower 35 million women in the urban slum across India.

 

We use research backed technology driven approach to creating systematic change in women agency. While we are developing the agency tool, we also measure the impact on women health seeking behavior by tracking increased utilization of healthcare services and higher labor seeking behavior by tracking increased female labor force participation.

 

Research shows that women are strong but due to gender and social biases they often denied chance to realize their full potential. To transform this reality, holistic approach should be needed and that's what mennamela does. We have Women agency program. We create a safe supportive environment where women are encouraged to speak just like a chatty mana bird.

 

We have on ground program like physical spaces and digital platform which we run. Through this program we run ground clinic and center within the community, mobile application and AI based chatbot on WhatsApp for women to manage their sexual reproductive health confidently and efficiently. We have recently launched AI Innovations and academic research Vertical MENA Research provides understanding about the magnitude of the problem, scale of the challenges through randomized control, trial guide, program design and help us to collaborate with meaningful potential leaders to derive a systematic change.

 

We have been fortunate to have been supported by many partners in this work like data.org the Agency Fund, the Gate Foundation, MIT, SOL many more. This research and implementation integrated approach has been instrumental in mana's MELA growth and impact but none of this possible without dedicated team member.

 

We have 75 plus team member which have background in technology, health, grassroots expertise in implementation. It is truly honor to represent Myna Mahila Foundation work on this global platform and share the work to create a more equitable future for women.

>> Sakshi Shah: Continue on and moving along the day.

 

We have Tanvi Diwate next Co Founder of RANI Jobs.

>> Tanvi Divate: Hi everyone, very good morning. My name is Tanvi Dipte and at raniwork we are building a platform for women, one that reimagines flexible work to be more inclusive, dignified and future ready. Through our conversation with employers we have consistently heard the same challenges that hiring full time employees is difficult, retention is very low and there's a persistent mismatch between available talent and the skill set that companies actually need.

 

RANI is here to solve that. RANI is a workforce platform powering inclusive AI and digital work. We connect companies with trained women who can deliver a wide range of tasks. From digital, AI enabled work to backend and human in the loop operations. Companies get access to reliable on demand talent pool not needing to worry about the delays and cost of hiring full time people.

 

What makes our workforce unique is that it's gender balanced, multilingual and trained which means that data is more precise and model gets less biased and we're not just doing the usual micro tasks. Our workers handle complex workflows like prompt engineering, red teaming and quality assurance. Because it's all built on mobile first platform, RANI is designed to scale, making it easy to onboard women, upskill them and keep them engaged for long term.

 

Our system is simple and scalable. Companies upload tasks and set quality parameters. RANI then breaks them into gamified micro tasks and pushes them through the app. Workers complete the work via smartphones or PC desktops and building QA methods ensures that there is consistent accuracy maintained. Workers are then paid fairly based on completion and performance.

 

Rani's women have already taken on a wide range of industry specific tasks. In healthcare, for example, they have generated language data sets, trained as AI health counselors and even supported advanced tasks like red teaming, prompt engineering for health models. And in retail and E-commerce they have worked on product sentiment analysis, tagging and categorization that has been all crucial for understanding consumer behavior.

 

On the tech and the backend side they have done QA testing, backend data entry, multilingual transcription and even app and website testing. And in the development sector they've gone hyper local doing door to door surveys, field data collection, training chatbots in regional languages. We know that flexibility matters, so we package work into short manageable hours that fit into their daily lives.

 

This platform is exclusively for women, supported by local digital hubs that are built in their local communities and also having trained AI assisted job counselors who help them navigate any challenges. We have seen strong results across different client work. They have delivered around 98% accuracy in data annotation projects and about 70% of the women who start the task actually finish it completely.

 

And that's a big deal. Especially in gig work where the drop offs is really high. And in one of our chatbot projects the quality has gotten a 35% engagement rate both due to bot localization and also having AI assisted health counselors. For every Rani worker that we have, we have 5x women on the wait list, ready, trained and eager to start.

 

This shows that there's a huge untapped labor supply potential. We are not just solving a hiring problem, we are creating a pathway for women to gradually enter and grow in the workforce. Many of the women we work with are entering paid work for the first time. So we have designed a step by step journey that helps them grow at their own pace.

 

At level one, they start with simple, low barrier flexible tasks they can do from home or within their community. And as they build trust and consistency, they move into quality related work such as reviewing tasks, testing chatbots and doing some validation work. And in level three, with more experience, they are ready for more complex and also field based roles like surveys, directive and prompt engineering.

 

And finally, they graduate into larger ecosystems, whether that's platform like upwork or more offline work and stay long term. This model gives women the freedom to balance home responsibilities with career goals while building skills, confidence and income over time. So join us in reshaping the future of work and building more inclusive workforce together.

 

Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: This takes us into the second part of the day that will focus on marketplace solutions that enable better matching between labor supply and the demand of employers. So the first talk will be by Dr Suhani Jalota, sharing a research insight on the latent productive female labor supply in Mumbai.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Hi everyone. So Tanvi actually showed the solution that I'll be discussing the research around. And as part of this project, this is joint work with Lisa Ho, who's also here with us today and will also be presenting her another piece of research. We're talking about solutions that are designed for women.

 

So essentially what works for her, how work from home, digital jobs affect female labor force participation. And we are providing evidence from field experiments that we've run in Mumbai's urban slum communities. So we know this fact already. We've been discussing this a lot, that women are generally quite out of the workforce and particularly seems to be a problem in low middle income countries, particularly in South Asia.

 

But it's also that these women don't seem to be leaving their homes. In fact, we find from the Time Use survey that about 70% of unemployed women are not leaving their homes even once a day in urban India. So then why do we think that the women are not able to enter the workforce?

 

There may be various constraints that may often have to do with the traditional barriers to working outside the home. And this involves safety concerns, childcare concerns could involve multitasking, related responsibilities that they may not be able to manage along with paid work. It may be the lack of information about jobs themselves and the trust in those jobs.

 

They may just be norms of seclusion or parda norms which are essentially veiled norms that a woman should not be seen by the outside world. There's also disapproval from husbands and other community members that could be preventing them from working. So with all of these barriers, there also seems to be a lot of jobs available that women are just not able to do.

 

That sorts of shows that there are maybe these large mismatches between the types of jobs available and the types of jobs that women can do given all of these constraints that they live under. And this is particularly true in the context of India, but also South Asia, the Middle East, and other such parts of the world where norms are pretty stringent.

 

So then what can we do about it? Well, one strategy is to potentially change the norms themselves. And that, as we know, takes time. It should happen, but it takes a very long time, maybe generations. So another strategy could be to actually try to change the jobs themselves and the design of the work such that it becomes more compatible with the types of opportunities that women can actually do.

 

And so with this, if we go back to the same list of constraints, we can provide women with jobs to overcome the safety concerns that are right next to their homes. There are women only, so only other female co-workers. We can overcome the multitasking related barriers by providing women with work that is extremely flexible at a time of their choice.

 

They can work when they want, for however long they want. We can provide women with job information trusted in a source that they really understand right at home. We can also overcome these seclusion related norms by providing women with opportunities also directly at home, with devices or means that they already understand.

 

And so in order to be able to understand whether we can actually get and what is that latent labor supply, can we actually get women who are currently out of the workforce to enter? If we actually address all of these barriers, we then established these sorts of jobs that provided women with reducing all of these constraints and provided women with these jobs directly from home and from these women only, female friendly, child friendly centers that were right next to their homes.

 

So it is kind of like if you can imagine an ideal job setup for a woman who is out of the workforce and may be constrained by a lot of these different barriers. So now what do we exactly do? Well, actually, a third strategy is that we could actually also be changing the wages.

 

What if you could just pay women to enter the workforce? Can you pay them high enough so that none of these barriers actually matter as much? They can overcome this by just getting paid more. We tried a lot of these, and so we actually run these experiments to mainly answer these fundamental questions.

 

First, to what extent can work from home jobs actually get women to enter? And how does that differ within these local job offices that we set up versus from home? How does that differ? By providing women with higher wages? So can you just pay them more? And also, is this the same for husbands?

 

Are the husbands determinants to this labor supply for this type of work the same as it is for the wives, or different? And then we also want to understand the mechanisms. Well, why is it that we do see differences between work from home and office? And we explore some of these different barriers as well?

 

And then we want to understand scaling up. Do these solutions actually have potential to scale up, given that firms may actually obviously care about cost effectiveness, productivity? Is this sort of work that women are doing from home, remotely, from these local offices, actually productive enough for them to be able to provide more of these sorts of jobs.

 

So to do this, we run a field experiment here that I'll describe very briefly because we don't have much time with 3,200 married households. And the job intervention is digital work, as Tanvi explained. So I won't get into the details of this. This is data labeling work on the raniwork smartphone platform that we developed where women can now get paid piece rate for every task that they're completing.

 

So what did we do? We actually randomly assigned households into seven different treatment arms, six treatment and one control where women are being paid a low, medium, a high wage and being assigned to either home or office at each of those wages. And these high wages are higher than their husband's wage.

 

So this is a pretty significant amount of money for flexible work that women can do from or next to their home. We also randomize whether or not their husbands know directly from us about the job and about the survey. And then we run another experiment at endline, we have an endline survey as well.

 

I only have time to go over a few of the results. So let me show you. First, this is how work from home jobs look like. Women are on their own Smartphones work from office jobs where women are bringing in their smartphones to the office, they're sitting together with other women and working in these sorts of setups.

 

Again right next to their homes, they can bring their children along as well. So what do we find? Well, the main result now this is at baseline, all of the women that we're working with are out of the workforce. When we provide them with job opportunities over their smartphones, we see that about 56% of the women who are currently out are actually able to enter.

 

Now what happens when we provide the same job to women right outside their home? This is again within a five minute walking distance where you can bring your children. Here we see that the take up is about less than half, at about 27%. Now, that itself is quite significant, which means that we're still able to get a quantity of women that are currently out of the workforce to enter, even just by reducing a lot of these outside barriers to work and by placing these jobs right next to their homes.

 

But we can really double that if the job is just provided at home, possibly because there may be certain barriers preventing her from leaving the home. Now, what happens with wages? I said that maybe wages could matter as well. We shockingly find, and this is kind of surprising for some of us and not as surprising for others who know the context probably better, is that the wages don't really seem to be changing the take up rate for women at all.

 

So even if you pay her $60 a month to $300 a month. Her take up of the same job from home is about the same. Now, there is a slight difference in take up from a local office, so there's a slight increase between the low and the medium wage, but then it again plateaus.

 

So wages matter less, but location matters a lot more for women to be able to enter this sort of workforce. And these estimates that we find for work from home are actually pretty significant even in comparison to many other interventions that are trying to get women to enter the workforce.

 

But then a question really arises. Is this really about gender? And when we run a similar experiment with husbands, we find that husbands seem to be caring about the opposite. So the location doesn't seem to matter much for husbands, but it's really the wages that matter. So as you pay men more, they're much more likely to take up this sort of job.

 

Now, this is not exactly a one to one comparison because many of the husbands are already working in another job. That's the context in which we work in. But still it shows you the determinants of entry into the labor supply. We don't really have a lot of time to get into the mechanisms here.

 

I just want to end with. We actually did a two year follow-up, and we've now found that actually the women who were assigned to working from home, oops, I don't know how to go back. Okay, who were assigned to working from home at first, are now actually more likely to actually leave the home and work from outside in any other sort of job.

 

And this is any work that exists. So this is two years after. So possibly this is an optimistic view that this could mean that maybe women are gradually able to enter jobs outside the home if this gradual step is provided at first. And I'll just pause here. I'm, you know, I'm fortunate to have been mentored by many of the people in the room here with this research.

 

And I'll hand it over to another mentor, actually Steve Davis at the Hoover Institution, who's really made this occasion and this overall event really happened. So thanks so much everyone, and over to Steve.

>> Steven J. Davis: It's a real pleasure to be here and especially to follow Suhani. She gave me way too much credit.

 

This is her and her collaborators undertaking. All I really did was look at it and say, wow, that's a great idea. Go ahead. So my talk is actually gonna be somewhat related to what Suhani was just talking about. As you'll see, very different setting, very different context, different type of empirical research, but overlapping Messages.

 

And so let me start from the big picture that you already know. But I want to just put things in context. The pandemic triggered a shift to more remote work around the world, okay? And that's really happened everywhere. And the extent to which it happened differs a lot across countries, depending on the occupational mix of jobs, the educational mix of the workforce, cultural factors, the exact characteristics of their pandemic.

 

But we've seen this shift across countries around the world. When you look within countries, there's a very pronounced relationship between educational attainment and how much work from home rates have risen since the pandemic struck. And the basic story is more highly educated people have made the bigger shifts into remote work.

 

Now we're going to study how this shift played out in one country, Turkey, in one large firm, okay, called Tempo. It's a major customer service firm with a broad clientele of businesses and government organizations. And much of its work is call centers. So we're gonna focus on those call centers.

 

We've got really super individual level data on productivity and customer quality that's being provided by these call center agents. And so we're going to draw on that high quality data. And we've got it over time from 2019 to 2023. So think of this as a company, and I'll tell you what happened to this company.

 

Now. Basically, it went from all of its call center agents were working on site almost all of the time to all of its call center agents were working in a fully remote capacity. So they went. The shift was instigated by the pandemic. It was a response to the lockdown restrictions in Turkey, but then they decided to stick with it afterwards.

 

So really a major change. This company, Tempo, they've got about 3,500 employees. Before the pandemic, they operated at physical locations in seven provinces in Turkey with headquarters in Istanbul. Afterwards, as I've already told you, they shifted to fully remote work. So this shift happened in the space of two weeks in March.

 

So very abrupt shift. The company facilitated the shift by providing its call center workers with computers and Internet support equipment that they could take home. Okay, so that's the setting. Now to understand what that meant for the workers. Here's the picture. So in panel A, those are two snapshots from offices before the pandemic.

 

And the feature that I want you to take away from those office settings is these are high distraction environments with many people working in close physical proximity. And, you know, it's an office and it's a crowded one. It's not. So don't think of this as luxurious office quarters versus cramped quarters at home.

 

Then on the right side, panel B, those are just four different employees working from home after the pandemic. So you can see there's a pretty stark shift in the working environment. And of course, you don't have to commute and so on. So I just want you to understand the context before I show you the results.

 

So here's the summary of the main findings. Big shifts in the composition of the workforce over time towards more representation of women, both single women and married women, older workers and people who live outside metropolitan areas, okay? And in the Turkish context, you can think of those as groups, especially among women outside metropolitan areas, who had relatively low labor force participation rates.

 

So productivity actually rose as measured by number of customers served per hour by these agents. There was no loss of service quality. In fact, the evidence is suggestive of some slight improvements in service quality. But those effects are small and sometimes not statistically significant, so I won't really emphasize them in my remarks today.

 

The productivity effects were quite similar for men and women. Okay, so here's perhaps the biggest headline result in the paper, and I'll show you a bunch of pictures like this that have two vertical red lines. The leftmost vertical red line. That's when the lockdown restrictions were imposed in Turkey.

 

That's March 11, 2020, and they were lifted late in 2021 in Turkey. And that's kind of a pretty hard shift in Turkey. So we'll think of this intermediate period as being the lockdown period. Then there's the before pandemic period, and there's the post lockdown period that you'll see that over and over again in these pictures.

 

So before the pandemic struck, Tempo's customer service workforce was about 50% women by the end of this sample period in early 2023. So this is after the lockdown has ended, it's more like 75%. So huge shift towards women. Okay, so that's result number one. Now, if you break things down a little bit more finely, and I'll show you a bit of that, you can see that there was also a shift towards more married agents.

 

So people who've got kids to manage and so on. But that was entirely accounted for by a shift to married women, there was no increase in the employment rate at this company of married men. There was also quite a sharp move away from populous provinces, metropolitan areas in Turkey.

 

So, this is a group where people might have good skills but found it hard to find a job in close proximity to. And this gave them the opportunity to work from home. And then here's the basic story at the whole workforce level. Okay, so here I'm not trying to control for.

 

Actually this does have controls for individual fixed effects. We can measure the kinds of calls that these agents are servicing. So there's controls for the mix of calls over time. And this is just showing you what's happened to our basic productivity measure. Customer calls serviced per hour. These are all incoming calls, typically responding to some issue or complaint or change in service by the customer.

 

And you can see there's a pretty big increase that happens. Not immediately so when they shift to remote work, but within a few weeks, there's an increase in productivity that then persists even after the lockdown restrictions are removed. Now if you break that down, we can break this down into in various ways.

 

It's mainly coming because each agent is spending less time talking to each customer and they're putting them on hold less often as well. Okay, that's the leftmost chart and the top chart, you might worry that, well, they're working from home, maybe they're actually working harder or longer. In fact, they're getting more break time.

 

Okay, that's the other panel there. So these agents are increasing their productivity. They are taking less time per customer. A little bit less service quality doesn't fall, break time rises. We think what's happening is basically you're taking these people out of these high distraction, congested environments, putting them in their own home.

 

It's less distracting, it's more comfortable for them. They're able to get more done on their job. Now there's another aspect that's a little more subtle that's happening. We actually find that the people who start working remotely have a steeper learning curve initially are early on that's kind of contrary to what you might think than those who were working at this company before the pandemic.

 

But that kind of, but the on site workers kind of catch up over a while and eventually I kind of chop this curve off because there's a high attrition rate here. Eventually you see some drop, some considerable drop off in the productivity measure for the remote workers. And that may be some kind of boredom effect or so on that kicks in, but that comes later.

 

I said the productivity patterns are quite similar for men and women. Here they are. There is kind of one, it's not a big difference, but it's one material difference between men and women that I thought you might appreciate seeing, which is men take longer breaks on average. And it's not a huge effect.

 

It amounts to about 10 more minutes of break time per day. And that is offset by the fact that men are slightly less chatty on the phone with the customers. And so these two effects kind of even out in terms of the overall productivity measure. Now, I've painted a pretty positive picture here.

 

Okay, you know, we've got these more representation of employment from these groups that typically had more challenges in obtaining employment. In the Turkish context. There's not only no productivity loss, there's significant productivity gains. There's no drop off in customer service quality, and there's actually an increase in break time.

 

So that's all great. It just sounds wonderful. There is one challenge that I haven't emphasized. It's discussed in the paper. I just want to tee it up here because it is an issue. This is a company that faces high attrition rates. And you can imagine if you're on the phone eight hours a day talking to people, solving their problems over and over again.

 

So this company typically has attrition rates somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% a year. And that's costly for the company because they've got to train these new employees so that they can service their customers appropriately. The people who work remotely have even higher attrition rates than the company was experiencing before the pandemic.

 

So the company really wants to figure out how can we stay in this remote work mode but reduce the attrition rates? And we are currently fielding an experiment with the cooperation of the company to address that issue. By the way, one of my co authors on this project is quietly sitting over there.

 

Nick Bloom, both the paper I just talked about in the field experiment and what we're doing in the field experiment, and I'll end here, is let's bring employees, a randomly selected set of employees or teams of employees into the office one day a month. Let's have them work half day or three quarters of the day.

 

But let's go heavy on the socializing activities, the mentoring activities, getting to know your boss. And what we want to see is will that establish a closer connection between the employees and the company so that attrition rates go down over time while the company continues to get the benefits of this shift to remote work.

 

Thanks very much.

>> Sakshi Shah: This panel will focus on flexible work arrangements which would include online, offline, part time and gig work. So I'd love to call on our panelists. This panel will be moderated by Pragya Khanna, Global Head of Sustainability and Vice President of Process Group and NASPOS Ltd.

 

And the panelists will be Mrs Namrata Adani, Director of Adani Group, Professor Achutva Advariu, Tata Endowment professor of Economics, UC San Diego and co founder of the Good Business Lab, Nick Bloom, professor of Economics here at Stanford, and Hannah Rickson, Director of Sustainability and Impact at upwork. Please give a round for our panelists.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: Thank you so much for having us here and I hope everybody's you've done mic tests. They seem to work. Does everybody just want to say hello and a quick introduction then we know if the mics work.

>> Namrata Adani: It's working.

>> Prajna Khanna: Brilliant.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Hi, I'm A.J, how are you?

 

Nice to be here.

>> Hannah Erickson: Hi everyone. Hannah from upwork

>> Nicholas Bloom: and Nick Plin from Stanford.

>> Namrata Adani: Hi, I'm Namrata, all the way from India.

>> Prajna Khanna: Wonderful. Thank you for making the journey. Lovely to be here. So I have the absolute pleasure of hosting a very diverse set of panelists who hopefully bring very diverse perspectives on what is gig work.

 

So why is gig work important or why do I have an interest in it is because our company has invested in multiple digital platforms. We primarily invest in digital platforms across the world that has across our portfolio of companies. We have about 20 million gig workers in there, so it's very, very interesting to us.

 

But this is offline gig work and what's really interesting and the work that Sohani and the team has been doing. But first of all, what a cool academician with an entrepreneur in residence inside her. So well done for all the work that you've done today and. There is clear nuances between our perception of what gig work is, which is a lot of it is framed by the external dialogue around us and ride hailing apps where there was a lot of societal or regulatory talk about.

 

And I'd love for you to start, Hannah, and tell us a little bit about online gig work and what the nuances between being a gig worker or entrepreneur. How do you view the worker?

>> Hannah Erickson: Thank you. Great question. So I saw upwork has been mentioned a few times.

 

How many people in the room just show of hands are familiar with what upwork does? Okay, wow. So I don't have to do very much explaining. I'll just give kind of the basic overview. Upwork, of course, is a global work marketplace. That means that we have talent and clients in over 180 countries globally.

 

Since we started tracking, I think in 2006, freelancers on Upwork have made over $25 billion collectively. And so any work that can be done remotely, any sort of knowledge work that can be done digitally, can be done on upwork. Our largest work categories are things like web, mobile, software development, marketing and creative work.

 

But we also have admin, legal, you name it. If it can be done remotely, it can be done on Upwork. I will say I joined four years ago and even at the time I had some misunderstandings of what upwork really was. And so one of the sort of challenges is to make sure people really understand how to use upwork effectively.

 

And a lot of people think of Upwork as sort of an online temp agency. We don't think of it that way. People certainly can figure out how to use it that way and, and find ways to be successful. But I think there's a really important difference between sort of thinking about it as a place to get a temporary gig, maybe entry level, just a short term multifaceted.

 

You'll be doing different tasks, no clear deliverable. You just want sort of your first work opportunity and maybe that'll turn into a full time job. There's a big difference between coming with that mindset and then coming with the mindset of I am an entrepreneur with specific skills I can offer and a specific deliverable in mind that I can offer this client.

 

I think it matters both in terms of how clients use us effectively and also how talent uses us effectively.

>> Prajna Khanna: Absolutely. I think what's really important to also highlight is the fact, especially with our portfolio, we're everywhere, both in the global south and the global North. There is a local economic context, societal norms, and general women participation in the labor force will impact.

 

We were talking about this just before. Tell us a little bit about the work that you've done. And we were thinking about how can we leverage the enabling factors that enable women to join formal employment to also then make that transition to using the same factors to encourage more women to participate in the gig economy?

 

 

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Yeah, that's right. So wonderful to be here and thank you for the invitation to participate in this event. My work largely focuses actually on how to recruit better and design jobs better in the formal sector for women in low income countries and a lot of work in India to this regard.

 

But the work I want to talk about today focuses kind of like on the in between space between sort of like own account work or self employment work in rural areas and kind of that formal sector. So the idea is that often this sort of own account and you know, micro entrepreneurship businesses that have been very successfully fostered for some time now by movements like the microfinance revolution have, you know, have, have actually to a certain extent succeeded in getting some, some more women to do this kind of work and take part in the, in that opportunity.

 

But often that those are sort of like short term or, you know, very small income generating opportunities. So is there a way to integrate women better into supply chains, particularly global supply chains that might actually generate sort of long lasting and perhaps larger income jumps and create those kind of more lucrative opportunities even for rural women?

 

So this project that we are in the middle of right now, that I'll just take a moment to explain, focuses on the fashion supply chain and essentially having rural women participate by creating little crocheted squares that then go into larger products like handbags or sweaters and things like that that use some of that work.

 

What we did was very similarly to what Suhani mentioned in her study as well. We focused on this distinction between working inside and outside the home. And looking at the idea that working within the home for many rural women, particularly women who are not in the labor force, might be an easy entry path into income generation generating opportunities and also might create kind of lasting change compared to working outside the home.

 

So we actually ran an experiment in rural Rajasthan in India where we offered women the opportunity to take up this work either from their homes or from a village factory set up essentially of little space in their villages, which was very, very close to their homes. It was, basically, right outside their doors.

 

And very similarly to what Suhani found and Lisa found in their work, the take up differences are massive with respect to women really wanting to work within their homes on these products. And not only is take up more, the effort that women put in is greater. So they actually work about 88% more hours when they're working within the home.

 

They make approximately 100% or double the product when they're working within their home. And, and similarly to what Steve just mentioned, productivity actually goes up substantially as a result of working within the home. And a big part of this is we think, learning by doing. So when you make these products, you start out kind of slow and then you speed up and you're much better at making quality products.

 

And that occurs more within the home because women are just able to devote a little bit more time to it. Part of this comes from multitasking as well, which as we know from the pandemic, we all probably experienced this, that's a double edged sword of, you know, distracting and, and, and potentially productivity killing.

 

But also when you're able to multitask effectively as, as women tend to do the, you know, in these settings, you actually find that productivity on net goes up. So, so this is kind of, you know, one step toward understanding ways in which kind of global supply chains might be able to reach all the way into people's homes.

 

And as Suhani mentioned, rather than tackling a deep seated norm and we can debate about how deep seated these norms really are and all that, maybe one immediate solution is changing the way that the amenities and the features that jobs provide, and one of those being working from home, and the flexibility seems to be really, really valuable across all these different settings.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: And I think a very critical takeaway on extra layering on that is the fact that I think 90% of supply chains, global supply chains, end in the global South. So that opportunity is huge. And if we would overlay an upwork sort of an idea onto this and imagine if we had.

 

You know, a company agnostic platform, digital platform where these women could log on with whatever sort of expertise that they can bring. It doesn't matter if then it's for H and M, or for Zara, or for whoever, whichever other, you know. So I think technology has a very easy, quick opportunity there to go from which could be online enabled gig work for the same women.

 

So next step. And of course if we're talking working from home, we have to come to you, Nick, and you've done a lot of research or your research has focused on at the time at Covid, the remote work and the productivity. Was there a woman angle to it?

 

Did you look at a gender perspective as well within the research?

>> Nicholas Bloom: Yeah, you're right. I think if I'm going to speak as a safe bet, I'm going to talk about work from home. So yes, I mean the theme we've come up, you saw Sahani talked with Lisa from atch's stuff, Steve, Steve Davis talked, there's multiple, multiple papers.

 

What you see very consistently is work from home actually increases employment in general across both genders. So it's, you know, you see men will take these jobs as well. Interestingly, one group that's very favorable on it we haven't talked about is folks with a disability. For them, getting to work is an enormous challenge and also controlling your work, you know, you can imagine if you have serious back issues is not just getting in but if you're sat in a chair.

 

But another group you see very strong evidence for is women. So in study after study you see it just increases female employment. And I love the setting that Sohania, and Ash picked up on it as well, that it's like ideally you change the norm, that norms take a long time to change.

 

And actually it's funny, AJ and I were talking about Sahani and Lisa's long run follow up about it's not just that they do these work from home jobs, but they're more likely to have in office jobs in the longer run. So it's like a stepping stone in 5, 10 years more these women are working more generally.

 

I think my thought for everyone here is how do you change this? And I'll give you kind of two thoughts on this, I talked to an enormous number of firms, execs, journalists, etc. The biggest pitch I've had, there are two groups you need to persuade. One is firms and honestly for firms is to persuade them, which I think is correct, is profitable.

 

So, if you're going to Tell a CEO you should support hybrid, you should support remote. You want to say that it is profitable for your company because ultimately they'll do that. The data seems pretty supportive on it. You've seen two or three studies. We have one in Nature last year, very kind of similar setup where we did an A B test on work from home in a company called Trip.com.

 

they're listed on NASDAQ, they're worth about 40 billion. Their founding CEO, weirdly enough, this is very Stanford was in my class like 15 years ago. And so him, and then their current CEO, Jane Suns, they did this big A B test. They randomized whether on, even on odd birthdays, whether you got to work from home two days a week.

 

And what you find is working from home had no effect on performance. So, everyone says, well like surely you've got to come into the office for mentoring, for creativity and innovation. But once you're in the office two, three days a week, the value added of those extra days is very low.

 

So, the productivity scores and performance from promotions, all of this thing is flat. What you did see is quit rates fell by a third. And quits are really expensive companies. So typically the estimates every person that quits cost you 50 to $100,000. And so for Trip.com which is a public listed company, this was like a no brainer.

 

It was increasing profits by 10, 20 million a year. So much like Sahan, we're seeing this over and over again. Productivity typically is flat or up, turnover is lower and it's very profitable. The other angle I think is for politicians. Everyone's kind of aware of what's going on domestically, and a more interesting thing is Australia.

 

Is anyone here following Australian politics? Probably a few. So they're having an election coming out pretty fascinatingly in Australia. Work from home, I wish I was there. Work from home has become like a big topic. So Albanese, he's the current incumbent, is pro it and Dutton, who is the kind of main challenger has been against it and saying everyone should come back to the office full time.

 

Turned out it's so unpopular that Dutton's kind of rapidly reversed policy and backed out and said actually we changed our mind. Abernazi was slightly mischievous because he implied that Dutton was saying this was for everyone. In fact they were talking about government workers. But even so, politicians, we all kind of express our opinions that we like work from home.

 

We can also boost this and directly until we change norms, I think this is a huge driver of female and in fact disability and even men's labor force participation.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Well, and also just a comment that actually Lisa and Suhani's work, I think, showed that you can actually, by doing this work for more opportunities, actually contribute towards changing norms.

 

You change how women view their own abilities to work, how men in the household view their own abilities, women's ability to work and contribute to household responsibilities and all that. So it could also be part of that process.

>> Prajna Khanna: Absolutely. And Hannah, very quick one coming back to you with this.

 

Nick just mentioned, there is this aspiration, a general understanding or a general expectation that this short term work, work from home, remote, digital enabled work, should lead you to a sustainable long term job. But increasingly there's a shift in. You have digital nomads, you have people who are just really intrinsically not long term workers.

 

There are some sectors where this has been just the norm. I mean, TV and film production, you always get gig work, it's not, you know, there's no expectation around it. So Hannah, give me a little bit view and perspective what you've seen from the women who've been successful on your platform.

 

 

>> Hannah Erickson: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, going back to your comments, you know, Upwork obviously has been proselytizing remote work for a long time. In 2020, when Covid hit, it was like, you guys see, we were right and now there's a little bit more pushback. So we're still kind of having to make the argument.

 

But yeah, I mean, you know, we think of flexible work. When most people think about the term flexible work, I think they're thinking about or hybrid work, they're thinking about remote or in office. And we see that, right? We use the term in that way as well. But we also think about employment versus freelancing.

 

And so not everyone wants a long term job with one employer. Unfortunately, the truth is that employment itself has gotten shakier, right? None of us have the, well, very few of us have the many year pensions that once existed. Or you know, the people are moving from job to job more often than they used to.

 

And so there's, I think a lot of people have rightfully realized I can actually have more job security if I have multiple clients or I have a clear deliverable skill I can offer and I can bring in this client and then that client and then that client on the platform and continue to work with multiple clients.

 

So yeah, I think, you know, we don't want to sort of dictate what success looks like if someone wants a long term job or if they want to even just work as a freelancer for a single client long term then great. I mean if they can find that relationship with a client on upwork more power to both of them.

 

But yeah I think you know we think of terms like tenure right the goal on upwork isn't necessarily that you're going to have a long tenure with one client. You want that, you want your pay you know you want your hourly rate or your the rate that you're being paid at.

 

Maybe it's based on milestone maybe it's based on hour. You want that to be good. You want to sort of have the flexibility to choose which clients you work with and what hours you work for them you know what hours you're working for them. There's a lot of asynchronous work happening on upwork and in the context of women obviously you know that flexibility really helps if you are a caretaker either for children or elderly parents.

 

It really helps to just be able to choose when you work, and we've got. Surveyed our customers, freelancers on the platform to say, hey, do you feel empowered to choose when you work or are actually clients kind of dictating? And overwhelming majority, 75% yes I can, said yes I can choose when I want to work.

 

The client's not dictating that I do the work when I need to do it and I deliver the final product. When we agreed to.

>> Prajna Khanna: Wonderful. Mrs. Adani, you are building the workforce of the future in all your educational institutions that you run.

>> Namrata Adani: Yes.

>> Prajna Khanna: Is this a consideration of, you know, there has been a massive shift from the idea of employment.

 

You know, you would have, traditionally you would have lifers, you people would go into an organization and then come out 40 years later with a pension. And then there has been this whole remote work opportunity. People want more challenges, they want more diversity in their career paths. In your student population, do you see a shift in their desires or is that completely, or is it still.

 

The ideal employment is, you know, 40 year job in one company.

>> Namrata Adani: Thank you for that question. You know, it is very difficult, you know, because in corporate like, you know, a lot of people say that it is very easy to do things but you know, we do follow a lot of government regulations also.

 

So, we do have a lot of challenges in that perspective because, you know, not everybody wants to work or the teachers, or we recruit them, they don't want to work in those fields because, you know, we are very particular about, because we have to give them the laptops and the data and everything.

 

So if they work from home, our all safety goes away if they work from home. So on that context I think it is very difficult for them to work from home.

>> Prajna Khanna: So, how do you then think about the edtech platforms that exist, you know, that have become everything from Brainly to Udemy to all the, I mean in India there's, there's a lot, there's, you know, enabling people to learn when they want, how they want and teachers or trainers to take these as gig jobs.

 

 

>> Namrata Adani: No, they are doing, you know, because in, see we have two kinds of model. One is the rural development model where we give them that platform that you work from home. We are giving this equipment, it's called Sakhi program, which is called a buddy program program wherein Buddy, you know, she does the mentorship in the rural village and she mentors the whole ecosystem there in the village.

 

Yeah.

>> Prajna Khanna: And what was the second model? So one is the Saki

>> Namrata Adani: and one. Is the like, you know, it's an IB program, you know, so it's a high end school Program so where you don't have to tell them to work from home, you need the physical appearance and everything because you know they work with the laptops and everything.

 

So we don't want our data to go going out.

>> Prajna Khanna: Correct, but I know my son is sat here and he does, he follows an IB program as well. A lot of the young people are now using online tutors.

>> Namrata Adani: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, it's a huge challenge.

 

That's I've written that, you know, because in that also, you know, we need a certification program because you know, without that, you know, we don't encourage that, you know, you start using all those bought systems.

>> Prajna Khanna: Right?

>> Namrata Adani: It is very challenging, I feel.

>> Prajna Khanna: And what is the, do you have a policy on it?

 

What do you see as the future?

>> Namrata Adani: Yeah, of course, you know, every organization has a policy but you know, we see as a future that, you know, we have to live with this because if you don't give. But we have to have somewhere the balance around.

>> Prajna Khanna: Right.

 

I'm just curious, Nick, you're a teacher here. What is the policy here at Stanford?

>> Nicholas Bloom: Well, I was happy Nemorata. I had to take the question first, I was actually intrigued as to what you were going to say. There is no one policy. I mean I think most people have exactly your view, which is this is life and so you should be allowed to use ChatGPT.

 

One thing it's changed is you probably are moving away from just setting students writing short essays. And also there are certain things that it's pretty clear they're going to look up. Like in fact there's more in high school, my kids have said in high school for French translation, you know, like people are just using Google and ChatGPT.

 

But yeah, I totally agree that. I mean five, 10 years, this is the workforce. So it seems crazy to say like you know, let's stay, let's ignore it. You better off just letting them use it, accepting it.

>> Namrata Adani: I don't know. After 10 years, that's what Bill Gates was there in India recently and he said, you know, the teacher's job and the doctor's jobs are going to be at the risk.

 

You know, so the more and more schools and institution we are planning to open, we are really vouching the research. You know what, after 10 years it's. Going to be,

>> Prajna Khanna: yeah, using the crystal ball, because also from healthcare, right. The technology and AI based technology solutions are really revolutionizing how you're especially really remote based access to healthcare, that's some research that you've also done.

 

What do you see as the role for women who, you know, in the healthcare sector around the world, other than top management, it is women who make up the, the body of healthcare providers. Is there a platform enabled remote work possibility you see in that crystal ball of yours?

 

 

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Yeah, it's crystal ball gazing at this point, so I can't report any results, but I do see that there's certainly a lot of potential for women to come into that industry because there's traditionally more of an acceptance for women to play those roles all over the world and India in particular.

 

And I think that as to the CHATGPT rise in all occupations, I think the best we can do as organizational leaders, as teachers and leaders in our community is basically understand its role and how it's changing things, but also promote how best to use it to be more productive within our organizations, to be better students, et cetera.

 

So I think that the sort of one side of the response being we're afraid of AI, we want to shut it down and then we just make people do what we've always done is sort of not going to work. And I think what we need is an approach that embraces that technology and understands how we need to adapt to the technology and how we teach and how we lead organizations, et cetera.

 

And there I think women also might have a very critical role to play if we structure policy and incentives correctly.

>> Prajna Khanna: Absolutely. I think it's the AI industrial revolution that we're seeing, we're witnessing and either you're with it or we are not. And I do think that there is going to be the haves and have nots of AI benefits.

 

The divide, the digital divide is just going to get much bigger. Some of the research we saw today was really focused on very, very rural, traditional sort of contexts. And they are certain not going to be benefiting from this unless intentional policies and work get put in place.

 

To situations such as yours, for example, where you were talking about the women who are engaged, gainfully employed in the global South. Tell me,

>> Namrata Adani: I was telling, you know, we have a very good policy in our system, it's called masking policy. You know, so my hr, it is like a gender, you know, they do not know which gender it is coming from.

 

So, we have like three CFOs, women working in our airport businesses, two CFO working as a HR business. So, it is a very good, we have just started one year back, and it works very well as an AI tool where you know, as we are talking about gender equality and pay parity, you know, so that is also quite equal.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: Yeah. So, I actually, I'd love to hear your views on maybe Hannah, yourself and yourself as a follow up on the use of AI in the end to end life cycle of either an employee. Employee or livelihoods opportunity which is in from recruitment to termination and you know, lowering cost of acquisitions.

 

Do you have an experience as well on.

>> Hannah Erickson: Well yeah, I mean what I can say is AI is the equal opportunity disruptor, right? I mean when it's for so long been the manual labor that's been impacted by automation and now you see knowledge work being impacted by AI.

 

And so of course Upwork saw this very quickly. Our stated goal is to really make the talent UPWORK the most AI enabled talent you can find. And we have been banging that drum for the last year and a half of if you want to work on Upwork, our recommendation is to get acquainted with XYZ tools.

 

Use them in your work, it will make your work faster but it'll also make you so much more marketable on the site as probably is not surprising to anyone the AI job category. So that can be anything from prompt engineering to actually building these tools themselves and doing the data analytics.

 

That's our fastest growing work category, things like writing and translation, that's going to change. It's just the job categories that are more in demand and also how talent are doing those jobs is rapidly changing. So it's one of those things where I think we're all sort of waiting to see exactly where it goes but we're trying not to be too responsive and more sort of proactive.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: I think organizations that wait to respond are going to be the ones that get left behind. You have to keep trying and testing and moving ahead on that, Nick, another one for you in your work. Did you see there was a gender I don't know if you researched this aspect specifically on was the balance between doing household work and being able to be productively doing your job remotely.

 

Was there a difference between the men and women?

>> Nicholas Bloom: I'll give you an anecdote then mention the average data so I heard anecdotally going in both directions from women. So anecdotally some women would say look it's great being able to work from there are primary carers. Because it's easier and if I have a nanny say or an au pair or something I can watch them or if not I pick my kids up from school.

 

There are other people that said it's terrible because I can't escape and like I want a bit of time. And I would say those, those anecdotes, I mean they were in the kind of dozens on both sides they netted out in. I do the two data points we see which is in the Stuff with Steve and Jose and Shelby and others.

 

If you look at preferences, what you see is the big driver is actually having kids. So if you look at men and women, if they have children under the age of 12, their preference to work from home goes up a lot. It increases, this is slightly more for women.

 

But I was to ask you one data point to know whether you like work from home is do you have children under the age of 12? And it's actually relatively gender neutral. The other thing that's interesting is in the American time use survey, you can look at what happens to time use of folks that work from home.

 

And you do see in levels that women do more housework and there's a number of home chores. But if you look at off people that work from home, the delta the increase for men is actually somewhat larger, so they're still behind. But proportionately that gap is closer to the at US knows you see particular college educated men.

 

So in the US this is college educated men spend a lot more time with kids if they're working from home. So I don't have data in other countries, but the thing that I saw is kids and the biggest group is honestly come back to a disability. So I think work from home is positive for everyone, I keep trying to push this.

 

Talking to the current administration, the most frustrating thing is I know they're against it. I'm like, why would you be against it? Because the more people that work from home, the more people are working and they're paying taxes as you know, if you want to, we got a massive deficit.

 

And if you want people to pay taxes and if you want to control inflation, you want more people working to push down prices. So it's a totally a win win, I don't really understand when everyone would be against it. If you commute to work, the person in front of you works from home, they're not driving, you can go a little bit faster.

 

There's very few downsides to this, but there's people that get angry and somehow.

>> Namrata Adani: But tell me, how do you do the measurable goals? Because I feel like corporate like us, it's very challenging for them to give them the insurance, the taxes, the other benefits because that employee wants everything.

 

So how do we measure that?

>> Nicholas Bloom: By the way, great point, I don't mean only about half of jobs can do it at all so if you look in the U.S. which is kind of the most advanced, something like 50% of jobs, you can't at all. So if you're like cleaning, you know the people that's going to serve the food and then of the other 50% roughly only 10% are fully remote.

 

So most people like well hybrid this will be so much better in person than it. So most jobs, now a typical thing for like my Stanford undergrads is you're going to be in the office three days you'll work from home too. There's about 10% which are kind of elite coders, call centers, data entry, crochet makers, I'm not sure we have a category for them, they can be fully remote.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: But the point that you raise is really, really interesting because from our businesses, you know we have for example everything. We have a stake here in Doordash, we have a very big stake in Swiggy. In India we Delivery hero, which is 34 brands globally, one of the most worker welfare and benefits.

 

How do you structure that? So currently at least in India, you see and we've been mapping regulation globally on this on gig work or on demand platform enabled work. You see that there is Europe sort of defines it and then the rest of the world sort of follows which is actually unfortunate.

 

Because also with the Indian government, how do you create this is a third paradigm of work. It's not traditional employment, you cannot put regulations that suited traditional employment structures carte blanche on this new type of employment. And there is how do you do insurance for a delivery driver who is multi apping?

 

They have the flexibility and autonomy to be able to deliver at the same time for three different in the morning, be a courier, in the afternoon, do a lunchtime delivery, then be a courier and then do dinner deliveries. So how do you structure insurance products for them or the benefits on and also pensions.

 

So I know Southeast Asia-

>> Namrata Adani: Because pensions is very important in India because you know the woman who's doing a work at home and if she doesn't get any benefit or she doesn't understand.

>> Prajna Khanna: Yeah, so I know that the Indian government for example has just it's not yet been implemented in a couple of states.

 

Yes, I still think that the devil is in the detail of the implementation because theoretically the idea is that you would have a pool that is run by the government. And then there's all gig employers or gig livelihood enablers would contribute to the pool but the devil is in the detail.

 

How does it work at upwork for you? Where does the worker benefits come in?

>> Hannah Erickson: Well, so for our customers, for the freelancers on upwork it's wildly different depending on where you're working, right? It's a global platform, so if you are based in the US you are giving up your health benefits and other things by not working for a full time employer.

 

Me, personally, this is my personal view, right? I think that that's an unfortunate limitation, that your health benefits and the coverage for your family is then tied to the specific employer that you have. Now, if you are based in Spain and you're working up work, you have a different scenario because you tap into the local social safety net regardless.

 

So it's a challenge. It's just a challenge, especially for a global platform where everyone's working on slightly different terms and with different legal requirements. I will say, too, for the clients, the shifting, not shifting. I mean, they're shifting, but. The varied legal requirements for what constitutes an employment job and what constitutes a freelance job differs.

 

It differs across states. If you're in California or New Jersey, you need to be very clear with the types of work that you are giving your. This worker, right? If there's any training involved, if there's, you know, there are certain things that automatically make it so that it really needs to be an employment role.

 

It should not be a contractor role. And so a lot of upwork services are for clients that are trying to correctly classify the people that they hire, because there's a lot of legal ramifications if you get it wrong. So it's tricky. It would be much easier certainly, if there was, you know, more consistency across borders.

 

It's one of the things, in addition to I think benefiting women, one of the other groups, including people living with disabilities, is immigrants and refugees, right? Upwork should be a great platform for you. If you need to cross borders and you have skills that you can take with you, keep working.

 

And it's been sort of a humbling experience for me trying to launch a few programs to help refugees and asylum seekers who are looking to find work. Well, you can do the work on upwork, but you have the legal right to work in the location where you are and a legal right to open a bank account.

 

Like, those things are still limitations that we can't control, but that certainly limit people's ability to use us effectively.

>> Prajna Khanna: Of course.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Just to comment, I mean, I think there's likely some under-exploitation of the ability for some of these benefits to be recruitment incentives for platforms, especially related to gig work.

 

I think one model is of course, to pay into a pool, and that's really hard to get right.

>> Prajna Khanna: That's being done very well in Singapore and Malaysia.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Okay, t but here in the US, I think the Black Car Fund and other things have tried to start this up.

 

But it's been really difficult to sort of mobilize, get agreement from all the platforms. Who should pay in, who classifies as a platform worker? Do you need to work on just one of these platforms, for how many hours a week to get certain benefits? But if we think back to the, I think personally also unfortunate role of, you know, employers and health insurance here in the US like that was originally used as came about historically as a recruitment tool for businesses.

 

And I think that you might be able to use the same leverage the same kind of Incentive that, you know, if one platform offers certain benefits, they're going to have workers that are more likely to stick with that platform and work more intensively there, etc. And so I think there's probably some under experimentation and maybe things that platforms can try around the world that, that show success stories in that regard.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: So, question for all of you, quick one on. Do you then think that regulation, you know, this whole classification and making it really complex for this third dimension of livelihoods and income opportunities. Do you think regulation is stifling the sector very, very early? I've seen that in the eu, for example, it stifles a lot of innovation and growth.

 

And the tech industry, for example, especially on AI, we have the EU AI directive. Nobody knows AI yet. Then you have directive that comes in ahead of the industry getting to its maturity. Do you think that's something that's happening globally? I mean, I don't know how much perspective you have on Southeast Asia, but in the us.

 

 

>> Hannah Erickson: I mean. Short answer. Yes, I think it's a problem. I think it's hampering innovation. I think it's hampering workers' ability to choose what is best for them in that moment, right? Remote work is great when you have kids and I've benefited from that, and maybe in a couple years that'll change for me, right.?

 

We all have shifting lives and shifting needs and if there's only one employment model in each geography or state, it's a problem.

>> Prajna Khanna: In India. What do you think? So if we would not look at regulation as it exists. So if you could tell the regulators what the regulation should be to enable innovation, social innovation, economic innovation, what would that be based on your experience?

 

 

>> Namrata Adani: I think, you know, in our like, company like us, you know, we are doing lot of like, not the people are sticking to one work, like because if we have a business like cement, cement business, or we are into airport businesses, so employee has that chance to change that business, you know, so we keep on transferring them, you know, from one organization to other organization.

 

So that freedom of space is there,

>> Prajna Khanna: right?

>> Namrata Adani: Yeah.

>> Prajna Khanna: Fantastic. Any questions from the audience? We have one minute, 33 seconds, otherwise. I have one. You have one.

>> Nicholas Bloom: I think there's someone right there.

>> Prajna Khanna: Yes? One minute 20, 19.

>> Speaker 9: Wow, lots of pressure. Thank you so much to the panel for sharing your valuable insights.

 

My question was, and we've obviously had a lot of conversation throughout this day around changing norms and shifting cultural norms, etc. I wanted to ask if there were any findings around shifts in the distribution of Intra household care work. Yeah, especially in the low and middle income country setting.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: No, you take it.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: No, I mean, if I'm representing Lisa and Suhani's work correctly, I think that there was some increase in men in the household working on household responsibilities, as a result of the take up of this sort of work from home for women. So there was some understanding of the value of the economic value of economic opportunities for women in these households and that men, men supported put their work behind that kind of belief change and actually contributed in some way to the household.

 

I'm not sure if I'm representing that accurately so I'll leave it to them to clarify. We're measuring the same kind of effects in our experiment in rural Rajasthan. So I think perhaps the idea that norms are really, really deep-seated and are really hard to change is not well-founded.

 

Or there's I think ways in which certain interventions might change norms pretty quickly. I think Rohini's work also has found similar things on giving women access to their own accounts for their work with Enrige. So I think there are changes going on. It remains highly unequal as far as I know in terms of the division of labor in many countries within the household.

 

But I think you shift closer to equality.

>> Prajna Khanna: Sorry.

>> Namrata Adani: Sorry,

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: I took too long.

>> Namrata Adani: But in my education sector I see a huge change between the parents' communication because I see a lot of men coming to the parents teacher meeting. And they have been very active part of the whole system, and women are giving more and more, especially it's happening in second generation.

 

So the first generation is still getting there. But second generation I feel is really being very active in taking the role.

>> Prajna Khanna: Wonderful, and that's insights from the ground. If I may just add one and then a quick question. So, you know, when we generalize about a country the size of India, 1.4 billion people, which India are we talking about?

 

Because I mean, the India that I know is where the household labor is, not men or women. It's the help that comes. So, you know, I think that it's important to qualify which strata we're talking about in the middle income country and not make generalizations across the entire 1.4 billion people.

 

 

>> Dhaval Shah: Yeah. Hi, I'm Dhaval Shah, I'm Stanford alumni, thank you very much for this wonderful panel. I had a question to follow up on. At the risk of getting stairs from my fellow men, I have a follow up to your thought about multitasking. Women being better than men in multitasking.

 

So especially when it's working from home, when men are working from home versus women, what are some of the observations? Because probably when they're at work, maybe there's no need to multitask too much, but at home, how about the data?

>> Prajna Khanna: I'll just kick this off, so as a woman, I am terrible at multitasking.

 

Maybe that has made me a better professional and I can deliver better results and have been able to go up the corporate ladder. So I don't know if there's any research out there that actually ratifies the fact that men or women. Does anybody know of any research on men and women being multitaskers or is just a perception it's always women?

 

I'm not quite sure. I certainly can't multitask, ask me to write.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: I don't know if your research speaks to that, I know in our study this was with all women, so I can't speak to the comparison. But a sizable portion of the hours that women are able to spend at home working comes from multitasking, which they're less able to do in the village setting.

 

Outside the home, less, we actually made it like pretty flexible. They can still bring their kids, they can bring other tasks with them. But just inherently being in the physical setting of your space, your home, makes it easier to multitask. So we do find that I think between a quarter to a third of the increase in hours that they're actually spending on this economic opportunity is done while multitasking.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: But you haven't run a same control group with men.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: No.

>> Prajna Khanna: Okay,

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: yeah,

>> Prajna Khanna: fair. Sorry, Nick, you were going to say something?

>> Nicholas Bloom: No, I'm very happy that. Pragya Namrata, you're taking all the hard questions now in the stuff that I've seen, you don't see any difference in the productivity effect of men versus women of work from home, to be clear, Come back to Namrata's point earlier.

 

For some things like call centers and crochet making, it's very positive, but other things, it can be quite negative. So, like teaching is terrible on zoom, I don't know how many people here talk or we're teaching on zoom. It's just awful, like, I remember in the beginning of the lockdown, I had this experience.

 

I had a class of like 50 people, I had to flip them onto zoom. And there's one kid that didn't realize that he turned off all the lights in the room. So the only light on his face was from his laptop, and he was wearing big glasses. So it's reflecting.

 

And I'd be like showing slides. There was no, nothing was changing and his glasses were changing, and I knew at one point I was like, I think he's watching a Sopranos. Teaching is terrible. Call centers are great, it really very much depends on the task. But everything I've seen when you've interacted, productivity, effective work, from whether it's positive or negative, you don't really see any gender effect.

 

Actually, the other, the other thing I found is I think the study's saying multitasking is not really possible. So, people doing, you know, there's probably many people checking their email right now, but it's like you're kind of 70% efficient of both and it's hard to actually, you're better off doing one or something else.

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: I think power of suggestion, telling a girl all her life that you're better at multitasking so you'll do the housework is. Let's move away from that, but thank you so much. I don't know. We're out of time, Sohani, we are now really officially out of time. It's been an absolute pleasure.

 

We could carry on forever. Do you have one sentence each to just round up?

>> Namrata Adani: Yeah, I think women have to take charge of themselves and I strongly believe that financially independent you must be. And that's what my mother has taught me. Passing that to my daughter. Also,

 

 

>> Prajna Khanna: intergenerational role modeling. Wonderful, a quick one, Najee.

>> Achyutva Adhvaryu: Wow. Working from home works, but we need to think more about benefits and amenities for women.

>> Hannah Erickson: Yeah, I would just say for researchers in the room, if you are interested in working with upwork, it's so helpful for us to know we're not doing long term studies following different field groups on Our own.

 

We need researchers to help us do that, do that work. So please reach out,

>> Prajna Khanna: there's a welcome.

>> Nicholas Bloom: Arch took my sentence, actually, what about, why don't you go, you know, she lives in Amsterdam. Give us the Dutch perspective on all this.

>> Prajna Khanna: The Dutch perspective is, you know, the entire gig work dilemma is happening as we speak.

 

There's a lot of European regulation that's following one up to the other. It's going to kill the business models. And so I do think that we need to educate ourselves about the benefits, the flexibility, autonomy, you know, especially for very, very quick data point here across our food delivery businesses.

 

Everything from, as I said, Swiggy in India, Delivery Hero and DoorDash. I was chatting with Elizabeth, who leads policy at DoorDash here, and I said, you know, how many women do you have expecting, anticipating? It's in single digits, the percentage. 60% of Dashers are women because you can deliver a burrito with a child strapped in the back, but there are not many other jobs that you can do.

 

So there's a lot to be said for gig work and the opportunity for women out there, I think we can close on that. Thank you for listening.

>> Namrata Adani: Thank you. Sohini, thank you so much for calling us. And we want to more and more interact on this topic because it's really, really very important.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: We heard earlier from Mr Jalota that India has seen an increase in women drivers. And Pragya also, towards the end of her panel, mentioned how there are 60% of Dashers on Swiggy. So up next, we've got two brilliant minds who are driving change. Yes, literally and economically.

 

First, we'll hear from Yasmin Wirjawan, visiting scholar at Stanford's Asia Pacific Research center, followed by Valentyna Brilovskaya, economist and associate director at ID Insights. They'll be sharing powerful insights from their work in India and Indonesia on women's economic participation, especially in the world of gig platform driving, where women aren't just passengers anymore, they are taking charge in the driver's seat.

 

 

>> Yasmin Wirjawan: It's a privilege for me to be here and I'm honored to have the opportunity to speak at this event. Today, I'd like to discuss the evolving trends in women's economic participation in India and Indonesia. Indonesia has been influenced significantly by India throughout, throughout the history in areas of culture, religion and language.

 

So they are both key trading partners, and I think both countries can learn a lot from each other. India And Indonesia are two of Asia's most populous countries, with about 1.7 billion people between them. About half of them are women. While their trends are very similar, there are notable differences in how their population grow, age and participate in the labor market.

 

Demographics have a significant impact on growth, productivity and equity. So, in both countries, a large youth populations over that's about 40% are under 25 years old, and that's present a major opportunity for a demographic dividend. But this potential can only be realized if young people are educated, skilled, and employed.

 

Both countries are undergoing demographic transitions at different rates. Fertility and maternal mortality are declining and populations are aging. So Indonesia is moving through this shift earlier than in India. So by about 2050, the population of 65 years and above will nearly double. And therefore it's important for these countries to strengthen their aging policies, not only age sensitive but also gender sensitive policies.

 

So the next slide shows gender equality comparisons between the two countries. And we've discussed this at the earlier presentation. And similar to India, Indonesia also faced challenges in achieving the gender parities and which is not unique. For if we compare to the other markets globally, some of the factors in Indonesia ranked better like economic participation, education and health.

 

However, India rank higher on political empowerment with more women in political leadership position. Both countries have quota of about 30% to 33% of the seats in state legislation and parliament. However, their representation is still below the target. So it's important for both countries to have decision makers not only in political parties, but also institutions to ensure that the challenges like bias and underrepresentations can be addressed.

 

Let's talk about the labor force participation. India and Indonesia have faced several global and domestic crises over the past two decades, including the 2007-2009 global crisis where many export oriented companies were affected and also the COVID pandemic. And these had significant impacts on their workforce, particularly in certain sectors, in terms of gender dynamics, informality, and labor market recovery.

 

So both countries have higher rates of women in agriculture and the informal sectors with continuation of gender gap. Interestingly in 2000, last year there were an improvement in labor force participation in both countries and India shows a slight stronger growth because of aggressive, more aggressive approach in their engagement in both urban and rural areas.

 

While Indonesia it has been more or less the same, you know, with the last two decades. I think one of the changes that have been ongoing is the simplification of business registration process and the reduce of bureaucratic procedures that also transfer some of the informal or self employed workers to formal.

 

Now let's turn to education and the diaspora. So women now make up over one third of all Indian students studying internationally, while Indonesia is even higher at 50%. The Indian diaspora is vast, it's very big with 35 million people globally. And while we don't have the gender differences, but we know Indian women make up a significant portion, especially in the places like in the US.

 

Indonesia diaspora is smaller, but unique. And actually, majority of them is more on the overseas workers. So in this case, the migrant labors is more in the caregiving and domestic workers and these roles are underpaid and under protected. So one of the things that we notice, that is, these countries have progress in terms of their global innovation index.

 

But I think the women's representation is very small, it's very limited. In India alone, what we've learned is that it's only less than 10%. And in education too, we see that the young women especially that are not in education, employment or training is very small. So it's, I mean what I meant is actually higher than the portion of men.

 

So I think this one needs to be addressed as well. Teachers are not only improve learning outcomes, but also help to stay longer. And the teacher in India and Indonesia, more than half of them are actually women. So investing in female educators is critical for the gender parity across sectors.

 

So this is the digital divide. In both countries we have many, you know, we understand that there's still a lack of smartphones, limited digital skills and even social norms affect the girls and women. So all of these gap indicators mean that there are many women, particularly in the rural areas, benefiting from the potential of the Internet, of the Internet for education, communication and economic opportunities.

 

We've discussed a lot earlier about the financial inclusions and there are some similar issues because even though they do have female account ownership, but owning an account isn't the same using it. So a lot of them, like one third of women in India, don't use bank accounts actively and it's even higher in Indonesia.

 

So in conclusion, both India and Indonesia face structural barriers to gender equity in the labor force, from informal employment and leadership gaps to limited access to credit, education and digital tools. But despite these challenges, there's a unique opportunity which is the digital gig economy. In India and Indonesia, many digital gig platforms have created jobs for women and this will be presented by Valentina.

 

While there are some challenges, these platforms offer a glimpse of what inclusive innovation could be like, especially when digital tools are designed with women in mind. So therefore, it is important for the gender parity in labor markets to have multi stakeholders collaborations between government, business communities and research.

 

Researchers, this is very important because I want to address that public private partnership is a very important tool to bridge the gap for women. Because publicly listed companies in India and Indonesia are required to disclose their business responsibility and sustainability report of which if they don't disclose they will get penalties.

 

So social issues and inequality is part of the global risk in 2025. So what we've seen in CSR has actually shifted. It has evolved from a philanthropic to become a strategic business initiative. Right now when we talk about social aspect is actually at the board level among private sector.

 

So it's very important for all of us to actually disclose, I mean discuss among each other even though we have different missions in order to find a common purpose, thank you very much.

>> Valentina Brailovskaya: Hellö, everyone. Today I'll be talking about research that we've done in Indonesia and India on two platforms.

 

And we're talking about women's and men's experience within the country and we'll also be making cross country comparisons. So a little bit about the organization that I work for, we're called ID Insight. We're a global research policy organizations that help evidence makers to use, sorry policymakers to use evidence in their decision making.

 

This particular grant is supported by the Gates Foundation and consists of two components. The first component is descriptive. We just want to understand who are the digital workers. The second component is about generating causal analysis to understand what are the welfare implications of being able to participate in digital work and also are there any add ons.

 

So we're currently, we just concluded descriptive studies and moving on to ideas on the causal studies. Okay, so motivation for this study. Well, there's been a rise in digital labor platforms across the globe and it has potential to provide income opportunities, especially for women because they're looking for flexibility, as we've heard over and over again.

 

Several studies have documented experiences of gig workers in developing countries and middle income countries as well. But the evidence on women is missing, especially in the male dominated sectors. So some of these studies have small sample size or qualitative or don't have representation of the population to kind of see what are the patterns generally.

 

So in this study we partnered with two firms, one in India and one Indonesia, and both are in digital gig driving. So you see an example of a woman on a motorbike and she in this case is delivering something to the passenger. All of them are two wheeler drivers.

 

We worked with the platform to obtain the population records of all the drivers at the time of the sample taking. And we reached a random sample over the phone obtaining about 400 women, a sample in India and about 800 women in Indonesia. One thing to say is the representation of women in these platforms and is very small.

 

In India, less than 1% of all drivers are women, in Indonesia, it's a little bit more, but still tiny. If you look at the same statistics in developed countries such as United States, there's a little bit more of distribution of women and men working for these platforms. And that has to do with cultural norms, also digital access and access to vehicles as well as so first we want to look at the description of the population.

 

And first we see a striking difference between India and Indonesia about how gig workers engage. And more people are engaging full time in Indonesia than in India, so in India it is more of a part time gig. There's also no difference in how women and men work in Indonesia and there are in India.

 

And more women in India are engaging part time. In Indonesia they have a choice of what sort of service to deliver and many of them opt out of passenger driving. This is A, due to discrimination because sometimes riders cancel orders if they find out that their driver is a woman.

 

And B, explicit harassment because they're driving a motorcycle and there's a man behind who keeps moving forward. We also see demographic differences across between men and women that are holding up. We see that in both countries women are a little bit older than men and in India that's actually in line with general labor participation rates of women and they tend to enter the gig.

 

Sorry, just general participation in the labor force market after having children. We see that in India there are indeed more likely to be married and more likely to be children. In Indonesia, the story is kind of the opposite, we see that women are less likely to be married and also less likely to have children than men.

 

So there's some cultural and different types of population are attracted to these platforms which are quite the same in different countries. So that's important to keep in mind when we're talking about global gig work is that context really matters. Student population is also quite prevalent in India and not at all in Indonesia.

 

Women in Indonesia are also a little bit higher educated than men, which is potentially suggesting that there are just limited opportunities for women to work after obtaining education. Most people are coming from full time jobs. So there's a whole narrative, we think that this is going to draw in informal workers and yes, to some extent it does.

 

But many people are still coming from formal employment, which potentially means that they're either looking for flexibility or maybe these jobs are better in one way or the other. Or there are no formal jobs available in the economy and they're here. More women compared to men in both countries are reporting that their current income is higher than their previous earnings.

 

Earnings, so we differentiate between gross and net earnings because there are quite significant expenses associated with driving, such as fuel, loans and anything else that has to do with operating a vehicle. There is a gender pay gap in gross earnings per hour. And we don't think it's explicit discrimination by the platform, though we don't have the data to say this, but it is in line with what was found in the United States.

 

And the story is that women can't work on profitable hours because profitable hours are either at night or during the time when they want to be at home with their children and husbands. We see that net earnings per hour, the difference is higher in Indonesia and I've run out of time.

 

But I do want to say that overall, we're finding that working conditions are a little bit more favorable to women in India than there are in Indonesia. There are many explanations that are potentially behind us, partially because in India these are delivery jobs and not passenger driving jobs.

 

But partially it's because Indian jobs do pay a little bit more than the Indonesian jobs. So I'm happy to talk about research a little bit more if anybody would like to. Thank you.

>> Foreign.

>> Sakshi Shah: So we're kicking off our afternoon with a very special session, question, and answers with Mrs Smriti Irani. Mrs Irani has been a cheerbaser in politics, media, public services, and is now bringing the Berkeley Skydeck to India to strengthen ties between Indian entrepreneurs and silicon and Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem.

 

When Suani met Mrs Irani in Davos for the World Economic Forum earlier this year and told her about this summit, Mrs. Irani immediately agreed to participate. She saw how important this conversation is, and aligned with it right away. We're so honored she's here with us today. So please join us in welcoming Mrs Smriti Irani and our moderator, Dr. Swani Jalota.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: I mean, it'll be mainly you talking, so, okay? Hi, everyone. Well, we are here to talk about Mrs. Irani and her journey. And actually this is a very interactive session. She actually requested that she wants mostly audience members and the attendees here at the summit. Thank you.

 

To actually ask her questions. So she's very happy to respond about any issues around future work, her work in health, women's health and women's empowerment overall. But we are so honored to have you here with us today. It really means a lot. I know we met a few months ago and then since then you've really shown so, so much commitment, honestly, also to this.

 

And I've just had, I've been just so surprised by the level of warmth and.

>> Smriti Irani: You're surprised?

>> Suhani Jalota: No, no, sorry.

>> Smriti Irani: Politicians have commitment? No, no, but it is surprising. I'm sure that politicians who are continuously, incessantly committed must be.

>> Suhani Jalota: I think we are able to get real answers from you and we're able to get you to actually come to sessions that are meaningful for women around conversations on academia and actually engaging in cross sector work, which is very, very unique.

 

So thank you for that. And we are all inspired by the work that you do. We want to showcase some of that here today for some of the people who may be even less familiar from those that are in academia and other spaces. So just speaking to that to get started first, Mrs. Rani actually has been on a tour of multiple education institutions.

 

So I was told at first she was coming to Stanford, then other universities got added on and there was Harvard and Berkeley and Kellogg and ASU and many universities in the mix. And so we'd love to learn from you maybe a little bit about your journey across these universities.

 

What have you learned, any surprises, anything that you'd like to share to get started?

>> Smriti Irani: What's honest answers? Okay, so at Howard My response was if you want to disagree with me, then read up. I predominantly, in my engagements at Harvard, not only spoke about the role of and how women in politics are perceived.

 

I believe many people presume that there is a problem about being a woman in politics, but the honest to God truth is there's a problem of being in power. So perceptionally you have to recognize that being in politics and being in power are two different attitudes, opportunities, circumstances altogether.

 

I am very pleased to see at the front row here, Pragya Khanna, who's again a partner in crime at the World Economic Forum. I work with one of her colleagues in the B20 South Africa team for digital transformation. And one of the issues that we are taking to ground in India is across 300 cities, 100,000 women who own businesses.

 

How to help them understand certification compliance needs for the global supply chain. How to introduce them to generative AI, how to teach them macro accounting. How to leverage AI or technology even on devices which may not be as smart as Apple, but how to ensure that high consequences with low tech is a possibility.

 

I also believe that many women who are in business presume that that one product, that one service is the life of their business opportunity, which is not the same for men. So I'm hoping to explain to women that failure is a part of doing business. So how to go from, let's say, one product to another?

 

Services do reach a saturation point. So how to go from one service to another if they so desire. How to deepen their engagements in local markets if they so desire. How to reach out to diverse regions in terms of markets. But also we have partners, let's say, in an organization like Kearney, which says we will teach them how to engage with global suppliers and be a part of, you know, conform to global standards so that they can be an equal partner in growth.

 

Apart from that, we in the alliance have an MOU with a Commonwealth Secretariat. So what we will do in India across 300 cities is also going to become a template for 56 countries across the world. So that's just me in the personal capacity insofar as of course, the work not only within India, but my experiences at Howard, at the Howard Kennedy School, there's a very, very well-meaning academic leader, Hannah Bowles.

 

And we were in conversation as to how to teach negotiation skills to these women, especially if they want to negotiate on international contracts or even negotiation skills within family structures now that they'll be part of global supply chains or at least will articulate a global ambition. So given that our movement will not be in the so called very celebrated urban centers like Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai.

 

We are going to the smallest of cities and towns in India. I think it'll give Hannah a great perspective as to how women in business relate to her negotiating skills at the Kennedy School on the grassroots in India. So it'll be a good mix to see at Berkeley.

 

I had the privilege of having an executive education program at Berkeley FinTech. And when I was minister, I believed that I wanted to learn things which had nothing to do with me, my policy, my ministry. So I did have an opportunity to see my old colleagues at the Harvard Extension School because I've under the executive program there, I've learned a little bit about environmental policy, about organizational behavior.

 

So in Berkeley, my professor who taught me fintech, he's the founder of Fintech at Berkeley House, Yaniv. And he also looks at the UC Berkeley Skydeck program where startups predominantly, and those who are academically extremely celebrated, who create startups, they are positioned well and supported well by Berkeley to present to VCs and PEs across the globe.

 

So the last I spoke to my professor, I am taking the Sky Deck to India to now help people within the ecosystem who are possibly from small towns and cities and teach them the art of connecting with VCs and PEs globally. And I did tell my old professor, I said, do your student a favor, whoever is the best of the best from India, and particularly women, let's take them next round to UC Berkeley and the Sky Deck there.

 

So, I have his verbal and E. Email consent. Let's see how I can build on it. Yesterday I was at the Arizona State University, the president there, Michael Crow. I think that when we come to platforms such as this, it is not only to speak at or speak to or engage with an audience, it is also that you chance upon people who have such a vast knowledge ecosystem that you'd like to get possibly a look into.

 

So, Dr. Michael Crow, many here who are academic will know that spoke about the new systems of education and university policies in the US, and he has a paper written on issues of reallocation of resources, redistribution of resources across the healthcare spectrum with a predominant view on healthcare and research.

 

So, I'm going to look that up as well. And my interface with Michael Crow was extremely, for me as a learner was of great importance and complementing it was the presence and my engagement with Vivek Lal who leads General Atomics. So with him, I mean it is fascinating to have the blessed opportunity of oscillating between medical research and then talking to somebody about fusion and talking to him about how to, you know, create more defense strategy systems for a country like India and have transfer of technologies not only, let's say from the US to India.

 

But what if you need it here as well, and you need to transfer something from India into the US. So I think it's even those collaborations, those conversations that enrich and I think today it's nice to see Pragya again. We are looking at possibly partnering on two, three other issues which she's very passionate about, the issue of enterprise.

 

And I would lie if I say that she's only passionate about women, the issue of enterprise. But it is not always the academic side that you see of people or the private sector side that you see of people. So I had the good fortune of meeting her son Aryan and I'm fascinated by the fact that he speaks great Hindi.

 

So, I'm like one of those doting friends of mothers who are going E and AW. And then, I have a couple here who are the quintessential Gujarati couple. I don't know how many of you are Gujaratis but there's that Nilesh bhai right at the back with his wife and they heard I'm in the city so they came packing with some Doklas and some mamras and they're like, you must be hungry.

 

So, so it's nice to be amongst people where you can talk policy, where you can talk politics and when you can talk people.

>> Suhani Jalota: Really this cross sector collaboration that's already happening or discussions. I'm loving that. That's really the essence of this conference and this initiative. If you, given that we are at Stanford now, if you had to think about what are collaborations that you see that would be really beneficial for women in South Asia with Silicon Valley.

 

 

>> Smriti Irani: From the last time I was on your platform, take away from what Pragya said, there is a dearth of understanding academically about circumstances, current situations and possibilities and potentials of the global South. In the global north, in terms of academia, there is a historical context. One needs to consider that before the explosion of technology, people presumed everything that was happening which was of tectonic shifts in the world, was happening only in the global north and particularly in this geography.

 

But you have over 3 billion plus people on the other side of the world who are doing very well. As an Indian, I'm proud to say that 70% of our GDP is domestic in nature, actually. So we are positioned well to handle the shocks, economic or otherwise, of the world.

 

I think as an Indian, I'm extremely proud of the fact that Covid was the best test of our capacity and our humanity. We created a vaccine within our country. We saw nations that were writing paper chits out that were running out of toilet paper. We deployed that vaccine to 1.4 billion people and then we distributed it to 160 countries.

 

We did not hold global supply chains hostage. So I think my endeavor is to tell people that we are great people to collaborate with. We know how to share and when your back is to the wall, there's no better friend than having an Indian by your side or an Asian by your side.

 

Because we know how to fix problems when resources are not aplenty. We know to fix problems when you cannot possibly think of solutions and you're overwhelmed by surge of just despondency. So I think that that is possibly the template on which I'm engaging with. And I believe that Pragya, in her just intervention in your panel this morning, just hit the nail on the head that you need to create more research and understanding.

 

You cannot wish it away if you can or if you want to, that is to your detriment. Because as the world grows scarce in resources, as populations expand, you need to find new avenues of collaboration. And collaboration cannot happen when you pontificate.

>> Suhani Jalota: We'd love to hear from any of you who would have any questions for Mrs. Irani as well.

 

Otherwise I have plenty, but I'd love to hear from you. Yes,

>> Speaker 4: I think I'm pretty loud.

>> Smriti Irani: I always say Indian women don't have a problem speaking out, they have a problem being heard. Yes.

>> Suhani Jalota: Very true.

>> Speaker 4: Yeah, Again, thank you so much for joining us today.

 

In this morning's panel, you outlined all the metrics along which, you know, India, South Asia has been faring much better than the global averages and, you know, breaking different ceilings and challenging the status quo. So I really appreciated all of that. I'd like to hear from you about how do you see India leading the way as an emergent economy, as a disruptor?

 

 

>> Smriti Irani: I don't think it's the Indian nature to present itself as a destructive disruptor. I think we are just by genetic design positioned to creating cohesive atmospheres for exchange of not only knowledge but also opportunity. And I think that what quintessentially different about being an Indian, that. And I'm again doffing my hat in absentia to Dr Crow.

 

He speaks about the invisible hand. It is not as though you come to the surface of discovery just because you had a light bulb moment is because you've read something somewhere and you have built on it. And I think that is another strength of Indians, that they don't suffer from the myopia to say, I know it all, that they are open to a confluence of ideas, that they are open to a lot more research, a lot more matter on subjects which may not be pertinent only to the decision.

 

For instance, there was no need for me to study all the subjects that I did as a minister. I could have very well sat very pretty on my chair and said, I know everything. I don't. And I think that that incessant thirst for knowledge, that incessant thirst to also bring knowledge to fruition from taking innovation and idea to enterprise, I think that is going to be our greatest strength.

 

So, what I hope for in the future, and the immediate future for that matter, is we may have great ideas. Ideas, but we have the capacity to collaborate and with respect, do that collaboration that even when we shared the vaccine. And again, I'm going back to the vaccine because that's a globally acknowledged, I think, achievement.

 

We did not snub the 160 countries we were sharing with. We were not calling in IOUs, we were not speaking down to them. We reached out because we knew what it felt like not to have a solution and not to have the money even if you had the solution.

 

So I think that's what gives me hope for the India of the future. We know when resources are low and we know how to be human. At that exact moment. You're audible

>> Ashmi: hi, Mr. Sirrani, my name is Ashmi. I am very proud of some of the policies recently in India, like Betty Bachao and Ayushman Bharat.

 

One thing I want to ask about is where do you see India going from the perspective of women's safety? That has been one of the ongoing challenges for women to go to work in many places as the topic of this conference. But a lot of the progress has been made and I'm curious what the focus is both from a government and a social leadership perspective in not having women have to think about safety so much.

 

 

>> Smriti Irani: I think that the challenge is the presumption that as population explodes, you will reach a state of utopia where no challenge will ever exist. Idea is to have systems which are responsive to need. When the challenge confronts you and allow me to just substantiate what I'm saying, the nation you're sitting in right now, it's inhuman for me to say this has a 17% higher crime rate than India.

 

Should I reduce myself as a human being to say my per capita of violence against women and your per capita violence against women and have those conversations? No, I was the gender minister who presided administratively over the Nirvia Fund. So I can say this with evidence. We created 35 helplines for women across all states and a national helpline.

 

In the past decade, we serviced 220 million calls. We created 700 crisis centers across the country across every district. And then we added that in any district, if the population is double and so is the crime rate, then we will open double the amount of crisis centers. Many felt that it is a sign of rising crime.

 

I said it's a sign of rising solutions. We had 1063 fast track courts which were created, out of which 444 were only for children who are victims of crime. And in the past five years, where I had administrative control, 200,000 plus cases got solved. I'm somebody who wrote and amended the Juvenile justice act and brought child pornography and made it punishable.

 

But we also simultaneously ran 7,000 child welfare homes. But we recognize that it's not only the children who are traumatized. It is the caregivers, even those who were appointed by the government who were also transacting in that trauma. And with Nimhans, which is the premier institution in India on mental health, we made sure that 144,000 caregivers received counseling and mental health support.

 

So I think that if governments stop responding and stop creating solutions, that's where challenges will emanate. Many are governments shy away because the numbers are so horrendous to confront with because they get weaponized politically. The idea is who can move beyond that weaponization rhetoric and just keep the focus on issues that need administrative support.

 

That's where maybe people like me come in. But you have to then factor one very, very startling fact. 80% of violence against women and children happens from. From people they know, people they are related to. So in a democracy, would you want the government to walk into your bedrooms?

 

That is a challenge that you're confronted with. The safest country on the planet is Qatar, which is not a democracy. One of the top 10 safest cities in the world. One of them is Chinese. And then comes up the banner at the back which says stop. So, okay, not because it's Chinese, but because the time has run out.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: We will just take one final question from Kritika.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: It's incredible to hear of the impact that you have driven and led. My question is, how does the private sector best interface with the government?

>> Smriti Irani: Why do you need only the government to interface with?

>> Kirthiga Reddy: Why do I only need is one of the.

 

One of the partners. So for example, you spoke about the incredible program that you're running in the villages with a certification.

>> Smriti Irani: That's not government.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: That's your personal.

>> Smriti Irani: That's not me personal. That's an alliance, I created the World Economic Forum. I had the privilege of creating the first ever center for female leadership in the CII, which is a confederation of Indian industries.

 

It has 435,000 Indian companies. I'm also the strategic advisor for the Confederation of All India Small traders, which is 80 million traders and 48,000 trade associations. That's my private side.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: Incredible. So maybe the question is broader, is again, how can the private sector best interface with these different organizations?

 

 

>> Smriti Irani: The private sector is a part of it. It's just that we don't verbalize your participations I'm calling out Pragya because I mean she's there so she is one of the private sector support bases we have. If you'd like to join that cohort, by all means, I will tell you who NCII to connect with because I'm ensuring that it's industry, as unions, as associations that always keep the leverage so that it does not get individualized in terms of becoming only a single woman's purpose.

 

I have the industry buy into it and the corporate leadership of India buy into it because I'm of the belief that the biggest misconception is democracy is government. We forget democracies of the people, by the people and for the people. So, I've done the for the people bit because I'm a three time mp.

 

Right now, I'm doing by the people bit. So if you want to connect somebody in cii, happy to help.

>> Suhani Jalota: And actually just to wrap up, this flows very well into the next segment which is a CII collaboration that we'd like to announce. So, Gargi Pavar who's here, she's running CII from Palo Alto office and today actually we've just signed a letter of intent.

 

Gargi, you can come on stage, and then we'll just describe. So, we have the strategic partnership in the spirit of cross sector collaboration with private sector players and CII as well as civil society organizations and researchers and academic. Academia, we are essentially to bring more women into the workforce, and how do we enable that to happen within certain sectors?

 

Specifically with the CII Institute of Logistics where we're trying to create an initiative where we can enable more women to enter in the logistics space. And Mrs Irani, given that

>> Smriti Irani: I used. To be, once upon a time, 32 years ago, one of the first three women in India who did logistics.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Wow,

>> Smriti Irani: so I don't know what your industry is. I'm happy to help and connect you to that particular segment which can help women. Congratulations.

>> Suhani Jalota: She started Facebook India Meta vision now, and has had a very, very illustrious career.

>> Smriti Irani: So that's why the 300 city thing connects with you.

 

Yeah, but that's one of the partners that somebody back in CIA and back in India and my office is chasing right now. So, I'm supposed to go back home and one of the first meetings after I land back is to look at all the technology partners. So, can you imagine that?

 

That's why women should network.

>> Gargi Pawar: I wanted to say that CIA is very excited to work with Suhani, and her team across Stanford Hoover and the Maina Mahela foundation. And they're doing some phenomenal work and that aligns well with CII's vision of women empowerment and leadership and economy, a vision in which Mrs Irani has been a powerful guiding and leading force.

 

It's wonderful to have you and nice to meet you as well. Just very briefly, consideration of Indian industry, CIIs and non government, not for profit, industry led and industry managed organization which has members across the private and the public sectors as well. We have offices spread across all across India and primarily the Centers of Excellences which I work very closely with from this particular office are the developmental arm of CII and with them, along with all our global offices and institutional partnerships such as these, we work very closely with the Indian government as a point person and a point reference for international business community.

 

The Institute of Logistics is One of the 13 Centers of Excellences of CII and it plays a pivotal role in accelerating growth and competitiveness in the sector across supply chain and the logistics space. They work towards the modernization of the sector as well, setting up global benchmark standards, driving capacity development and pushing the industry agenda through policy advocacy.

 

Together with Suhani and the team, we are working on outlining the roles and responsibilities across research, analysis, training, recruitment and coordination between all the institutions as we take this particular research initiative forward. Bridging the gender gap in the workforce is of critical importance across sectors and regions in India.

 

And as this initiative and partnership evolves, we will bring in other arms of CII as well to develop and initiate strategies aimed at increasing women's participation and advancement in the workforce. Thank you. And over to you again.

>> Suhani Jalota: Thank you so much. So just very briefly to show you, you know, we want to increase women in logistics, and for that, we want to bring in the different stakeholders here.

 

So these are the different stakeholders that at the moment we are including as part of this collaboration. Would love for anybody here to join if you're keen on working on in logistics or have any ideas for us as well as we develop this. That's all we'd love to have, you know, just a little photo op with Gargi and with Shweta here from Mena Mahila, but really, please, first, can you join me in thanking Mrs. Irani for her Q and A and for her time?

 

Really, it's been such an honor to have her here. Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: So now we move into the third part of the day, which will focus on, on the demand side, constraints and solutions. Basically, what's happening on the employer side when it comes to hiring and keeping women in the workforce.

 

To dive deeper into this, we will hear from Lisa Ho, postdoctoral Associate, Yale Economic Growth center with Inclusion Economics. As Rohini Pandey mentioned in her keynote earlier today, Lisa's research is on something many of us instinctively, instinctively know, but now have data for how maternity leave policies, while important, can have unintended consequences on women.

 

So please put your hands together to welcome Lisa.

>> Lisa Ho: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much to Suhani and the conference organizers for inviting me, and thank you for the very nice introduction. So I'm Lisa Ho and I'm currently a postdoc at Yale University. And, and today I'll be talking about a research project that examines the employment effects of an extended maternity leave mandate in India that went into effect in 2017.

 

So this is a project that's joint work with Garima Sharma, who's at Northwestern University, and Shreya Chandan, who's at Harvard University, as well as Pulak Ghosh at IIM Bangalore and Stephanie Howe at Revellio Labs. So we were motivated to study this question by some of the patterns in the data that Professor Pandey highlighted during her keynote lecture this morning.

 

So participation in the labor force is particularly low, somewhat puzzlingly, among women in India who are more educated and among women who live in urban areas. So approximately 40% of women in rural areas are in the labor force, compared to only 25% of women who live in urban areas.

 

Similarly, labor force participation doesn't increase with education, which is surprising given that we would think people with more skills have higher potential wages if they were to enter the labor market. Education is actually highest for women with below a primary education and lowest for women who have a secondary education.

 

This is all women who are outside of the labor force entirely. So women who are not looking for work, once we look within the labor force, so at women who are trying to get employment but are unable to get it, we see that unemployment rises with education and that a huge gender gap emerges in unemployment, particularly at the level of tertiary education.

 

So for people who have a tertiary education, 10% of men are unemployed compared to 21% of women. There's a huge group of women who are unemployed who have a tertiary education and kind of have the skills to work. So that raises this question of if these urban women are highly educated, they have the required skills to work, and they're actually out there looking for jobs, they want to work, what's stopping them?

 

A lot of the literature in academic literature recently has focused on labor supply factors. And what we want to look at in the study is consider more the role of the demand side and consider employers decisions to hire men versus hire women. And so in this paper, what we'll look at is the decisions that firms face when there's an increase in cost of hiring female workers relative to hiring similar male workers.

 

In particular, we're looking at a landmark change to formal sector employment for women that was passed in India in 2017, which was this amendment to maternity leave policy that extended the length of mandated leave that firms had to offer from 12 weeks to 26 weeks. This was described kind of by policymakers as a labor supply lever.

 

So, it described as a way to keep women in the labor market after childbirth by making it easier for them to return to work after they'd given birth, this actually made infection. India, the third most generous country in paid maternity leave behind only Canada and Norway at the time.

 

In considering the policy effects, though they did not necessarily seem to anticipate a strong demand side response was a strong response from employers. But if employers react to the increased price of female workers, that could undo any response from the worker side of being more willing to work.

 

So in this paper we look at the short term impacts of the reform on young women's labor market outcomes. The data that we're using is from the Employee Provident Fund organization. So this is the organization that takes Social Security contributions, and that means that we can see all formal sector workers who earn 15,000 rupees or less per month.

 

To study this, we'll use an empirical strategy called the difference in differences strategy, where we basically compare outcomes for women versus male workers before and after the reform and at firms that were already offering the more generous 26 weeks of leave versus firms that were not previously offering the generous weeks of leave and so had to change their policies at the firm.

 

In response to the policy change passed in Parliament. Our main results that we find will be that there's an approximately 5% decline in women's employment even just six months after the reform went into effect in 2017. And we find that the effect is concentrated on young women who you might say are kind of most at risk of childbirth from the employer's perspective and having to actually take a maternity leave, that would be costly.

 

In contrast, we see no effect on employment of men. So to give you a little bit of context for those who are not familiar, family leave policies in India apply to all establishments, formal sector establishments with 10 or more employees. Initially there was a Maternity Benefit act passed in 1961 which guaranteed 12 weeks of paid leave.

 

And then there was no change to maternity leave policy or no major change until 2016, 2017, when Parliament decided to pass law first in the upper house and then in the lower house, that the length of weeks that firms had to offer got extended from 12 weeks to 26 weeks.

 

And that went into effect in April 2017. A key question here kind of economically is who is actually paying the wages? Who's paying for maternity leave? And that remains the same both pre and post reform. So for workers who are earning less than 15,000 rupees per month, and that's the set of workers who we're looking at here, the salary is paid by the employee State Insurance Corporation, but for the employer, they still have to pay the cost of losing this worker for an additional 14 weeks and having to find a replacement.

 

So it still increased the cost of hiring a female worker relative to a similar male worker. What we do is this difference in difference is designed to estimate the causal impact of the maternity leave amendment on labor market outcomes. And we'll kind of run our analysis at the establishment level, looking month by month, and we'll look at firms that were already offering 26 weeks of leave before the reform, compared to firms that had to change their policies that they had to now offer 26 weeks when previously they wanted to offer less maternity leave to workers.

 

We allow for differences between firms that were offering more leave versus less leave pre and post reform. And we also kind of control for time trends just because they're across different industries. There are different trends in employment over time. What we then do is try to look at how, what the treatment effects are, and those will be what are plotted on the next slide in the time periods relative to when the reform was passed in March 2017.

 

So our set of control establishments, so the places that we say are unaffected by the reform are those that were already offering 26 weeks before the law was passed. Okay, so this is showing our first set of results, which is that the reform decreased women's employment by approximately 5% just six or seven months after the reform was passed.

 

So on the left side, you see the months kind of before the reform, and you can see that relative to the month before the reform, employment for women was approximately level, whereas after the reform was passed, the first two, three months, we don't see any effect. But then we start to see a decline in women's employment up through months 6 or 7.

 

And this in terms of magnitudes is about a 5% decline in overall women's employment. In comparison, we see no effect for male workers. So both before the reform, before time period zero, and after the reform, we see just a flat line. So it doesn't seem like employers stop hiring women workers and then start hiring male workers.

 

They just seem to cut back on employment overall. And so the size of these establishments shrinks in terms of number of workers and there are fewer women relative to male workers after the reform is passed, relative to before. We also look differentially by worker age. So we might expect if this is driven by employers concerns that women are going to give birth and they're going to leave, that this would be kind of concentrated on women who are most at risk of childbirth.

 

And consistent with this, we find that the effect is entirely concentrated on, on women who are kind of younger workers aged 18 to 35. When we look at women who are 35 years or older, we actually don't see any negative employment effects for them. So this really seems to be driven by workers who employers worry might want to take the maternity leave and be gone for 26 weeks.

 

Okay, so just to conclude, what we find from the effects of this policy to maternity leave that made women workers essentially more expensive relative to male workers is that in the short term, extending the length of mandated leave decreased female employment by 5%. And that effect was concentrated on women of childbearing age.

 

And there was no substitution to male workers. There was just an overall decrease in employment. So in terms of implications for policy, it seems like one kind of takeaway is that we should consider both the labor supply side so workers deciding to work as well as the demand side.

 

So what employers decision are in their hiring. When considering responses to policy changes and related to what has been discussed on other panels, policymakers, it makes sense for them to think about how these reforms not only affect the decisions of workers to work or not work, but how they might affect the business case for hiring female workers.

 

Thanks so much.

>> Sakshi Shah: Thank you, Lisa. And that was a perfect segue into the next panel discussion of the day, the business case for hiring and retaining women across industries. So we will hear from the tech industry, manufacturing industry as well as the maritime industry. So we have Suani Jalota moderating this panel and our panelists that I'd love to welcome include Kirtika Reddy, CEO and co founder of Verax and the ex managing director of Facebook, India and South asia, Rohini Pandey, Mr. Rajiv Jalota and Lakshmanan Chitambaram or CTL, President of the Tech Mahindra Group and head of Mahindra Group Americas.

 

Please put your hands together to welcome all the panelists.

>> Suhani Jalota: Okay, great. So thank you everybody for staying till the afternoon. We have a really incredible panel ahead and look at the people here. This really speaks for all of the experience and I'm really excited to bring this topic about the business case for hiring and retaining women with this illustrious panel.

 

So in my experience of talking to many private companies over the last few months, as we had for the report that we were writing, I'd often go to them and tell them that look, we have more than 10,000 women waiting for jobs. What do we do? Can you, do you have any flexible work arrangements?

 

Can we do remote work opportunities? What can we do? And then I would be sent to the CSR or DEI teams, you know, talk to them. They deal with the women. And this aspect of why women conversations should be a diversity or an inclusion issue to begin with, given that this is half of the population, then really got me thinking much more about what is the business case.

 

We need to have a much stronger understanding of the business case. And there is probably one, but probably the messaging across sectors is not as clear. Corporates probably understand the costs of hiring women not as much. Maybe even the benefits they may understand may not fully have internalized it.

 

Maybe not across all levels. Maybe the governments are not providing enough support to enable the business case. And so what does that, where do we stand? Where is the evidence? What do we know? What do we not know? I think that's where we really want to dig deeper into in this panel today.

 

I'll start with Mr. Lakshmanand. Coming from the industry perspective, coming from Hinda Group, just where have you seen there to be if, if any differences in productivity and performance between men and women across any of the companies? And where does the Mahindra Group stand with the business case, so hiring women, and where do you stand with that?

 

 

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: So thank you, Suhani. And just as an introduction, the Mahindra Group is a $23 billion conglomerate. One pillar of the group is core engineering and manufacturing. So it makes two wheelers, four wheelers, six wheelers, eight wheelers, small aircrafts, so on and so forth. The second pillar is technology, which is a very different business.

 

Its tech, Mahindra has 6.2 billion in revenues, 130,000 people worldwide and 90% of revenue is coming from outside India. And the third part is a group of companies like Mahindra Sustain, which is into renewable energy, Mahindra holidays and resorts, so on and so forth. So that's the view of the group for you, right?

 

And from our perspective, you know, in the last three years, it's very difficult first of all to directly measure productivity from employing, let's say women in the workforce. Because at the end of the day, it's a joint workforce, men, women, a diverse workforce that's delivering the goods, right?

 

So then how do you. There are subtle indicators. So from the Mahindra Group's perspective, in the last three years we've employed three times more, twice more women right into the workforce. And if you look at the performance of the group overall in the last three years, it's now the largest tractor manufacturer in the world.

 

Number three in the US, 42% market share in India, the largest SUV manufacturer in India with a 24% market share. So if you take all this, you know, the world is changing so rapidly. If you have all men work in the workforce, it's a monochrome view of the world, in a rapidly changing world.

 

So, so diverse views, diverse thoughts all come in when women, men, all of them bring their best to the table. And so we believe that the subtle indicators are in two forms. One is women feel more inclusive in the workplace. And at the end of the day, we have a for-profit enterprise.

 

We're not doing something which sounds good, which is a CSR initiative. It has to make sense for the business, right? And so what we are now seeing is hiring managers going out and saying that we want women because they're seeing productivity and then the environment that's getting created where it's more inclusive and less attrition for women.

 

All this we are seeing, these are all the empirical statistics that we are seeing right now from our perspective. The other way it is translated into reality is if you look at the Mahindra group, the brand presence, right. You know, the fact that it's a more inclusive workplace, we become the employer of choice.

 

These are all very subtle indicators. You can't put a percentage figure to each of these. But every year when we look at this, it's getting stronger and stronger. So now the thought process is what do we bring to the table to retain women and what are the additional avenues to discover and bring back women?

 

So one of the initiatives that we have launched is called SOAR, S-O-A-R and that focuses on bringing back women with five years of experience who have had a break in their professional life, right? And then bringing them back not into any other job, but into mainstream jobs which are relevant to where they were when they took the break, right?

 

And so you're going ahead that that involves multiple levels of interventions and there's a cost to doing it and it makes sense because it's delivering value.

>> Suhani Jalota: Right, right, no, I mean that's great. And I think the companies are taking a lot of initiatives, it seems across because they realize that this is important.

 

I think quantifying as you maybe have highlighted is maybe still a challenge. What is really the contribution of the women? What is the productivity? So Professor Pandey, if he can come to you in terms of quantifying, I don't know what data evidence do we have on the productivity benefits and the costs to firms for hiring women.

 

Where do we stand?

>> Rohini Pande: So yeah, so let me start with a little bit more, I guess at the macro level and I alluded to this also in my talk. I think the seminal work from that was actually in the United States States looking at the period pre and post say the 1960s when you had sort of civil rights acts that made the made discrimination against both blacks and women much less likely in the workforce.

 

And what they look to see is what happens to productivity after that. And you find increases in productivity. And the explanation is very simply, in a period where we know men and women are both getting educated at high rates, you're going to maximize productivity by best allocating talent to the jobs that they should be matched with.

 

And so if you think for both the distribution of men and women, let's say this is very simplistic, but there's some ranking from the most productive to least productive. If you think of a marketplace that first employs all the men and then only after that comes to women, then the most productive woman is likely more productive than the least productive man.

 

This changes that remove the barriers to women are going to lead to increases in productivity. This is not just true in agri productivity. Another place where we've seen similar evidence is actually in politics where you've often had gender quotas. There's a paper that I always joke could only have been written by an all male team.

 

I think any woman who wrote such a paper would be, I think, would not get it published. It's called Mediocre Men and it's about Sweden where they introduced quotas on parties to have men, sorry to have what they call the zipper list. So you had to have one woman and one man.

 

What they showed was that one reason why what they call mediocre men persisted is that party leaders wanted to maintain their political base. And very often they would maintain their base through men who would maybe bring in more money, who would actually sustain it, but were not as well performing as the best qualified women.

 

So when you had the zipper law and compl and you had to kind of replace some of the men by women, by law, you actually saw improvements in terms of the competence of the leaders who got elected. So I mean those are two examples of kind of gains of productivity.

 

I think underlying it. Comes to the question Sohani were asking about, why is it that companies answering the business case so easily? And I'm probably twice Sohani's age or close to that. So I mean I would love to say it's all about not making a good business case.

 

Certainly there's some of that. I think certainly when people say things like, you know, there are so few jobs, how can we start giving women jobs? I think you can talk about talent allocation, can start talking about, but look at, you know, who is stopping Class 12 exams, who's doing well in college.

 

If you're not giving them jobs, you're doing worse. But there probably also is some amount of bias or discrimination. So one paper which is from a very different setting but I think speaks to this is a nice recent paper by Eliza Marching co authors asking what happens when you try to employ women in jobs that don't match sort of the stereotype.

 

So probably quite relevant for Mahindra. So they basically started training and then allocating women as mechanics in Uganda. What they found is if they just did this and matched employers were very happy to hire women and women did well. But when they asked employees why hiring women, it was very much like women are diligent.

 

We don't need to provide so much oversight. They do their job. When they started actually providing alongside potential employees also a technology to audit to see who's doing how well, employers went back to wanting men who were no more productive. The paper is called hidden gender discrimination. To say kind of sometimes when you make the business case for women, you're not making it actually on productivity, you're making it on things like I think there was an earlier slide saying that women take smaller breaks.

 

They actually are more diligent. Maybe at some level that is also a problem because we are not recognizing productivity. So I think when you make a business case, I think we have to be careful when the business case is actually being made on productivity and how much is it being made on things like they don't take breaks because technology is changing.

 

Employers can surveil employees much better now, and that's not a case they will surveil more.

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think many of the docile characteristics of women often make them more attractive for employers. Is that a good thing or a bad thing in the short term and the long term?

 

I think there's a lot of those questions around that as well. Kritika, I just wanted to see if you have any comments to make on what Mr. Lakshmanan and Professor Pandey said.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: And then I'll ask you, I'll add a few anecdotes to illustrate what was said. One actually starts with a personal story of, I would say talking about bias, unconscious bias at this very institution that I'm so grateful for what it gave.

 

This was in my second year of my MBA fall semester there was an iconic class that was co taught by Andy Grove and Bergelman called Strategy in Action. And the TLDR there is strategy is action. You can have something on paper that you write, but what you actually spend your time on is what is strategy.

 

So evaluate that and make sure it's a winning one. It was something that I really wanted to go and attend. Now the challenge was that or the beauty either way was I was pregnant one quarter into the first year of business school and I was severely challenged in my ability by the administration to say, are you sure you can do this course?

 

You're going to have an infant. You can only miss two classes. It's very rigorous. Are you sure you can do this? I'm going to take that as stemming from deep concern versus skepticism. But my child was born two weeks before falling, which meant I skipped exactly two classes, finished the course, you know, finished top of the class, graduated as an R.J. miller Scholar.

 

I actually walked the stage with her. She had her own graduation down, so it was really cute and, and so fast forward like maternity bias is the most significant gender bias of all. And we see a 39% mid career drop off. And you really have to think is how much of that stems from attitudes.

 

And I've seen again in the workplace, after that, I was an investor at Softbank. We had a woman who had a new baby and the manager was making decisions for her saying, you know, I'm not going to send her for this important assignment. And that actually came from actual care.

 

But why is someone else making that decision for you? Let me make the decision myself. An example of where it worked was actually at Facebook. We had someone who joined us who was pregnant to come lead staffing for us. And she came from the other Internet giant. And we could have said, my God, we're ramping up so quickly.

 

Can we really afford six months for the person to be gone? Well, this one, she transformed the whole system. In the three months before she went on maternity, she was off for six months, had a whole leadership team in place. She stayed with meta for over 10 years, went up to lead staffing at an APAC level.

 

So one just has to push ourselves to think was that six month Break that you had, would you have not hired the candidate because of that and lost the opportunity for 10 years of impact? So there's a lot of attitudes in here that need to be challenged. And I would really urge everyone and all parts of the ecosystem to challenge.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah, completely. Thank you for sharing that personal experience as well. So Mr Rajiv, so wanted to ask you a little bit about your experience in case it's not obvious. So just from your government perspective, what are some government policies that you've seen have actually enabled more of a business case for firms that have maybe helped firms in some way reduce the cost of hiring women, increase the benefits to firms for hiring women.

 

And you can also discuss any examples from the maritime industry or any of the industries you work with.

>> Rajiv Jalota: First of all, I think to set the context right, how I come from the government sector where giving leaves is a norm. So Nobody worries that six months, 10 months leave, you have to give, you have to give.

 

It's like that. So in my 37 years of government service, I never faced the situation that we were not hiring any. Anybody is hired based on merit, a woman or a man. So there is no distinction per se. So I think that way government is a best hiring company per se.

 

You can say now coming to the port sector or the maritime sector, you are saying that yes, this sector is more male dominated sector. So like I was representing Mumbai port at the port you go, you will not see I think any woman working at the port. But yes, in the office there are large number of workers working.

 

But because I had to do lot of research for this panel because for me it's all new corporate hiring. And also so that is why I saw one paper of World bank reshaping norms a new way forward. Post Covid 2022 they wrote and which was only on South Asia.

 

And they said that the labor force participation which everybody is talking female is the lowest in South Asia, 23%. But the paper brings out a very important fact that if gender parity norms are followed then there will be a 20% rise in GDP of those countries over a longer run.

 

This all goes to show that there will be an increase in productivity with women. Then there may be various reasons to it, but this is the case for it. From a personal example, in early 90s, Maharashtra government brought out a policy that there will be reservation for women in the Gram Panchayats.

 

So these are the rural governing bodies. And it was a very, very big change. But a progressive government took that call. Fortunately, when I joined that particular department, I remained there for three years and initial phase it happened and what I found a big change that these women leaders, they actually were focusing more on education and health in the villages because there were villages where male were also governing and there were villages where females were governing.

 

And one could see the stark difference that time. I think we were not having economists like Rohini and all to study. But yes, that is, that is an area to study that how does that help in. Because that will increase the ultimately economic outcomes of the society when health and education improves.

 

So just an initial take on this, yeah.

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah, and you'd also mentioned about some, some nudges, financial incentives potentially that the government could provide and, or in the case of maritime redesigning ships and any of that. Could you maybe describe what are ways in which more women can actually enter?

 

 

>> Rajiv Jalota: Actually what has happened in maritime sector that Maritime Sector 1 is talked about more is the seafaring sector means the seafarers, they drive the ships and the engineers, they run the ships there. The women labor force Participation is just 1.28% across the globe. It's very, very low.

 

It's very low. But in the last few years International Maritime Organization actually started women in maritime that concept. And because of that they said that there should be a gender parity in all forms of engagement in maritime sector, be it seafaring, be it ship building, be it maritime logistics and all these places.

 

It is just I think six, seven year old story. And that is why a lot of companies in the maritime sector started looking at it from the gender perspective. And then government came in the picture like Scandinavian and European governments, they started giving lot of subsidies and tax breaks for increasing gender parity.

 

Then similarly in India there is the Directorate General of Shipping Office which is the regulator for the government. They started issuing guidelines that there should be more women hired by the Indian flagships. Then they started offering lot of scholarships to women who will take cadet courses as well AS rating courses.

 

Five years back India had 0.5% women seafarers. It has increased to 1.4% just in five years. And what has happened across now the various shipping companies, Musk Shipping company among the top ones, they are actually female participation seafarers have become 5.5% in India they started their own women focused hiring process wherein they will give onboard training.

 

Because this is very, very important issue in maritime that you train a cadet but onboard training is not given on time. So that cadet then takes a long time to get jobs here. They started offering for women immediate onboard on onboarding and rate of women employment in Musk India tripled between 2021 to 2023 just in three years time.

 

Synergy Shipping they actually started designing their vessels which were multi gender. So they took a call that they will be an engineer, they will be an officer and they will be a cadet. All three on one ship together. Otherwise there used to be because these cargo ships which go they have only 20, 25 people working on a ship.

 

So one woman used to be there. So then there was, there were safety issues and all and all these various directives have now been issued. So based on that Synergy Shipping actually it's a small company not compared to like Maersk or CMA cgm but it got the IMO best gender parity award because they designed like that.

 

Then what started happening that the ships actually are owned by a particular company but they get flagged in a particular country. So you will see that ships are flagged in various countries. So the flag state is important because you have to, the ship has to follow the norms of the flag state.

 

So these many of the flag states now have issued guidelines that the ship design has to be multi gender. So when the ship will go for a survey the survey company will have to see that it is taking care of all infrastructure which is related to females.

>> Suhani Jalota: If I can just pause.

 

So it seems that the reason why more women in maritime is even beneficial is because at least in some conversations it seems that women have shown there have been some productivity differences. Women only warehouses have apparently outperformed men only warehousing in maritime in some companies. So we have some evidence that there is a reason and a need for doing this which is why the companies are building these sorts of changes.

 

So actually Mr. Lakshman, bringing back, talking about scaled up efforts as dad was also talking about these sorts of global efforts that are being made, what are some of the practices that Mahindra Group has scaled up and things that you feel have actually shown a stronger need for more women coming in across countries.

 

What have you done? Well, you think, and I think you'd also mentioned at once about supply chain efforts in say China where the factories are much larger. So how does that affect factory sizing in areas where we need more women and why is that beneficial?

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: Sure, I'll give you an umbrella view which could look like we're straying a little away from the topic.

 

But there's a reason the world's supply chain is completely skewed. We saw some of it during the pandemic, right? And after the pandemic things subsided. So I think the world lulled into complacency a bit. I'll give you some statistics. 85% of commercial shipbuilding happens in three countries in Asia Pacific.

 

China, South Korea, Japan.

>> Rajiv Jalota: 93%.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: 93%. I'm sitting next to. The other part is chips. 92% of chips is from Taiwan. Forget China blockading Taiwan, that's a different story. You need lots of clean water to manufacture chips. And Taiwan had a drought two years ago. Now just look, a car SUV that we are rolling out has 200 chips.

 

The world supply chain is very skewed. Germany bought 56% of its power from Russia and thought they had no problems. If you come back to the U.S. the China Kool Aid that we've drunk is out of control. I have a customer. The largest market is the US 92% of sourcing is China.

 

This imbalance has to get corrected. It's not China plus one. China plus two. You need to correct this imbalance for the betterment of the world. We are now seeing a conscious attempt of organizations trying to move out. That's where this happens. Saying you want to move out. But the large factories in India from.

 

15 to 16,000 people, whereas China has got 150,000 people. Look at the scale, right? And so, if you look at India, let's focus on India now. The largest, the most populated country in the world, right? And the opportunity the last 10 years was information technology for India. The next 10 years can be manufacturing.

 

Can and should be manufacturing. So that window is for India's to lose, right? And for that, the workforce has to quadruple. You know, the Vixit Bharat vision that the Prime Minister has painted out says India should be a trillion dollar economy by 2050, right? If that has to happen, where will this additional workforce come from?

 

There's a huge woman, you know, audience that we need to target, right? And so, from the Mahindra group's perspective, there were a couple of initiatives we launched which had nothing to do with all this. They did it because it was the right thing to do, there were two schemes.

 

One is called Nanikali. 2% of the group's profits go into CSR. Focused on only one thing, razor sharp focus, Nanikali, which is the development of the girl child. A World bank report showed that if you focus on the girl child, that country's GDP goes up. There's no big science behind it very clearly.

 

So the focus is on the girl child. And what they've done with that is that they focus on girls between the 6th grade and the 10th grade. They sit with them after class. So they've tied up with, you know, colleges where underprivileged children go to school, right? Over 2700 schools.

 

And they sit with them and teach them financial skills, literacy skills. They teach them, you know, they've introduced football now. So it teaches them resilience, it teaches them leadership skills. And they find that the biggest drop happens is after school, they get pulled into something else. They never enter the workforce.

 

So, Nandikalli prevents that. We're so proud. It costs $80 to sponsor a child for this. And the second is a program called Kabil, and Sheetal Met as a CEO and your mom Rupali is involved, and they've done phenomenal work. I'm so glad that as an ambassador for the group, I get to talk about Kabul.

 

Kabul is an online platform. It also identifies school going children as well as college going women. And it trains them on all these skills, soft skills, how to dress, how to talk, math skills. Then it also identifies workspaces where work is needed. It could be in caregiving, it could be in accounting, it could be in apparel manufacturing.

 

So they identify all that then they identify the women and they find the skill gaps and they do specific skill gap training to get them to be productively employed. And so that whole thing, they've touched a million women so far. Million women in Nanikali, 870,000 girl children. Anything for scale?

 

It's India. You can't beat it. So to us I think all this gets you in this mode where if India can get this you'll productively employ and lead the world. From a friend shoring country perspective, Smith Irani today morning said we've never approached the world with hostility so you need friendshoring countries who can now become the next substitute.

 

From a China perspective I think the opportunity is there and getting all of this going is going to be very important.

>> Suhani Jalota: Totally agree. Thanks for bringing up all those programs. Kirtika, what is do you think the role of and you've been a strong torchbearer for this, the role of technology and AI in building more of this sort of business case.

 

Where do you think this is? More of it brings more women in, it excludes women. What do you think companies are doing about this?

>> Kirthiga Reddy: Yeah, so I'm a technologist and an optimist and certainly have seen a huge believer in the role of technology in actually addressing some of these inequities that we have spoken about, I'll call out Reena who's here.

 

She runs Mom Relaunch and how beautifully she's used technology in terms of both for example, seeing the whole Salesforce wave partnering with that company, getting people trained on the right set of skills and then creating that whole ecosystem for training, learning and putting them back in the workforce.

 

She also beautifully partners with Verics and we are a trust layer, and she uses that to create a skills passport for these women such that they can carry that and take them around wherever they're being employed. Really increasing the trust factor, the place in which that verification that employment happens and happens on an ongoing basis.

 

Another example I'll give you is when I was at Softbank as an investor I led an investment in a company called Eightfold AI. It's a talent intelligence platform and what they do is they take a resume, they create an AI first model of the person and do matching to the right job and surface the right jobs for that particular person.

 

What they were seeing is that some of the companies were seeing almost a 50% increase in diverse candidates and they said to themselves why? What's happening? Well, research shows that when men look at a role and they see a 60% match with a role, they think that the perfect things to slice bread for that particular role.

 

When women look at a role, I can see several different nods here. What's the percentage that they think that they need to match to apply for a role? 80 to 100%, right? And so, the rules being surfaced to candidates, where candidates looked at it and said really, I am the right person for this role.

 

I would have never thought about applying for this role. And that was what was driving the increase. So, for one for sure, let's not take our eyes away from everything that we need to do to make sure that AI has all of the ethical AI, transparent AI, all of that to prevent biases from going in.

 

But my challenge for all technologists in this room is really about how is it that they can employ technology to solve those problems and also to add to that then making sure there's the right workforce. And I'm so encouraged by the initiatives here and the change that that has caused.

 

Because if we look at women in AI across the largest companies, you're talking about 10%, 12%. This is Meta Google. And if they're not going to be reflective of the population that they serve, you are going to have these biases seeping in. So we really need to make sure that we change that pendulum, and we are so excited to share that.

 

Varic's in partnership with the government of India and this is now a sneak peek and an announcement for this special community. We are going to be announcing on Monday an initiative called AI Kiran, and Kiran is about spotlight and rays of light. You can't be what you can't see.

 

So we're going to start with recognition for women in AI in India and really invest in that community. So as India becomes a trillion dollar economy, we have the right participation. So we're very excited about that and invite everyone here to participate. And I'm sure we'll be having many conversations with this group as well on everything that we can do.

 

And I should say to your point of all of these conversations, I met with youth Kiawas Anshul. We said okay, we should partner. So, it was the first introduction partnership struck, he's in our announce on Monday so there can be more that happens. So, thank you so for bringing us all together.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: That's great, that's amazing. And actually just I wanted to have follow up on one question. We haven't yet spoken about startups and that industry. Entrepreneurship in general, we know there are fewer investments made in women led startups. What might we do to create more understanding, awareness or even just create that business case for women led startups?

 

What is missing?

>> Kirthiga Reddy: Yeah, so Swani, I mean when you talk about the other metrics there, I think there's been study after study, whether it's a McKinsey, whether it's a Harvard. Like every single organization has looked at this and said diverse board perform better, diverse executive teams perform better.

 

There's just study after study. And then you have to just think to yourself, after all of that, why is there still a gap? The number of women founders in running deep tech companies? What do you think? What's the percentage of female founders in deep tech companies? Running deep tech companies?

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Single digit, 4%, right? 4%. 4%. And so there are many structural challenges. There are structural challenges around. There was a study done about the questions that are asked for women founders versus male founders. Male founders will get asked by VCs about, what is the upside?

 

Like, you know, how big can this grow? A woman is asked, this is a study about what are the risks, what are the downsides, how are you protecting against that? And, of course, the woman begins to answer the question, and they're taking notes of all of the risks and the man answers the questions about the opportunity and the notes are being taken about the opportunities.

 

And I've had my partners who in an IC investment committee group, they sent two groups, one a male founder and one a female founder, with the exact same script, exact same script, exact same data, same level of confidence. And one walked away with 100 times more in terms of their investment versus the female.

 

That is what we are dealing with. And I think it behooves all of us on both sides of people writing checks and then people asking for checks to be aware of these dimensions and to really make the shift that we really need to see.

>> Suhani Jalota: So we need a lot more solutions.

 

And Professor Pandey, would you be able to shed any light on any solutions that you feel? Maybe we have evidence on those or any pilots that have been done, any scaled up solutions around where either in startup space or otherwise women have been able to enter and companies or industries or governments have recognized the need for more women, not as a DEI but as business case.

 

What do we know on that?

>> Rohini Pande: We don't know as much as we would like to know. So I'm scratching my head. I think I mentioned one of the things earlier that one of the things we seem to know is that women are good for women. I think companies where you see either female ownership or you see female management are better for having more female employees.

 

I think again often, and that's the flip side of diversity, I suspect female managers feel more pressure on them to show that they're doing things not for maybe perceived as DEI, but for productivity. But actually that seems to sometimes go against what we see in the data. I think that's one place we've seen some evidence of success.

 

I think the Namrata Adani earlier was talking about masking. I think issues, for instance, where not just at masking, but for instance there's Nina Rusi had a nice study showing that defaulting also matters a lot on platforms. So when you're putting out these job ads, a lot of these platforms will ask you to type in what you expect your starting salary to be.

 

Instead of that, if you just have a default that they could possibly change, it can help increase for women at least the expectation of what they would see. If both men and women tend to default to what they have. I think simple ways of actually trying to affect these biases by automating as much as you can of this data seems to be helpful.

 

Eris Bonet had a book a while ago arguing how about it's much easier to change institutions than it is to change people and their biases. I think goes in that direction, especially as we see more and more use of tech in setting up at least the first stages of job applications so on you can automate a lot there to make sure that people at least both sides of hiring and the side giving information start with knowing for instance this fact that the average person applying for a job has only 60% match with the job.

 

You could have that at the top, right?

>> Suhani Jalota: Absolutely. So in the final couple of minutes, I guess if anybody on the panel wants to comment on strategies to reduce the cost for firms to hire women or strategies to increase productivity for women to be hired.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: See I'll make a quick point earlier in factories because Mahindra has a number of factories.

 

It was male dominated. But now with robust robotics becoming mainstream, women are now finding a place on the shop floor and that population is beginning to grow rapidly. So technology is enabling more women to get into the workplace as well.

>> Suhani Jalota: So that's reducing the cost of hiring.

 

 

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: It's reducing the cost of hiring. Productivity is on par with male workers. So the business case, everything has to stand on a business case. The business case works out.

>> Rohini Pande: I think another way of putting a question is not so much about reducing the cost of hiring women, but equalizing the cost across men and women.

 

So I think Alessandra briefly alluded to earlier when she was talking about paternity leave policies. I don't think we have great evidence that paternity leave policies directly help women's careers. But both they seem to have effects on how kids perceive the roles of men and women. But it also equalizes a bit the cost if men also become more expensive when they have kids, not just women.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: I'm going to take the contrarian view and say, like we actually, we pay our recruiters twice their commission if they get us a woman engineer, right? Because we don't have enough women engineers, and we believe in that, in that business case. So we are actually paying more to make sure because we believe that the business case still works even if you, if you do that.

 

Yeah,

>> Rajiv Jalota: you have to work out the total cost dynamics. What is the return of investment? Say because of maternity, you are having some lost man days or woman days you may call. But the overall productivity, what all is coming out in maritime sector per se. During my research, all the companies, all the companies they have come out that DP World says my 25% supervision has come down in all women warehouse.

 

And this experiment has happened in uae, India and Africa Musk the port of Rotterdam. They are taking women leaders to 40% by 2027. They say that my productivity is so high. So I think you balance out whether that small cost you are paying, price you are paying and plus the gains you are getting.

 

What Kitiga also mentioned, it is coming in maritime companies as well that women are more conscious and errors are very, very less. And that is another area where you save on lot of costs. So it has to balance out per se. And I believe say for example India, it has to grow so much the next decade is of India.

 

An example I give of always of Exim trademark. Presently our exempt rate is 1.4 billion tons. It has to grow to 5.5 billion tons by 2050. If it has to grow 3.5 times from now, who else will work if only men can work? You need equal amount of women or more women to work to see all this happening, and with digitalization I think women are now working everywhere.

 

You have seen smart containers, you have smart trucks, all kind of things are being managed. Even women are being used working from home to monitor all this. I gave you example that day of Shravan Shipping that they have employed in Vizag. Women working from home and they say that productivity is as high or even higher than earlier.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: And they're working from home monitoring the ships.

>> Rajiv Jalota: Yeah, so these type of things will become a possibility in the future.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: And Suhani, if I may add, Madhus at Mahindra is a scheme that was launched landmark in India. Five year maternity support program. Not one or two years, five years interventions before, during and after.

 

And like I said, we are a for profit company. It should make

>> Suhani Jalota: business sense.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: Business sense to do it.

>> Rajiv Jalota: Mahindra Mahindra factory in Chakan has women forklifters.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: Absolutely.

>> Rajiv Jalota: Where they are working.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: Absolutely.

>> Rajiv Jalota: And even more competent than men in terms of productivity.

 

 

>> Suhani Jalota: Well great. That is a strong business case, if there's any burning questions we can take one question I think if anybody. Yes, you raise your hand first,

>> Speaker 12: it's all very nice to talk about women. Take away everyone's job. Forget women. We've got agentic AI. We've got the physical AI.

 

Should we work at all?

>> Suhani Jalota: Great question to end on very difficult one.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: So AI is definitely changing the workforce. And as the adage goes, AI is not going to replace jobs. People who know AI will replace the jobs of people who don't know AI. That's what each one of us need to be thinking about in is how are each one of us really on the forefront of how we are using AI to increase our productivity 5x10x and be at that forefront.

 

So that's one, but two for sure it's going to cause displacement of a huge population. And in these changes, unfortunately it is women, but you saw Covid women had much higher of an impact. Technology changes like this, much higher of an impact. And so anything that we can be doing as a private sector, as a public sector to make sure women are on top of that technology change we should be doing.

 

And really it goes both ways, it goes from an individual perspective and I'm on the board of VTA's that is about women in technology. And the CEO says, it's just fascinating that I see women gravitating towards the management, the soft skill courses and, and more men gravitating towards, even if there are free courses, the hard tech courses.

 

So it does start at that individual level. It starts as a societal level of what we are encouraging our girls and our boys to do. And then it goes all the way to a professional level as well.

>> Lakshmanan Chidambaram: All great points, Kritika. I just want to add, we have 130,000 people.

 

We've seen a 30% improvement using AI, which means your work should be coming down, right? And it will come down. So the whole thing is going to change. But I've always felt every crisis is an opportunity. So from our perspective, what are we doing? We're moving higher up the value chain.

 

At one point we did time and material work, then we did fixed price work, then we did outcome based work. Now we are taking end to end business processes, automating the hell out of it, bringing our own IP and going up the value chain. And customers will begin to move money away from what they save here into transformation, and higher end work, right?

 

Everything is it driven now. So, you know, there's lot of, lot of, lot of good things going.

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah. Any final question? Really? Okay, we have one minute. Yes.

>> Speaker 13: In all, in AI, we are all at an equal advantage and disadvantage right now. Where the, where the technology is, is there opportunity to skill people, especially women, to kind of take advantage of that?

 

And is that happening whether in India or elsewhere?

>> Kirthiga Reddy: So the short answer is 100% yes. And the more we make sure that they're, that they're there at the beginning, the less you have to catch up. And truly I can't stress that enough. The more we emphasize in the beginning, Meta did their diversity report where they said, listen, if you have to get the right diversity at this stage, we have to fire everyone and start again because it's just not possible to catch up.

 

So if we don't have women jump into the AI bandwagon now, we are again going to be at a place where it's going to take 100 years for gender equality to catch up. Which is why initiatives like AI Kiran that we're launching on Monday and the government is actually putting a whole amount of support of the government of India is putting a whole amount of support are on even their recent budget in terms of the dollars that are allocated for rupees that are allocated for women, startups, entrepreneurs and more.

 

And it really behooves each one of us to take advantage of the opportunity coming back right here to home tycoon. There's a, you know, Mayfield is sponsoring or she pitches, she wins. Okay, it's Mayfield is one of the most prestigious VC firms. This is a Silicon Valley. They have 18 entries, one, eight entries.

 

I mean like really, that should have 800 entries, not 18. So there are opportunities available and I think we need to make sure at this point that we create that infrastructure for people to take advantage of those opportunities. The opportunities are there is that middle gap that is missing from my perspective.

 

But would be curious,

>> Rohini Pande: one thing, having seen a lot of the field, I'm sometimes less optimistic. I think you can have these opportunities, you can have them at the highest level. But what holds back, at least say in rural India, women is just very basic things. It would be not a lot of electricity, not a lot of access to things.

 

So I think what you end up, the fear is you end up creating quite a lot of inequality in that there are these sort of back end training LLM kind of jobs. The ones that can be really broken up, the kinds of Lisa and Suhani looked at that those go maybe a lot also to women who work from home.

 

But when it comes to who's writing those patents and who's doing the top end, that's still a very small market. And as long as you're looking at say in India looking at the IITs or you're looking at these engineering colleges and they're largely male dominated increasingly. So very often it's not clear to me that this is going to be democratized just by pushing out these single schemes.

 

It's very much about how are we actually changing where that human capital is taking place. And getting into these colleges is hard. You need to pay tuition to get into it. Parents don't want to pay tuition for girls as much as they want to pay for boys. So in the end, I think the constraints that women face often don't change just because a new technology has emerged or we offer those opportunities.

 

As long as we're not seeing equalized access to human capital in many levels, which we aren't, and if the returns become larger, I think think about people like Claudia's work. If you think that a lot of these are kind of equivalent of greedy jobs at the high end, there's very high returns to.

 

I'm not so sure that just pushing it out there is going to help women. I think in the end, a lot of the biases we have to address the same irrespective of the technology, and technology is not going to change those biases.

>> Suhani Jalota: A lot of great learnings, thanks everybody here.

 

 

>> Kirthiga Reddy: And what would you say, too?

>> Suhani Jalota: Yes.

>> Kirthiga Reddy: You're done a ton of work, so we'd love to have your thoughts.

>> Suhani Jalota: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a mixed bag and I think similar to what you all have actually said, there seem to be some headway in terms of some strategies.

 

Maybe it's equalizing the cost, that's what's really needed. But then to ultimately acquire and find the woman who is left out and she's not applying even that is an additional cost component. And then how do you then reduce that? Then you have to put in. So that's where I think the cross sector collaboration actually is really useful because maybe civil society can absorb some of that cost, funders absorb some of that cost.

 

Private sector may not be able to do that. And then that helps enable and create a system where we can then equalize the cost of hiring the women ultimately for the private sector company who then can take on those women. And then hopefully if productivity differences are there for certain types of jobs at least, maybe there's even more of a business case for pushing companies to hire more women for certain roles.

 

So I do see that this is an opportunity for cross sector collaboration, a time that we can bring in civil society funders, startups to fill in the gaps. But thank you all for your time and all of your really keen insights on this topic.

>> Sakshi Shah: Next we have Pooja Goyal, CEO of Uditi foundation, who will walk us through how her team is helping accelerate women's workforce participation, specifically in Uttar Pradesh in India, and how that ties into India's dream of becoming a trillion dollar economy that Kirtika also touched upon in the panel discussion we just heard.

 

So welcome Pooja.

>> Pooja Goyal: What an incredible morning and an incredible discussion on AI. I wanted to add just to that, there's so many things I wanted to, you know, going through my head. But one of the challenges is that women are not using AI as much to your point, Kirtika there.

 

And because people who use AI better are the ones who are going to go up the value chain and women are not and we need to do more work around it. But thank you, Suhani, Hoover Institution, Myna Mahila, for really bringing us all together. It's just been incredible, it seems like our tribe kind of just, just making it happen.

 

My name is Pooja Goyal. I'm the CEO of the Udaithi Foundation. We are, we are driving a lot of system change work in India, working with governments and with private sector to really increase India's Female labor force participation rate. I have been in the private sector for almost 28 years.

 

I had been in the private sector either as a startup founder or with large corporates. In fact, I used to work in the Bay Area with Adobe for many years before moving back to India. So it's absolutely amazing to be here and talk a little bit about our work at Udaithi.

 

And if any of this resonates, I would love to or triggers any questions, thoughts, would love to catch up. I'm going to speak about this female labor force participation rate as an economic imperative for India. India is in a very uniquely positive position as India talks about creating new jobs, getting to this $30 trillion economy.

 

One big advantage we have is the demographic dividend, the large demographic dividend that we have. And if you just peel the onion, what you realize is that a large part of that demographic dividend that we talk about is actually gender dividend. It's the 196 million employable women that are currently out of the workforce in India.

 

And so the good news has been that the female labor force participation rate in India has been going up. From 27%, it was almost at 25, 27% for many years, and then in 2023, it went up to 37%, and then last year, to 41.3%. But if you peel the onion a little bit, what you realize is that all of that increase has been the right side graph.

 

All of that increase has been in rural and self employment. If you look at what women in the formal workforce, that number has pretty much stayed stagnant, and actually it's come down. So when you're talking about new jobs, good jobs, AI jobs, urban areas are going to be your engines of growth.

 

And women are not participating there, and the numbers are going down. So that's a really big problem. And when you compare India to other countries, what you see is again, the percentage of women in the workforce is still extremely low. And we need to go a long way.

 

The clock is ticking. There are two big opportunities that we need to work on. As I said, the gender dividend, it's a shrinking window. So this dividend is not going to last forever. We have two decades to make it work. In many states in India already, the replacement fertility rate is below 2.1 already.

 

So that means that the population is starting to get stagnant or go down, as we've seen in other countries like South Korea, Japan, etc, right? So it's a shrinking window. There is a sense of urgency. And second, someone pointed, yes, talked about it, right? That we actually have one of the largest gender budgets in the world today.

 

Last year the Union budget, 6.8% of the Union budget was allocated for gender. And this year it is 8.9%. So there are large allocations that have been made for worker women's housing, about 5,000 crores. For child care centers, about 2,000 crores. So it's extremely important that we engage as private sector civil society organizations as this is going to be used.

 

And I'll just give you an example. We are working with Uttar Pradesh and I'll talk to you about it later. You know, on paper you see some working women's hostel. Our team went out to see. Okay, what are these working women's hostel, how are they being used? There was one in the middle of nowhere.

 

And, of course, there is no woman using that working women's hostel. In a state of 250 million people, there is just one working women's hostel in the middle of nowhere. Not where there are jobs, right? So it's very easy to say, okay, patriarchal norms. And Uttar Pradesh is one of the states with a lot of patriarchy.

 

But fathers are ready to send their daughters, but where will they live? So from India perspective, well, we did a good job at early childhood, the beti bachao, then the adolescents, the beti padhao. Our gross enrollment ratios for women is one of the highest in the world. Now if you look at gross enrollment ratios for sciences in undergrad, 51% are women.

 

So women are studying, are graduating at record numbers, largest in some of the world. But when it comes to the drop off happens when you enter the workforce and you can look at it as the supply side or the demand side. Udarti's work is focused largely on demand side barriers and we heard a lot of it this morning.

 

One is design, design of workplaces, design of our urban infrastructure. It has been designed for men, by men. It's not as if somebody is sitting there discriminating, but it has to be designed, right? Infrastructure we just do not have. Safe accommodation for women, safe mobility, childcare centers, overall security and policy.

 

Today, if you want to hire women at whatever levels, it is harder to hire women. That's why we have to pay double to the recruit at whatever level. If you want to hire a woman on the shop floor in a flexi staffing job at 15,000 rupees per month or an investment associate in a venture capital firm, it's just harder to hire women.

 

It's more expensive to hire women and it is riskier to hire women. There are 54 laws in our country which in India which actually prevent women from being in the workforce and they are being systematically now removed. One of them is the night shift policy. So you know, women can't work in manufacturing facilities after 7 o' clock.

 

And now state and state by state, this policy is being dismantled. But what's happening is that when it is, when that happens, the Department of Labor says, look, you have to register with us, get a permission and then you are responsible to ensure that the woman reaches home safely.

 

So there is no reason for a private sector company which has already so many things on their head, to take one more additional risk there, right? So there are multiple policy led interventions that we are working on very quickly. These are the three broad pillars that we are working on.

 

Shaping demand for quality jobs, accelerating the infrastructure enablers which are safe accommodation, safe mobility, child care centers, overall security and increasing and scaling women enterprises. Again from the perspective that if it's a woman founded company, gender parity takes care of itself. You will employ more women. The big challenge right now is that we have a lot of women entrepreneurs but they have not reached a scale where they are even employing another person.

 

So from the survey, PLFS survey, which the government does, there are 49 million women entrepreneurs. But in urban areas, only 600,000 employ one more person besides themselves. So in order to be able to take advantage of this multiplier effect of women owned, we need to help scale them through access to skills, markets, and capital.

 

And we sit in the middle of think tanks, research institutions like Hoover, like Yale Policy think tanks and NGOs who are doing great work on the ground. We are kind of sitting in the middle working with decision makers, influencers, working with the government to essentially provide data backed evidence.

 

Whether it's data and insights, proof of concepts, what works, what doesn't work. Do some pilots, do some case studies, and then something that can scale, take it back and see how that can scale and institutionalize that change whether it is with the private sector or with the government.

 

So one of the data backed evidence is kind of at the foundation of all of the work we do. There is a data hub called Close the Gender Gap data hub which we launched about year and a half ago that's available to everyone. What we are trying to do is really make information and data about women's economic participation in India very digestible and available at very regular frequency.

 

So just an example is in the private sector the challenge is baseline. What does the number look like in different sectors and so on. So what we did was we took, we looked at 2,100 NSC listed companies who by law are supposed to provide information on women's workforce participation in their annual reports and BRSR reports.

 

And we made it into dashboards. So now across 23 sectors, you know, what is the percentage of women in every sector at different levels, at key management positions, women on boards and by sector you can say okay, health, 41%, women's workforce participation. The challenges there might be different.

 

In pharma it is 11% and in power and construction it is 2%. So what now we can begin to do is systematically set targets and work with the sectors to dismantle barriers which are very sector specific. So we are working. So Mahindra and Mahindra, we've actually worked in Mohali in one of the Swaraj engine factories where they were actually trying to get to over 50% women on the shop floor.

 

That's proved hard over the last year, year and a half. But they've been able to increase the number significantly of women on the shop floor, and we've captured that as a case study. But in these sectors, we are working with many leaders, Mahindra, in flexi-staffing with Quess Corp, TeamLease, Adecco, in pharma with Dr Reddy's, Biocon Biologics, BFSI with Axis Bank, Niva Bupa.

 

And then with industry bodies, because they play a crucial role in helping institutionalize it. Once you've kind of said okay this works or this doesn't work, then you work with the institutional body to institute. We're working with three state governments, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and we'll start work with Maharashtra now and then with some of the media and coalition partners like CNBC, CII, LinkedIn, Good Business Lab ladies who lead to ensure that all of this evidence that we are producing we are actually able to get it in the hands of the decision makers who can, who really move the needle on the ground.

 

I don't know how much time do I have? So this is private sector, you know, this is happy to talk about it. But essentially sector by sector, what we've done is set some targets to say can we actually increase pharma from 11% to 25% by 2030 and are working with the sector.

 

Yeah, in government, in up. Okay, give me two minutes. I'll just share the Women's Economic Empowerment Index. So what we were able to do there is collect all the data district by district. Got 54 indicators and across 75 districts now you can really track which district is doing well on the V front and then have different kinds of interventions for different zones of districts.

 

And this is available to everyone. So to give an example, Gautam Budnagar is 6 on 75 and across these five pillars then you can actually see where the interventions are needed. Yeah. So I think I've run out of time, but it's very exciting time in India. It was great to see so much good work happening.

 

And I'm taking back a lot of evidence with me to essentially make the case for some of these changes on the ground. The tailwinds are with us as far as government is concerned, private sector is concerned. We just have to go and do it in the next decade.

 

Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: So we're gonna go into the final part of the day. We're gonna talk about the challenges and opportunities in scaling up solutions to bridge the gender labor gap. To start us off we have Professor Susan Athey, Economics of technology professor here at Stanford. Susan is also the first woman to ever win the John Bates Clark medal for her groundbreaking work in economics.

 

She'll be sharing her work on scalable programs that help women transition into the tech workforce. Welcome Susan.

>> Susan Athey: So thank you so much for having me here. And I have to say I think I've never felt like so much support and positive vibes in one room. So kudos to the organizers for bringing together so many amazing people trying to change the world.

 

And it's always good when times are rough in the world to be around other people who are really thinking of their life's mission to make the world better. So today I want to talk about work I've been doing about helping workers transition. And those of you who know me from my academic life, I haven't been primarily focused on sort of labor economics issues.

 

But one of the ways I came here is that I have been very focused on technology. And so for like the last 15 years I've had to once a month or so speak publicly about what's the impact of, first it's digitization and machine learning and now it's AI on the workforce.

 

And one of the things that I started realizing is we could talk about it, but maybe we should do something about it. And technology isn't just a disruptive force, it's also part of the solution. So I have a lab at Stanford where we've been trying to partner with social sector organizations or organizations that for profit organizations but where we're working with them on social impact projects.

 

So just to start like if I'm thinking about trying to help workers get skills using digital technology and I'm focusing on that partly from just the subject expertise and also because it's scalable. What is the theory of how that's gonna work? And so you know, I can, I can get workers skills like through things like Coursera or digitally created programs like one I'm going to talk about that we created.

 

But before I go out and try to get a funder to fund it or you know, spend a lot of resources on it, I need to have some idea that if I get people, people non standard credentials that there's some prospect that that's actually going to help them.

 

And there's like a Bit of a chicken and egg problem, because people, if they don't know what a credential means, they won't evaluate it. But who wants to get a credential if nobody knows what it means? So I wanted to spend time thinking about that, like final part of the process, the process between like communicating your skills and, and getting jobs as laying the groundwork for if you establish that, which we did get positive results, I think that then justifies spending a lot more resources actually getting people the training to start with.

 

So, you know, if you get skills, especially if you're going into tech, a lot of people get recruited through places like LinkedIn or they're showing resumes, sending in resumes. First of all, the resume has to actually credibly signal the skill and, and then you also need to be able to demonstrate those skills in an interview in order to get a job.

 

So the first project I want to talk about is one where we created from scratch a program together with a small Polish organization to try to help women build portfolios that would demonstrate their skills relevant for IT jobs. And so we were basically trying to solve the chicken and egg problem here by not focusing on just like a credential of a certain title, but really going directly to having a work product that would be relevant to the job they were trying to get.

 

And this would, in principle, you know, they are acquiring skills through the program, but most of it is about demonstrating skills rather than just the acquisition. So we started working with this and I had worked with an amazing collaborator, Emil Palakot, who's from Poland, and he had a lot of the connections there.

 

And so he found this organization that just had like four or five people when we started working with them. And they had created a mentoring program that helped mentor women who had, they had advanced degrees. So we're not working with people here without degrees. They had aptitude, but they didn't have any skills in the IT industry.

 

And so the question we asked was, can we create something that's more scalable than their mentoring program? And those of you in the room who, I think a lot of people here do a lot of mentoring, you know that in some sense your bandwidth is somewhat limited. So how can we help more people?

 

And so what we, so they were running this mentoring program that what they were taking was people with skills but no tech job and matching them to mentors who were mid career women in tech. And the way the program worked was there were one to one meetings for three months and they would do different cohorts.

 

You would have to apply. Then they would have like a lookbook of mentees, maybe a thousand or so and the mentors, maybe 200 would pick mentees from the lookbook. And so they could do a couple hundred people a year that way. We created from scratch a new program and implemented it in collaboration with them.

 

The new program, we called it Challenges. And, and the way we came up with the idea is that Emil and some of the folks from DARE IT went and interviewed the companies in Poland who were doing the outsourcing and asked them, like, what would it take for you to take a chance on these women?

 

So what they said was they wanted, they liked this idea of a portfolio. It was really kind of workshop together with them. And so in the Challenges program, over the course of several weeks, you would submit six assignments, which in sequence add up to a portfolio item. And so one of the things here, I think, is it's not just that you create the portfolio, it's also the portfolio is really designed and curated to be, to demonstrate what the employers want.

 

And that also motivates the women in the program because they know they're not wasting their time with this project. So we ran two randomized experiments in parallel, separate experiments. One was for mentoring. There we had the issue that the mentees would pick the mentors would pick the mentees.

 

And we wanted to respect that. So the way we did that is we had instead of each mentor picking one mentee, each mentor picked two mentees. And then we randomized which one of them actually got mentored and the other one was like the control group. So we could compare the selected mentors to the non selected mentors.

 

In the Challenges experiment, we admitted people, we took all the applicants, we took all the people that qualified, and then we randomized admission to the program. In both cases, we tracked outcomes using their LinkedIn profiles. They had to give their LinkedIn profiles and their application. And so that allowed us to not worry about like a 20 or 30% survey response rate, which would be normally like the best you could hope for if we were following up with surveys.

 

So it gave us more complete data. We didn't have to partner with the government. We could just go to LinkedIn. And so what we found, and you can see these pictures that kind of really summarize the data from the result. We see first, for the Challenges program in the red, the Challenges control group and the Challenges treatment group, and what's being plotted is the probability of getting a job in technology.

 

And we see at the beginning there's no treatment effect because they're still in the program. And then the challenges kind of break away in terms of the absolute magnitude of the change. The difference between Mentoring Treated and Mentoring Control is about the same size as Challenges Treated and Challenges Control.

 

But from a percentage perspective, the challenges people, because they weren't screened by mentors, they weren't selected, they're worse on average. And so it's doubling their chance of getting a job. We also see the mentors actually can figure out who's likely to get a job because the mentors are choosing people who are already much more likely than average to get a job.

 

And so we do analysis in the paper to show that if they picked differently, they might have picked people who got more of a boost. They're not necessarily picking the people with the highest boost. They are picking people with a boost. But there were other people that could have had an even bigger boost, but maybe a lower level.

 

Of course, the preferences of the mentors come into play because they might want to mentor people who will get a job. So we don't want to exclude that. And then a second project I'll just mention briefly here. We partnered with Coursera and we took people, not just women, in this case, we took people from developing countries and people without a college degree in.

 

And we ran an experiment on about 800,000 people. And so in this experiment, we were again trying to understand the impact of showing their credentials. And so in particular, Coursera created something where that if you clicked on the credential on the LinkedIn profile, it would take you back to Coursera and you would see the individual named authenticated certificate, and that was embedded in your LinkedIn profile.

 

And what we did is recreated a little software package that would automatically do the posting in two clicks. So this is kind of really focusing on the signaling of the skills. We randomized only people who have already gotten the credential. So everybody, our treatment and control group, has the credential.

 

The only thing that the treatment is doing is it's helping people show the employer the credential on their LinkedIn profile. So, and again, we're randomizing people after they got the certificate, and then we monitor them on LinkedIn to see how they get a job. So this picture shows the treatment effects.

 

This is the intent to treat. Now, what we find is that a lot of people, you know, even we nudge people, we make it easy for them to post, but the Compliance rate is relatively low. So a lot of the people who we offer the chance to post don't take it up.

 

So that means that the overall treatment effect comparing people who were offered to the people who weren't offered is small because a lot of people just didn't take us up on the offer. In the paper we show that there are much bigger effects when you focus on the people who took it up.

 

But we do get a small but significant treatment effect on getting a job. We then kind of break things out. We first look at people who get a new job in scope. A smaller number of people get a new job in scope and the baseline levels are in the solid, the treatment effects are the shaded area.

 

And so for example, it's an 11% improvement over baseline of getting a new job in scope as a result of getting access to this feature. That makes it easy for you to post. And then finally we use machine learning to divide people based on their pre treatment characteristics into what we assess as being high employability, medium employability and low employability.

 

And we find that most of the treatment effects are coming from the people who look like they had low employability. And so my interpretation is that these people, if you just looked at their LinkedIn profile, you couldn't really see that they were a good candidate for a job in tech and therefore the recruiters might have also thought that.

 

But once you get the credential on the profile, it's really making a big difference to whether they get the interviews and thus whether they get the jobs. So I'll stop there. Just concluding that I view this as like preliminary work and it's really kind of laying the groundwork or motivating bigger, more scalable investments in non standard credentials.

 

Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: The final panel will address an important question. What are the key challenges in scaling women focused workforce initiatives and how can funding strategies adjust them? This panel will be moderated by someone who has been a big believer in this Summit since day one. Perry Hewitt, the chief marketing and product officer at Data.org the panelists will be Tamina Madon, Co Founder, the Agency Fund, Ritu Narayan, Foundation Founder and CEO at zoom.

 

Radhika Shah, Co President of Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs and founding co Chair of the United Nations Joint SDG Fund Breakthrough alliance and Miriam Rivera, CEO, co founder and Managing Director at ULU Ventures. Fun fact. A lot of the panelists here are friends and have known each other for a long time.

 

 

>> Perry Hewitt: So it's my huge privilege and pleasure to be here today. Among these are leading thinkers and doers who are actively improving women's workforce participation and most importantly, and I think we've heard this as a theme today, improving their agency and work and life. I work with data.org, where an organization that focuses on data and AI for social impact and leverages the power of cross sector partnerships to bring broader participation in what we see as a rapidly accelerating tech revolution.

 

I may be old enough to remember the dot com one and the speed is definitely over time increasing. Like many of you, we work with different funding models and we and we work with different kinds of funders to gauge impact measurement. I'm going to be very inappropriate. It's the end of the day and channel justice.

 

Potter Stewart, who 1964 on a very different topic, said impact measurement is hard to define in words, but we all know it when we see it. I'd say my biggest disappointment in moving to the social sector is seeing the time and energy that people spend, whether that's funders or corporations or even SIOs themselves, seeking to define that one true metric like what's that one number that proves what we're doing is good instead of investing in scaling solutions that work measurably and making quick calls on ones that don't.

 

With Andy Grove here, there are a lot of strategy work still being done in PowerPoint that's taking years off the people's lives who are building it instead of saving the lives of others. But today we're not gonna focus on disappointment, but on possibility. Mizorani said to us that MSRY should not have conferences and I wholeheartedly agree.

 

The women on stage with me make the implausible and the improbable very possible by bringing visionary ideas to implementation on tough social challenges, including women's workforce participation. I'm going to ask each of them two questions and ask they give really specific examples of what works even when it doesn't fit neatly into the rubric.

 

We all show our funders we're winding down at the end of the day, so I'm going to ask the timekeeper to keep me honest. That's you, Sakshi, I think. Then we'll wrap up with a few observations. And the lightning fell in the black. Let's get started. I'm gonna pick on you first, Tamina, because you're closest.

 

You funded diverse initiatives worldwide. Can you share examples of programs that have boosted women's workforce participation in the spirit of what tangibly have you seen that works and what the heck made them sustainable?

>> Temina Madon: Good question. Well, I'll start with what we've seen work. What I wanted to do is talk around the life trajectory of a woman and her family.

 

I think what we haven't talked enough about today is the importance of childcare and providing access to state funded and state regulated childcare. We have funded Rocket Learning, which is a partner that is building India's Anganwadi system. It is the world's largest daycare provider with I think 1.4 million women working in daycare centers across the country.

 

And what we've seen there is that when you upskill Anganwadi workers and also provide parents with digital tools that give them insights on how to care for their children, you see improved foundational literacy and numeracy in kids who are now going to from preschool to kindergarten. But you also free up women to work.

 

Women need care if they're going to contribute to the labor force. That's one stage is that I think we need to invest in childcare when children are small. And obviously there's evidence from business schools that women who run their own entrepreneurships, their own enterprises are far less effective if they have a kid on the hip.

 

And that's not surprising but they can't communicate with their suppliers as reliably. They can't attend to their customers as well. And I'm referring to evidence out of Uganda and also India observing women entrepreneurs and the struggles they face when they don't have childcare. So that's one piece, I think once you're in school as a young woman, there are a number of things we can invest in to make the transition to a livelihood a little bit smoother.

 

One Susan Athey just talked about is mentorship. There's evidence that a lot of youth come from school into the workforce expecting to find a job right away and, and expecting a high wage. Sometimes mentorship helps you adjust your expectations to be a bit more resilient to the bumps along the road.

 

Again, a study with BRAC in Uganda by a researcher who at the time was at Berkeley is finding that people who have a mentor can be more patient. They can persist longer and end up taking jobs that do get them that first step on the rung of the ladder.

 

So I think investing in mentorship is, is important. We heard about it this morning, but Suhani and others work, Lisa and others, to show women that if you have the experience of going to work, you can bring your whole family with you. Often in South Asia there are these norms around women being secluded, not going out of their homes for work.

 

What often a family needs is the experience of letting the woman engage in work, seeing that it's actually not that much of a catastrophe. It brings in extra income, it brings she maybe is feeling connected and feeling a sense of self affirmation by being in the workforce, you Just need to offer people those experiences that takes us to older age.

 

I think even mothers in law and fathers in law need better support and understanding the legacy they leave when they enable a young woman to flourish. Some work by a psychologist here at Stanford named Ayo Dado has shown that in northern Nigeria, where there is a big problem with getting girls back into school and delaying their age at marriage, we also face that problem in India, just appealing to the elder sense of legacy, that they are the roots of a tree.

 

But someday that tree is the granddaughter they have whose mother made it to school, whose mother is educated, who's going to help her own daughter persist through school and find a job. In those cases you see a big uptick in girls attendance and graduation from school and later marriage age.

 

Well, that'll be the follow up.

>> Perry Hewitt: And I love the point you made, really, Echoes of the woman earlier today said, sometimes it's a 74 year old man. Let's not keep pointing the finger at young men. Say hey, it's on you buddy. You gotta fix everything. So beyond funding a single intervention, how important is ecosystem building partnerships with government, NGOs, private sector, to ensure these have systemic long term impact?

 

I mean we think a lot about that@data.org, how do we bring the sectors together and make it work? But how do you think about building it as an innovative funder?

>> Temina Madon: So increasingly we are focusing on funding nonprofits or social entrepreneurs who have an elegant mechanism that they can leverage to scale.

 

Either they have built political or bureaucratic relationships with government, they figured out how to navigate the system, and now they're going to deliver programming through schools, through the Anganwadi, the daycare system. India is unique. It has a very strong presence, public sector presence that can be leveraged. We have innovative NGOs that can improve those systems.

 

But technology also is an elegant lever to scale and where you can bring women onto platforms for digital gig work to deliver advice and counseling or mentoring. There are digital mentors that are being tested in a lot of places we can scale through technology. The key is building delightful products that people want to use because you are competing with everybody else on the smartphone.

 

That a woman holds.

>> Perry Hewitt: And the Netflix and the couch.

>> Temina Madon: Yes, and the YouTube and the political messages coming in on WhatsApp. So we focus on NGOs that either have strong product management capabilities and are really focused on delighting their users or who have government savvy. And I guess the one thing that we would like to see, and I think it came up today, is More comfort engaging in political discussions.

 

Where academia is involved, research is unbiased, but the scaling of that research will never be unbiased. Can we get academics and politicians to be a little more comfortable sharing the same stage?

>> Perry Hewitt: Great, thanks so much. So Ritu, turning to you as a for profit entrepreneur has done amazing work.

 

You build a company with the mission of enabling more women to enter the workforce solving a very specific and important problem aligned childcare with. Can you talk about how that vision informs your business model and operations?

>> Ritu Narayan: My company Zoom was started here at Stanford GSB 10 years back and before that I was working for ebay which is one of the largest marketplace seeing how technology can really impact people's life.

 

Like people sitting any corner of the world would be earning money on this platform. And I was wondering, I was always struggling to pick up and drop off my children while at work and why nothing was done in that area using this wonderful technology and marketplace dynamics. And interestingly the thought came at that time that 30 years before that my mom had left the job for same reason.

 

So this whole issue is generational, it's societal and it has never been changed. So that curiosity led to the founding of the company and the idea was at that time 10 million women in US had left the job. And I realized like 2 million additional women during COVID left the job because of the same reasons.

 

The impact is really large for us. The development of the problem came through by having a deep insight and understanding of what women were or what women were looking for and what the experience of all of our stakeholders, parents, children, everybody was. And that informed our vision, that informed everything right here at Stanford.

 

Actually I was part of a course called Lean Loungepad where I interviewed, even though I was the user, I interviewed hundreds of parents and walk through their lives of what would really make them use. Trust is such an important aspect. Timeliness and safety is such an important aspect and reliability is such an important aspect.

 

Unless you cater to the true feelings of why people will not let go of their child and go to work, it's such a critical thing. You will not be able to attract them to use the product. Interestingly, when we launched, people didn't know I started the company, but I used to randomly hear, wow, this product is so delightful.

 

It feels like a parent developed it. I was like, of course a parent developed it. I was the early user and my kids were the early thing. Today we have come a long way from where we are solving this problem for millions of parents around the country. We are in 18 states serving 4,000 schools.

 

And that early stage insight has never gone away of how to provide the trust, safety and reliability on every single ride. Like we have done over 50 million miles at this point over the last 10 years in terms of taking kids from one place to another. But that basic insight of how to solve the problem, every single thing in our product that we think about on day to day, how our decisions are informed, come back to the same roots of how to change the experience of the student, how to change the experience of the parent.

 

And I'll just tell you a normal thing, like on one hand, our lives are so modernized. Like you can track your pizza, you can track your packages on your thing, but when you see here, like in us, even in us, in the public school transportation systems, when parents put their kids to the school bus, they have no idea where the kids are.

 

And solving that, just that problem brought so much reliability. And our customers are from all status of economic status, like they are people who are frontline workers and they rely on the public education system. They are people who may be able to afford to drive their kids to the school, but no matter where you come from, when you have the reliability that your child will be picked up, they are able to go to the work.

 

And that's what we have, and today the company is a very large logistics company and has evolved.

>> Perry Hewitt: Well, it's a level of security for both parents, right? We talk about things that benefit all parents as well as just women and definitely does both. What kind of data do you use?

 

I'll argue with Tamina later whether all academic research is unbiased, but okay. But when you look at data, whether it's your internal data or external research from academia or others, well, what do you look at that really shows that your model is expanding employment opportunities? How do you measure that?

 

 

>> Ritu Narayan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one interesting thing is people don't realize this motherhood penalty that's there and in the initial days, we used to call it about 4pm problem that the actual workforce works is not designed the way the school system is designed. The school system gets over at 3:30 and it starts at a different time and the work gets over at 5 or 6.

 

And if you leave early, you look like you are not fit for having the promotions and you are not the right candidate for the job. And it's so interesting, when Zoom started out, like women started going back to work, they started saying, I used to go at six, leave at three.

 

Everybody knew when I left. Nobody knew when I came in and that's what we basically started changing the narrative around it and making it happen. It is said that from the research, Oxfam research shows that even one person decline in participation of women and then leaving the job has an impact of around $150 to $200 billion on the economy.

 

And think about it like just in the COVID we had like trillions of dollars of loss because of that happening and our goal. That's what it roots us to. The second thing I would really point out too, it's not so related just to the company, but my experience being a founder, we all know that less than 3% of the funding, venture funding goes to the women founders.

 

And it's very daunting when you don't see the role models, you don't see the examples because you can't be what you can see. And in this I would really want to point out like Miriam here and Radhika, both were early investors in the company and they like them being on the other side and me not seeing the like not representation.

 

What a difference they made because today the company is one of the few unicorns in the country. And my idea was I would connect back to what Susan said about mentorship and doing something back or investing or being able to relate to the ideas. So that is something I really like today.

 

Definitely that metric is moving forward.

>> Perry Hewitt: A theme that keeps coming up in these conversations in the hallway conversation are the communities of women that support one another. I do a Pathways to impact series on data.org and that's a question I always ask her. What community bolsters your work?

 

It's so interesting to hear how often it's black and brown women in tech or mothers in my community I live in, it's not always tech related, what makes them succeed? Radhika, turning to you, you wear a lot of hats. You have a lot of interesting roles with Stanford Agiles and entrepreneurs and the UN Joint SDG Fund.

 

What innovative and intersectional gender inclusive approaches and financing are most effective in both shifting systems and scaling in the digital economy?

>> Radhika Shah: Yeah, I also want to continue the theme of focusing on peer networks, communities and mentoring. You've triggered this, Susan. All of us have been thinking about that.

 

And as I'm thinking of myself in the early days of my career in the world of tech, it was very lonely. The only professional networking was when people went to the bar at night and mainly only the men went and there was nowhere to go. I have been involved along with my mentor Miriam here In creating some professional, peer and mentor networks here.

 

Communities where people around with common affiliations, common interests and common purpose come together. I think those are very underrated. I want to talk about that as well. These are micro ecosystems here in Silicon Valley, but I think they are representative of what could exist in all parts of the world.

 

One such group is Rajiv Circle, which one of our mentors, Professor Rajiv Motwani, Stanford professor, passed away. Just to deal with this loss and to continue a spirit of helping without any expectations, we started a group called Rajiv Circle. It grew like wildfire, about 500 members eventually from the world of tech.

 

What was amazing was we didn't have that much structured mentoring. Even the unstructured model works very well. We had a time there was office hours at a cafe on University Avenue. Anyone who had a problem from the group could come and someone who wanted to be there and help would come.

 

And it was one-to-many or many-to-many, mentoring, problem-solving and it was amazing. And at that moment the trust was so high in that community. And what is unique about this group is because of the nature of it and the founders, I think it's very important representation at the top and at every level.

 

Because there were many senior women, co founders were women, it was very gender inclusive. That I think is critical. And the other such group is Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs founded by Miriam, which I'm part of the leadership and we have trip here somewhere. Trip, just raise your hand if you're around.

 

Who's our newest member? As you can see many women in the leadership. The group is another professional peer group. It is about 3,000 plus Stanford alumni have come together to advance entrepreneurship, tech innovation. It is also inclusive of both men and women. But what is unique is we don't hang out in bars.

 

Our gatherings are often in Miriam's beautiful backyard. They are on campus so they're very designed where everyone feels comfortable and feel like they belong, right? That sense of belonging is very important. People meet in an organic way. They meet role models, they meet mentors, they meet peers, they meet co founders, business partners and amazing things come out of that.

 

And for me personally it has been huge being part of this communities, helping build but also benefiting from them. And then that reminds me of Ritu's story. Ritu came by one day to my backyard and knew her brother and she was talking about this company very early days and I introduced her to Miriam and then Stanford Angels, a few members invested.

 

Mithyam's company invested and now she's our like we're so proud of Ritu, One of the star most successful companies out of Stanford Angels. But that power of community is really underestimated. As well as on the financing at Stanford Angels, we do also have a way where we also have structured and unstructured ways of helping the community.

 

On the structured side, entrepreneurs like Ritu, when she came first, they pitch to angel members and then again organically connections happen in that pitch process and whichever one to invest, invest in the entrepreneur. So it's access to finances, but I think the underrated part is access to the mentors, the partners.

 

And I have seen this work. Amazingly, I want to touch on zooming out to the world, the global South. One of my hats is founding co chair of the Breakthrough alliance of the Joint SDG Fund which catalyzes funding in these level of countries for transformative change. At a country level, two or more UN agencies along with other partners apply for the seed funding.

 

When they apply, one of the criteria is a marker. So if they're applying, say for clean energy transition for the country, the multiple markers have to satisfy. But always no matter what the theme, one of the markers is a gender marker and there is a score there. They have to do well on that and get more than a certain score.

 

And I'll give you examples on the clean energy transition. They have to show that both males and females will be equal beneficiaries from this transition. They have to make a very concrete case on that in the application. They have to show that there are actions there which will lead to when new jobs are created from this transition, equal participation in these jobs and decision making around these jobs for women that in other ways is advancing gender equality.

 

This is a minimal criteria. They have to show that they will clear before they get funding, whether it be for clean energy, whether it be for public health. And I do think bringing in this kind of gender centric focus in systems change really, really helps. It's not just the funding and it's not just that these three things happen.

 

It's creating that awareness in all the partners coming together in the ecosystem that this is important. And it's not just about women, but it's about the gender inclusion that men and women are thought of as equals and get equal opportunities.

>> Perry Hewitt: Makes me think of that earlier comment of it's easier to change institutions than people creating those kinds of metrics and baking them in.

 

I want to go to one real specific example, which is Ryss or Reis, how you've scaled in one state and you're expanding your model elsewhere. Can you tell us more about the program? We're a Little short of time. And then what factors you believe really made it work in the state and then be able to scale, which is what this panel is all about.

 

 

>> Radhika Shah: Yeah, yeah. RYSS is an initiative of the Andhra Pradesh government in India and it is one of the largest agroecology programs around community managed natural farming. It's innovative in that it's creating an ecosystem where climate resilient, sustainable agricultural system is being put in place. And as I understand, over 4,000 villages and 10 million plus men and women are involved in this.

 

And no pesticides, no herbicides, no fertilizers are used, biostimulants are used as catalysts and diverse crops, a lot of nature based solutions, but also new innovations and huge environmental benefits. What is powerful here is that this leads to many of these farmers are women, leads to huge agency and improved livelihood for the women.

 

They show it's improving their community's health as well, and more nutritious diet. But what is unique here in what has made this program succeed and scale in is that this is grounded and really anchored in women self help groups. These self help groups are the way that the knowledge about this kind of farming spreads from woman to woman.

 

They also have one of the core elements of success is that they're identifying what they call champion farmers, the best farmers, and then identifying and then coaching them and making them the catalyst for the change, for the knowledge sharing. And as it turns out, many of these are women.

 

And so the strengthening of the community knowledge is key and is through these farmers. This also I think one of the key things that helps succeed is that this is anchored within a way of livelihood agriculture that's already part of the community. So it's easier to get the women into the same kind of livelihood than some models where there's a very different kind of livelihood models being brought in.

 

So I think core to the success here is these three types of catalysts. And that is one of the things I think for entrepreneurs looking at scalable solutions is as a people catalyst, there's a process catalyst and then there is a technology catalyst. And they have very well identified these three catalysts and then found pathways to activate these catalysts.

 

And that's something I think really helps scale such innovations. My own link is there only as with one of my other initiatives, the UN Joint SDG Fund, we are looking at helping that initiative build bridges with these places. And they will probably be coming out to Stanford in a couple of months.

 

Anyone interested happy to make connections?

>> Perry Hewitt: That's wonderful, thank you so much, Miriam. I don't know how you have time to run ULA Ventures since you're mentoring half the people in this room. But I know that you invest primarily in US based countries. From your work in the US, what do you think could apply or scale to the global south or other regions of the world?

 

 

>> Miriam Rivera: Well, I do think that we have looked at a lot of areas that are probably some of the same things. I have worked in the not for profit sector, then I work in tech and have worked in venture capital. And access to capital in the US is also a big issue.

 

Only 1.4% of all the dollars in the US that are managed by funds of various kind are managed by women or people of color. That's here 1.4%. This is not an unusual problem and I think the same kinds of challenges app and we try to look at them at scale.

 

Transportation for kids was one issue. Elder care is another issue that we've looked at as well. Childcare is another issue. Obviously companies like food delivery have really changed. I think some of the things that women are typically responsible for like purchasing groceries, food preparation, other kinds of things like that have been venture backed.

 

And in Asia actually food delivery was already a thing much bigger than here in the US for a lot longer. But I think those solutions can be scaled. We haven't succeeded in every case. Child care is a very labor intensive thing. We've tried to do it through a model where we could do larger apartment based urban child care in buildings that could provide housing for the caregiver because that's one of the reasons why it's so expensive.

 

People can't afford to live in the places where they could work near kids. But even that proved to be a non tenable financial model. It would need subsidization in order to make it work. But for example, elder care is another thing where women are often the most responsible.

 

I helped take care of my mom for 28 years. My sister and I were a team. She was doing a lot of the physical care, was doing a lot of the financial care, interaction with systems like hospital doctors, etc. So, one of our companies, Monami, is focused on trying to help states and cities to be able to manage the care to the elderly in those communities.

 

They are typically working through not for profits, but they need systems to be able to at scale, understand what's happening on the ground. Is the food getting there? Is the home visit happening? Did the person see the doctor? Those kinds of things need to be kind of coordinated and they're helping to make sure that those elders are taken care of because people can't do good work when they're worried.

 

I kind of laugh at what you said about taking your child to work the first four months. When I had a child as a startup founder back in the 90s, I took her to work. I was actually asked to leave my own startup. I think in part. Well, I was told people thought, well, if it was my grandchild, I'd like the mother to stay home.

 

That was even in the late 90s here in Silicon Valley. These experiences are one of the reasons why I really have focused on are there ways which we can use the for profit model to help address some of these issues so that we can get more women to remain in the workplace?

 

Another thing that we focused on have been labor marketplaces such that people who have skilled work but often choose to leave the workplace because it's too difficult to manage their own children and taking care of their own children as well as working, but may be able to work part time remotely.

 

For example, speech language pathology is an area where a lot of pathologists were leaving schools. There were shortages of those people in schools. If they could work from home and they would have credentials that would allow them to potentially operate in different states, we could do that in a more scaled version.

 

That is a startup that had, you know, I would say middling success. It scaled, it helped tens of millions of children. But in venture we call that a middling success, but I think it helps solve a real social problem and a real need. Same thing with substitute teachers.

 

Another thing that obviously education is one of the biggest ways in which we can change the future of boys and girls. And particularly if we don't lose time in the work day with parents not having adequate teaching in the classrooms, et cetera. We've looked at a lot of different approaches that help to improve the things that women are typically in our society expected to be present for and to be providing to the family and overseeing that the kids are getting adequate education, transportation and other kinds of skills.

 

Those ways I think are scalable through technology often

>> Perry Hewitt: and realize some savings because. A ton of money is going into those things, childcare and elder care. So is there a way it can be better spent? Last question. When you're evaluating startups that aim to empower Women. Are there particular indicators or signals that you look for to say like, I think this could do long term growth and impact, whether it's founder characteristics or business characteristics might be interesting to hear.

 

 

>> Miriam Rivera: Yeah, we definitely try to look at problems that are just big problems that have large dollars associated with them. When we met ritu, we had no idea that busing for kids was literally the biggest transportation system in the United States of America. Who thought nobody really understood that.

 

So one is, does it have a big market? And then I can't emphasize enough how much the founder fit to the problem is such an important aspect of the success of a company. RITU had obviously lived this problem. I had lived this problem, sorry back there. And I had even been an early adopter.

 

Like there was a mom in my neighborhood who drove a car to school and like was paid by different moms to do it. Didn't think of it as a personal business opportunity to pursue. But when RITU was thinking about doing it at scale, I was like, yes, I know there are so many kids in my neighborhood that would have wanted to be able to or their families would want them to be able to do this.

 

But there was only one mom that offered the service, right? So it was one of those things where the founder had one. You had done like hundreds of interviews with parents. You really understood what was going on in the market. The other thing that we were really surprised by was the capital efficiency with which the company was addressing the problem.

 

There was a similar company in business at that time called shuttle with two Ds and dogs and it was shuttling kids and it was using Uber and Lyft drivers to transport kids. And, and it had a lot of the same insights that people really wanted to get their kids to school, but not the empathy that I think RITU developed by talking with parents, by having a lived experience of the problem of I really need to make sure my kid gets to school.

 

Like some of these kids were being left behind because there was a higher rate over here and anybody like I have, unfortunately, I think there were a couple of times when I was late to pick up my kid at daycare and I can't tell you how sad a kid is who's the last child left and how you will do anything to try and ever to have that happen to you as a mom.

 

Right. And literally one time I was like actually speaking in front of like the entire Google company and I was, they were delayed, delayed. And so I was late to pick her up. And you're Just in this conflict about how do you manage and having to do your job and also be there for your child in an appropriate way.

 

But that founder fit the empathy with the problem, the real deep compassion to the parents, I think was just something that was really helpful. And another insight for us, in the US, we often have kids that are living in multiple homes. They may have two parents that are not actually living together.

 

They may have a relationship with a grandparent, another caregiver that is providing housing for that child. So this ability to actually know where your kid is when they leave somebody else's home is such a real reassurance. So I think those were some of the things the founder fit to the problem.

 

The capital efficiency shuttle had raised something like 10 or $12 million to generate 60,000 rides. Ritu and her brothers, who she started the company with, had generated 20,000 rides with like $250,000. So really smart use of capital as well was something that just was very appealing.

>> Perry Hewitt: Thanks.

 

 

>> Radhika Shah: May I ask Mariam a question.?

>> Perry Hewitt: Yeah, sure.

>> Radhika Shah: Because we were earlier talking, Perry, about what is the technology innovations that can help with the women's workforce deployment? And I wonder, Miriam, if it's worth touching on your decision analytics model. Because I was thinking that can really help tackle human bias, that often investors, it can come kind of unwittingly, kind of women often get left out.

 

And having seen it, I think it's amazing having participated.

>> Miriam Rivera: So one of the ways, we use a methodology called decision analysis that was developed here at Stanford University by Professor Ron Howard in the School of Engineering. And it's an approach where we try to develop a picture of the market opportunity of a company.

 

This can be used for projects as well, for not for profit projects, right? Where you're trying to understand, like, as long as you can either quantify the value of people served or jobs held or some other way that you know what your unit of maximization is, you can look at what the market opportunity is.

 

In our case, we have to look at things like dilution, exit multiples, et cetera, to try to figure out what an opportunity looks like at the end. And that's one way that we are able to understand whether something is scalable, whether it would meet the kind of hurdle rate that we have for investment and also to prioritize projects, right?

 

So like if I have a potential opportunity that's looking like it would be a 20x compared to a 10x, I know that I should spend my time first on the 20x. And I think all of us in for profit or not for profit have to make the best use of time, which is really the scarcest resource anyone has.

 

 

>> Perry Hewitt: So it's like data informed triage.

>> Miriam Rivera: Yes.

>> Perry Hewitt: That's great. So I'm just going to do a quick wrap up of what I heard today. There are many tremendous insights. So for me, the three big things were can you identify the pressing problem, whether that's childcare or transport, don't fall in love with the technology, what's the real underlying problem?

 

And look for founder fit with that problem, can you leverage existing systems like whether that's self help groups or strengths of the community, like agriculture? So you're working sort of with the tide versus against the tide. And throughout all the panelists see that mentoring matters, whether that's senior colleagues who are devoting their time and attention to you or.

 

Or you're forming peer learning groups to share learnings amongst each other. Those are the three big things I heard, but I'd love to know what the audience heard. We have time for, I think two questions if we go quickly. Please go ahead.

>> Speaker 8: I have a question to founders and investors, I guess, are we creating a shrinking group of women for women?

 

Do you think that men are not capable of solving the transportation problem? And do you think women are not capable of solving deep tech problems? I guess what I'm wondering is in today's discussions all day, we're talking about how we need to step up and mentor our friends.

 

And I think that's fantastic. But I think we need to go out to a broader community because we just have the available people out there. I'm wondering whether we are unwittingly, even today, bias women for solving softer problems. We do a great job as women. We understand so many more dimensions, but I think there's a lot of smart women out there who need to stand up and solve the manufacturing problems and men who can really stand up and say I supported and I'm just going to use a terrible example here but when Naveen Chadha from Mayfield stands up and says I want to do this for women he's setting an example.

 

A lot of men need to come out there and do that. And I'm wondering whether as investors we should stand up and say I want to see more on the table, right? Just want to know what you guys think of that.

>> Ritu Narayan: I want to add to that.

 

It's very interesting you asked us because I used to work at Oracle, I'm actually a computer engineer undergrad. I was six women out of a class of 300 and worked in very technical fields at Oracle, Yahoo and then ebay and this whole view into the new world of platform that could really help people across the world.

 

KK to me and when I was moving into this idea the doubt in my mind was am I moving away from technical to something very soft like exactly what you said. And when I go for investment all the men out there would laugh at me and say this is a nanny problem, why are you solving it?

 

And surprising thing was that along the way everybody faced the same problem. Even though we talked we said women, women but parents essentially people are able to associate to the problem because their parent and they say their wives or their sisters or their mothers face the same issue.

 

The contribution the reason I mentioned Miriam in particular was in early days it's very hard because the representation is not there, it's very hard to trust anybody and give the money big money immediately. When Miriam put quarter million dollars and she went to Sequoia Capital and where she worked at Google and told her coworker hey this is the company.

 

You have to see what a difference it made. All of my rest of the investors were male investors top companies but it made so I just wanted to close the circle on that. Like women should absolutely do bigger problems and things but nobody will solve these problems if we don't have belief that 50% of the population is women.

 

And you can solve your problems and. They'Re big

>> Perry Hewitt: and that'll let them get into deep tech, and we have one more comment that. We're

>> Miriam Rivera: so I just want to say that this is a big technical problem. You know like think about like all the logistical issues that are involved in collecting that many kids and getting them to school on time in traffic and then in addition she's also solving an energy Problem.

 

Right. So like, and using solar power to help create backup battery systems and grid. What is it called now?

>> Ritu Narayan: Grid resilience.

>> Miriam Rivera: Grid resilience. So, like she's solving multiple problems. And 40% of our teams have a woman on the team. They're solving a huge number of problems.

 

I'm focused today on some of the questions that I think are more scalable for issues that impact women in the workplace. Because that was an investment thesis that for me was significant because I saw how many women drop out of the workforce over a career, right? Like I've been a working woman and mother my whole life.

 

I started working at 13, I'm 61 now. And it's just so rare to actually be able to have women colleagues. And if we don't address those real issues, we really lose that talent and that intelligence in our workforce, our society, government, everywhere. And to me, that is a real loss to everyone.

 

And I 100% agree with you that men need to be part of the solution. And I also think that a lot of the times, if we don't do it for ourselves, probably nobody will do it either. So there's a balance there. And for example, one of the reasons I started a firm was because there just weren't women led firms.

 

And so I thought, okay, if it's going to be, it's going to be up to me, right, to actually create it. And I think we have to go out there and create the things that we want to see in the solutions we want to see in the world.

 

 

>> Sakshi Shah: We're almost getting to the end of the day and have three very exciting talks ahead of us as we approach our closing. So hang in there everyone. You guys have been awesome. As Perry said, it's been such a positive environment because of all of you. So next we have Julia Roberts, President and CEO of BRAC usa.

 

No, not the actress Julia Roberts. But she'll be sharing how BRAC has successfully scaled solutions developed in South Asia and how those approaches are now shaping the future of work on a global scale.

>> Julia Roberts: Thank you all for sticking around. So brac. I do wonder how many people know about brac.

 

Okay, that's good. You know, it's world's largest NGO that I think most people don't know, sorry, I have to.

>> Speaker 10: Because it's not non European or non American.

>> Julia Roberts: Yes, and that's why I joined BRAC. So BRAC's focus has always been focused on women and realizing their potential.

 

And I think even coming after this last session that we had BRAC's unique approach is that it starts at the individual. And so, it's a real holistic approach to the challenges and the solutions for women and people living most in poverty. That's our main focus. A large part of our focus is both on social norms changes and the programs that need to wrap around that nationally statistic.

 

Bangladesh has made statistically significant strides with now 37% of women participating in the workforce, which I thought was the highest in South Asia until I heard the India presentation earlier. That said, it's 41% but also more girls are going to school than boys in Bangladesh. But on the flip side, marriage is still the highest in South Asia, gender based violence is increasing and all girls who are getting educated and getting employed are dropping from the workforce.

 

Why? We've heard about a lot of it today. There is still a lot of work to do in terms of gender norm changes, attacking patriarchy and evolving the ecosystem to support women to enter and remain in the workforce. Here we have a picture of a one start session with men and looking at harassment in the workplace.

 

130 million women in South Asia live in poverty. In South Asia, women are 18% more likely to be living in poverty than men and this is expected to increase to 30% by 2030. The female labor workforce participation in South Asia is also the lowest among the lowest in the world, just about 32% in 2023 compared to 77% of men.

 

Nearly 80% of working women in South Asia have informal employment, often in low paid, insecure and unprotected jobs, leaving them more vulnerable to shocks like climate change and pandemics. Given the scale and the number of those living in poverty, economic advancement will still require a continued focus, improving informal work for women.

 

BRAC pioneered the ultra poor graduation program approach 20 years ago in Bangladesh. When we discovered that our existing poverty programs were not adequately reaching or benefiting those furthest in need, they needed something more intensive and comprehensive to overcome the social and economic challenges they faced. BRAC designed the graduation approach, leveraging 30 years of experience.

 

Graduation is a multifaceted, time bound package of interventions that together equip people in extreme poverty with the resources and the training they need to advance. This program empowers women with assets, business skills, financial literacy training, coaching, enabling them to also invest in health, education and nutrition, thereby improving their household's trajectory out of extreme poverty.

 

We've reached 9 million women in Bangladesh and we add an additional 100,000 each year. We are also committed to bringing graduation to even greater scale by reaching 20 million by 2026. In partnership with governments across other countries both in Africa and in Asia. In South Asia and Southeast Asia, we partner in six states in India, Indonesia and the Philippines and this works alongside governments to be able to scale the programs through their existing national national social assistance programs, but with a graduation approach.

 

Also focusing on the informal work is microfinance. This continues to support economic development for women. BRAC's micro finance operations have significantly expanded across South Asia. As of 2020, BRAC serves over 7 million clients in South Asia. Notably and substantially the majority, 87.5% of these clients are women, reflecting BRAC's commitment to empowering women through financial inclusion.

 

Findings on BRAC Bangladesh Microfinance Impact survey showed that 83% of clients said the quality of life improved, 77% of clients earned more, 57% saved more, and 38% of clients were able to contribute to more meaningful decisions in their household. Learn, earn, Return Responsible Labor Mobility Partnerships the developing world faces a massive challenge.

 

A growing number of workers with not enough jobs Projected growth of working age population in low income countries will leave 560 million unlikely people living without wage jobs in their home country. High income countries, on the other hand, face the opposite problem, a growing number of jobs and not enough workers.

 

By 2050, businesses in high income countries will collectively need 400 million new workers. 75% of employers in South Asia report an unmet demand for digitally enabled workers. A green recovery in Southeast Asia could also create over 30 million jobs by 2030 in renewable energy, sustainable cities and agriculture.

 

Hence, a real need and opportunity exists for responsible recruitment practices and shared value partnerships between countries and job seekers. BRAC has therefore integrated our education, skills and migration teams into one unified unit. Acknowledging the strong interconnection between these, BRAC provides needs based skill development training for Youth, at least 60% of whom are female, on the use of agricultural tools, machineries, technology as well as training in non agricultural sectors including green jobs.

 

We utilize existing proven solutions that address the skills mismatch between job seekers and employers such as our skills training and apprenticeship model which is supported by multiple studies including random control randomized control trials. Findings from these studies of the model show that they significantly decrease early marriage in girls.

 

To be exact 62%. They increase income and employment by six times, significantly increase labor market participation, both current and long lasting, and then 95% job placement among participants. The program facilitates a transition from low productivity informal sector jobs to higher paying formal employment. This shift contributes to increased productivity and income stability among its participants and not a new topic.

 

The Care Economy A New Horizon in Bangladesh brac's home based Daycare initiative is an iteration of a flagship early childhood development play labs model which has proven to improve children's development outcomes that offers a safe, high quality and affordable childcare solution to labor based low income communities. The model is being piloted in urban and semi urban areas around Dhaka in which there is high concentration of working women.

 

It supports working mothers, particularly those in the manufacturing industry, by expanding access to reliable childcare while also providing childcare entrepreneurs with the skills and resources they need to develop these businesses. We've worked with thousands of children and hundreds of providers, but the opportunity and the demand to scale is there.

 

Finally, in wrapping it up, we will continue to focus in rural areas on reducing child marriage. In urban areas we'll address all the reasons why women are not participating in the formal sector workforce or why they're leaving it. Social compliance to make workplaces harassment free, making public space and transportation harassment free so women can be safe and secure while commuting.

 

And overall continue to work on targeting patriarchy but in a new way, by unifying leadership in corporate, legal, and cultural sectors. Alongside this, we'll continue to implement the programs. Microfinance and poverty graduation to build greater opportunity in the informal sector, skills and education to equip women for greater employment in the formal sector, and scaling our childhood care model so that families can be assured their children are well taken care of while they're at work.

 

We look forward to partnering with you and ever forward. Thank you.

>> Sakshi Shah: Next, let's hear from Soumya Ramakrishnan, head of Development Bay Area, the Nudge Institute, who will be talking about how Nudge is working towards the goal of increasing flexible digital employment opportunities for 1 million women in India by 2030.

 

 

>> Sowmya Ramakrishnan: Hello everyone. So I know I'm the last one before the closing and you guys have been amazing. So thank you so much and I will try to keep it fun. So I am from The/Nudge Institute, the future of work for women, it's not just a topic for me.

 

I have struggled with returning to work after maternity, the exhaustion of overcompensating as well as there was feeling small and vulnerable when I was trying to get back to workforce after taking a break for caregiving. So all of this and it was not just about me. I have seen it with so many women around me.

 

And some of them gave up, why? Because workplaces are not designed for our realities. But being here today, talking to so many of you on the sidelines, hearing so many amazing speakers, my heart is full and I'm hopeful that together we are going to get a workplace where women can bring their entire they don't have to compromise on any of their identities to thrive professionally.

 

With that, I would like to talk about the Nudge Institute. We are a nonprofit working in India to create resilient livelihoods for the underserved communities in India. And bulk of our work, women and their livelihoods is central to a lot of our initiatives and programs. And today, the next five minutes also, I'm gonna be talking about how we are working with, empowering, and nurturing social entrepreneur to solve for livelihoods in India.

 

Okay. Before that. Okay, so we started nudge is a 10 year old organization and when we started Nudge we struggled so much to get the initial capital as well as like mentoring market linkages and we just felt it was wrong like for profit startups at that point in time had all of these very easily available to them.

 

So social entrepreneurs as is we are struggling with very hard problems to solve when we don't have these basics right. So we decided we have to make the change in the space and seven years ago we started India's first incubator Accelerator exclusively for nonprofits. 130 nonprofits have graduated from our programs and we worked very closely with each one of them.

 

So that gave us an opportunity to observe the gaps in the system, capital and talent coming to social sector to work on social problems. So that's when we thought we should do something more. We should have another model in which we can kind of attract more capital and talent towards these programs.

 

So I know this is the last session, right? So I wanted to be. And you guys have been amazing. So I wanted to tell you a story. Who knows the connection between Napoleon and canned food? Anyone? Fantastic. Nobody knows. So this is gonna be a brand new, you know, okay, so rest of you, it's gonna be a story.

 

So Napoleon about 230 years ago, wanted to find a solution to preserve food for his troops. When they went on this long military campaign, he tried many different things and nothing came up. And finally he announced 12,000 francs. I just googled for what is the conversion. It says 14,000 USD, but I don't know if that's a true 1.

 

So 12,000 francs of an award for anyone who solves this problem. It took 15 years for a confectioner called Nikolai to come up with a solution where he was heating, boiling and sealing the food in glass jars to preserve the food. And it worked and he won the 12,000 francs.

 

And that is the basis of food preservation even till today. And food industry has not been the same. And where did it all begin? It began with a contest of 12,000 francs and somebody wanting to win it. So grand challenges have a very good history. Historically we know grand challenges have solved very significant problems.

 

But why don't we kind of apply the same logic to social impact sector? Why can't we solve this about clean drinking water for all small and marginal farmers making steady income or more women in the labor force. So at Nudge, one of our programs is to design and run grant challenges on very important social problems.

 

And we do that partnering with corporates as well as our principal scientific advisor, Office of Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. We have done three challenges and the latest one that we have launched is digital Nakri challenge, which is one of the stats Suhani mentioned earlier was 70% of urban women didn't step out once.

 

Another stat that we have had is like 200 million, it's an appalling number, 200 million women don't step out. Sorry, I saw the stop. But very quickly, 200 million women don't step out. Even once. So if women can't step out to go for work, can work come to them?

 

So I'm going to give you does that play on its own?

>> Speaker 12: Where we work has changed across centuries, from farms to industries to offices and BPOs and post the pandemic to our own homes. But for 160 million women of India, not much has changed. They remain time poor, bound to their homes and with household incomes that have largely remained stagnant.

 

Instead of being bystanders to our country's growth journey, can we reimagine work and work models that can bridge the gap between aspiration, opportunity and income for India's women? Enter Digital Nokri Digital knockeries are small tasks that are discreet by nature, can be performed online over shorter work hours and with a foundational skill set.

 

For the first time, technology presents a chance to bring elevated and sustained incomes to the doorstep of homebound women. This new class of digital naukris that are emerging around the world are being executed by people across a range of technical skills and digital literacy levels. In August 2024 at ChaCha, we began a journey to accelerate a better future for women at work.

 

Today we're excited to launch the first of five missions with a focus on improving the female labor force participation rate in India. Introducing the Digital Monthly Challenge by The/Nudge Prize and Mphasis of Fund Foundation. The Digital Naukri Challenge is a bold mission to pioneer and accelerate digital work models that work for women.

 

With the largest price pursed yet of rupees 6.5 crores, the journey will also give organizations access to a thriving ecosystem of investors, mentors and implementation partners. We're looking for solutions that lets homebound women choose their hours of work, access employment from wherever they are, and achieve economic freedom.

 

Not to stop there, but envision scale and sustainability. Are you working at the intersection of digital employment, gender parity and the future of work? Here's an opportunity for you to build work models that work for women and shape the next million digital jobs for them. Apply now to the Digital Naukri Challenge.

 

 

>> Sowmya Ramakrishnan: So, just to wrap it up, so we had launched the challenge last December. And we had 200 amazing applications, and of which we have shortlisted 11 challenges. And Suhani and Myna Mahila Foundation is one of our shortlisted challengers who are gonna be spending the next 18 months working on the Digital Naukri Challenge.

 

And come up with work models that work for these women to bring 160 million women into the labor workforce. So with that exciting thought, I'm gonna wrap my talk and thank you so much for being an amazing audience and thank you for this opportunity.

>> Sakshi Shah: Now we've left the best for the end.

 

Our closing session will be delivered by the expert herself, Radha Basu, founder and CEO of iMerit, who will speak about AI and the future of work and why hiring women is not just good for impact, but good for businesses too. Radha has built companies across continents and her insights are the perfect closing note for the day.

 

Welcome, Radha.

>> Radha Basu: I think you're all ready to go have a glass of wine and maybe talk about AI and what it's doing to us. I don't have any slides. I said I wouldn't do slides, I'm going to just talk. It's 2025 and we're in April of 2025 talking about future of work and women.

 

I really date myself by telling you that a long time ago when I joined engineering, my Engineering University had 2,780 guys and 17 girls. They were boys and we were girls, no question. I bring that up because one of the things we discussed is the future of work and what will we women be doing?

 

That's a long time ago. I actually did 50 years, celebrated 50 years of being in engineering with my class a couple years ago. I think that over the years I've really become very committed, passionate, and almost angrily passionate about getting to the point where there is not a need to have a Future of Work for Women summit to be able to create the future of work for women.

 

Because the current of work for women, the current of work will be women will have women in it. And what is having women in it mean? It means it's kind of a natural thing. When people ask me, my gosh, your company iMerit is 53% women. How is that even possible in technology and AI?

 

I take a deep breath because I could say some things I do not in an interview that I do not want to repeat, and I say, have you recently seen kind of the world. It's kind of 50, 50 to have 50, 50 in AI and in women in technology, which is the thing that I'm familiar with.

 

And I have to say that my bias, my lens, everything is technology and more recently AI. But that is the world that we want. That is the world we have to evolve to. I actually think that it's a world we are evolving to. I'll say a little bit about the organization, about iMerit but I wanted to share one more thing, since we're talking about AI.

 

I've been in AI now for over ten years. iMerit is actually 11 years old, and we've been in AI for 9 years. You're not going to find a whole lot of companies with more than 5,000 people in AI with 50% women in the technology space. But I wanted to share one more thing with you.

 

March 24th, two weeks before that, we were at this conference, in diaspora conference in Abu Dhabi in Dubai. And my talk was on AI, and somebody came up and said, really, in Silicon Valley, have you brought together women who can have an open dialogue without being on stage, without being recorded, about AI?

 

And another venture capital lady, who's fantastic, Vani Kola. Vani and I looked at Risha and said, yeah, why not? I said, Vani, when will you be in Bay Area? And she says, March 23rd to 26th. I said, okay, 24th, I'll get a group of women home who are really doing some great work in AI.

 

We ended up, it's like two and a half weeks later. I thought, at home, 25, 30 people. We had 85 people. And at 4 AM, I'm thinking, where in the whole world am I gonna put all these people? And reason I bring that up, and it was 40% men, important, important to have those voices.

 

Because it is important for us not to think about a man who's fantastic for promoting women. But I want everybody to be doing that. So we ended up having, it was a great dialogue, because so many of the women were CXOs who had started companies, running companies in technology, in research.

 

When I say CXOs, I'm just not talking about the corporate chair. I'm also thinking of people in research who are looking at what are the kinds of areas where AI can proliferate, can become important. And we have the guardrails of trust and safety around AI. We had such rich conversations.

 

And I'm sharing that with you because even we were surprised. And of all the women who came forward, in precision agriculture, medical AI, there are some really good conversations in medical AI. And we had the Googles and the Facebooks, sorry, Metas, and etc, etc, a lot of whom are actually clients.

 

We had some young people who came in and said, I want to understand what is the future of work for women in AI. Believe it or not, that was actually a conversation topic that evening. So with that, I wanted to say a few things. Future of work. And I'll talk about again about the AI side of things, because it's proliferation.

 

What made mobile devices so important? And I call them mobile devices and not cell phones, because they are like an appendage now. It's because it proliferated a large set of populations. A lot of women today use mobile devices for part of their livelihood, for part of how they exist.

 

If you take India, that is how Aadhaar is done, or that is how payments are done, or that is how somebody knows about, you know, when they plant a crop, et cetera. So if we want to proliferate AI, we better darned include be inclusive of the whole population, not just men and women in Silicon Valleys and Austins and Bangalores, but men and women across rural areas, across a wide variety of things.

 

Now, what does that mean when you take AI into precision agriculture? We are an AI technology company. The applications I'll talk about will go all the way from autonomous vehicles mobility, which is a big part of the work we do in cabin monitoring, or AVs and LIDARs and 3D point clouds.

 

Don't get me talking on this because I could talk for the next two hours. Two medical AI and the importance of being able to do breast cancer models that are inclusive of women. And when you're building the models that could be 5 million women in India, in Africa, in all parts of the world.

 

Because if you build models, you train models for breast cancer detection, cancer cell categorization, a lot of the work that we do, and you do it on a subset of women that are, and this is not even male and female subset of women that are in a particular geography.

 

Let's say in the United States you had basically not even at 20% of being able to work with those models with the accuracy and the quality you need. The same is true when you start to look at areas like precision agriculture and you can say, that sounds too techie.

 

No, it doesn't. Because I'll tell you the applications of that. One of the areas I really like that we're working and we work with some of the largest, we work with the deers and the Bosches, people like that, who are putting AI at the sensor. And when you're going through a crop, through a field, and there is, let's say as an example, a crop disease in a small area, it can spread to the whole field, destroy the field and you have to replant.

 

But if you catch it at the small area and you catch it early, that does not go into the rest of the field and there is proven, proven feedback and data, I shouldn't say feedback data, that, that can actually not just go 1.2 times, 1.8 times, but actually double crop production.

 

Same is true with water scarcity, with water. I can give you multiple examples there. Let me come to the women who are training the models. This is where. And I'll show you a one minute video at the end. This is where I love having been a founder of Imerit at what we do.

 

About 65% of the people working on these models, training the models are women, some of them from rural areas. And they can train the models for precision agriculture. We bring in agronomists, some of them are women, some of them are men. And we're able to bring in that expertise in and work on training the models.

 

How is this possible? We have two, I think barriers in our heads. They're not reality. One is, to work in AI, you need pedigree. What is that pedigree? It's a degree. What's the other pedigree? You need to have really been working in technology. In the urban centers that have the technology, the large technology organizations.

 

I can tell you we can take a group of people, young people, by the way, My company has 5,300 employees. I told you, 53% women. Average age of the company and you would never know it looking at me is 24.8. And they will say, very sassy group. And they'll say to me, they call me D.

 

Even our employees in New Orleans call me D. I don't even know if they know why, what that means. They say, dee, if it were not for you, we would probably be at 23 and a half. So that's a bold set of young people who want to learn every day, who want to learn new things and who want to go in English, in technology, in anything that you can have them learn.

 

You can take these young people, you can skill them. I will show you one lady who actually came to us with 12th standard, 12th grade, they call it 10 plus 2 in India, and very little English. I mean, she could not speak it. And I will show you, Kaikashan, half a minute video.

 

And she's talking to. That was an interview actually by one of our clients. And she's talking to the CTO of that company, who's an autonomous vehicle company. This is what we do when we train people, I have nine trainers. And she'll say, you know, in this anomaly labeling, you have not looked at this and that'll cost you a trust and safety issue.

 

And so that is the kind of thing that we can put together. So what I'm trying to say is we can skill young people. I work a lot of young people as I just said, young women in technologies in AI. And unless we do that and that contributes to the training of the models, believe me, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we will be talking about the AI divide.

 

I do not want to talk about AI divide. Whether I'm around or not, I want to address the AI divide now so that it doesn't happen. And the best way of doing this is to have an inclusive workforce, working on it, developing it, developing models, monitoring models, deploying them, what's called ML operations, being able to curate the data, to be able to test the data, to be able to apply the data in fields that are societal applications.

 

Yes, of course I'm a capitalist, you know, I started a company, took it public on nasdaq. Yes, I want to make imerit as successful as possible. But when business and success in business drives inclusion, not the other way around, success in business drives inclusion, then you are creating jobs in an inclusive way, and you're creating jobs that contribute to a global workforce that has 50% women.

 

And then you really can look at it and say if you can happen in AI, you know, you can pretty much say it can happen in a lot of different things. I'll give you one more quick example that not only talks about women in AI in coming from impoverished backgrounds, etc.

 

By the way, during COVID 37% of our workforce was a single wage earner for that family. And 62% of our workforce were the primary, primary by far wage earner in their family because they were part of doing work that had what work really continued then. Part of doing work in global AI applications.

 

Part of a global workforce that is really important. Recognized certified global workforce. We have one of the, I think it's now eight certified specialist centers in computer vision, Globally certified Computer vision center of Excellence. Excellence. And that particular one, not the rest of it, but that particular one happens to be 90%, 92% women, 92% women.

 

That particular one. We have lots of centers where it's 50, 50. So I know I have to close more recently we've been doing a lot of work in what's called corpus creation for large language models. What does that mean? You have the LLMs now you have to create the corpus that's focused on mathematics or legal or some of the sciences, etc.

 

It's called corpus creation for corpus creation. Unlike the belief of most people that AI technology will automatically create it. No way. Because it's just going to pick up whatever is out there, scrape it from the, from the Internet, and it's going to train it to whatever is available out there.

 

We have to create this corpus. So we had, we're working on a large project on this and one of the requirements, to give you an example, was for PhDs in mathematics who could also be able to create the corpus and do creative writing and be able to create this corpus, not creative writing, but writing to create the corpus on.

 

For the large language models to be trained. So they are providing the intelligence. This is where experts in the loop of AI is so important. They're providing the intelligence. We're like, my gosh, we need 200 or 300 PhDs in mathematics and they have to be in 14 languages.

 

How the heck are we going to find this? And so a couple of very brilliant ladies said, you know, a lot of universities and several people, I'm sure there are a lot of women who have PhDs in mathematics who for whatever reason have stepped out of the workforce and not working full time, et cetera, who would be glad to do this.

 

And this is a well paying job. Somebody had talked about the, you know, some of the future of work being in this kind of thing. So we went out. It wasn't just women. We went to universities. We went to Jesuit universities that were in, we got into Spain and into Italy and different countries.

 

We actually ended up doing it in 18 languages. We're still doing it. It's a huge project. And it's not just math. It's in other areas as well. And what was amazing is these two ladies who came up with the idea were right on. About 30% of the people we got were actually women who were not working full time or not working at all.

 

And there were PhDs in mathematics and they were so good, so good, that some of them, you just hired full time. I would stop at this point. There's so much I can share. I'll share a half minute video right at the end because you may not believe me that these three women you'll see are actually 10th or 12th standard.

 

And they are. You see the first one doing what she's doing, but they're working. One is working in autonomous vehicles, one in position ag. And the third one, she'll say herself. Can you please play that? Anudip is the nonprofit.

>> Kehkeshan Arzoo: I'm taking care of many AI projects or computer vision projects.

 

So basically the LIDAR, GenAI, and simulation project. And I have nine trainers under me who are reporting to me and they are also expert in these domains.

>> Barnali Pike: I'm basically working with the agriculture AI domain currently. You know, the smart agriculture equipment are available in the market. We are working with this kind of data.

 

We are preparing data for the machine or autonomous tractor, a smart spare, this kind of machine.

>> Tamilarasi: My father was a daily wagger and life for us was very difficult. I had to get married very early like many other girls in this community. Today I can proudly tell my child that her mother is a software engineer at bank of America in the morning and a computer coding teacher for the slum kids in the evening.

 

I want every girl, despite their background, to move ahead their life. Because if I can, they also can.

>> Radha Basu: I just picked this because this whole thing, my coming here, it happened this afternoon. I just picked this out of a much longer interview that took place. Kehkeshan, the first person, Kehkeshan and Barnali are employees of iMerit coming from the Anudip Foundation.

 

Barnali joined Anudip Foundation, she literally came from school from the rural areas of Sundarbans, one of the poorest families that she came from. And Kehkeshan was from an all-Muslim girls' community center called Metiabruz. And you can see Kehkeshan is now our project lead actually for autonomous vehicles. Bernali manages 450 people in Precision AG and the other lady you could see was is in bank of America.

 

So it is possible that will be not the future of work. But now very soon we'll be saying that's current work and I hope that happens quickly. Thank you. Sorry, sorry, sorry I took longer.

>> Suhani Jalota: It was beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Rather, I mean we've always looked up to Imerit as one of the biggest solutions in this space that's actually bridged this gap between where the employers are and where the out workforce women really are.

 

I just want to take this opportunity to thank everybody, everybody for being here. I don't want to take up any more of your time or of your evening but just so many thank yous to make this event really possible. A first really, really big thank you to Sakshi for really leading this overall conference.

 

Thank you so much for making this all really happen and leading our entire team. We have so many Stanford students, undergrads, we have our Mena Mahela team here. Shweta, Tanvi and Shraddha that's here and was managing VIP speaker management all day. Isha. We have Gauravi and Anjali and just so many others, Arya.

 

We've also had just so much support from various faculty members here at Stanford. Soledad Prillaman who was here, I think she has just left. Jessica, Casey. So the King center, entire team at King center. We've had so much of support from Onvin, Kim, Ezra and so many other people who have really, really made this event possible.

 

We could not have done this without them. Also just thank you to all the speakers and everybody who really made it from far and wide, from around the world to come for this conference and for this event. I hope that this leads to many, many conversations going forward as well.

 

I also wanna thank Alessandra and Nick. Catherine, Catherine, you're here. She wrote the report as well. Along with many insights that Sanvi and I pulled together with private sector companies in India. Thank you so much for that and if I'm missing people, I'm so sorry. Also really thank you to Varex for being a partner for this event, making the mementos for all the attendees as well.

 

And thanks to Hoover Institution for funding this overall event, making this happen and to Menamhela usa just everybody, everybody here. I also wanna just finally, before I close, just say we have a speaker photo. So all speakers, if you can just go outside, we have one photograph and then we are free to disperse.

 

Thank you so much, everybody, for making this event possible.