Women's Empowerment

It’s wild that Tamil Nadu accounts for 43% of Indian women in manufacturing 🙌🙌 If we consider only TN’s population, the %age of women out of the total manufacturing workforce would be way higher, and definitely higher than 60%. And I say that this is wild because even in China, women in the manufacturing work floor make for 45% of all headcount! .. And this isn't by accident. The state has for long had policies which incentivise industries to employ women, including subsidies for training and infrastructure. And then, there is the 'Thozhi' hostel scheme run by Tamil Nadu Corporation for Development of Women providing safe and affordable accommodations for working women near industrial clusters. Parallely, the state also spends ~Rs 3k crore a year to ensure free bus travel support for women. These alleviate two of the major barriers to women's employment - mobility and safety 🙌🙌 .. Parallely, the state also runs a scheme called Pudhumai Penn which benefits girls studying in Govt run and aided schools in three ways. 1> Monthly basic income from Class 6th onwards until the completion of undergraduate, diploma, or ITI courses 2> Given these girls come from financially weak households, that income ensures girls are not a liability on the household, removing hurdles to their higher education, and also delaying marriage 3> And in many cases, these girls, not having been a liability for years, end up also earning and often supporting the family with their wedding expenses .. But, actually, all the things I mentioned are an outcome of societal upbringing 🙌🙌 -> From the inception of the Dravidian movement in the early 20th century, the state has been a leader in women’s education and employment -> This cultural legacy continues to influence TN's policies, making it a beacon for gender equality in the workforce within India Consider Maharashtra and Gujarat. Women account for just 11% and 6% of women on the manufacturing floor. .. And this has also led to follow-on employment. With women working outside, there's been a noticeable increase in demand for domestic help, creating jobs for others and distributing economic benefits further into society. This has not only made women's employment more sustainable but has also boosted the local economy. .. And the impact on per capita income is evident 🙌🙌 TN’s per capita income (~Rs 2.4 lakh in FY24), is among the highest in India - 4.5x of Bihar’s and 3x of UP’s. Increased earning potential of women in TN lifts the stat, also driving up household incomes, spend on education, health, food and discretionaries. Result? The state’s growing only faster, despite being at a much higher base. .. That said, I share non-trending insights from the world of business with 20k+ investors on WhatsApp daily. Do check out: https://lnkd.in/gKrAWbnt Also, explore my newsletters Deepdives with Jay (https://lnkd.in/gA5gSCjJ) and Decoding the Dragon (https://lnkd.in/gx2VuZe6) Best, Jayant

I was shadowing a coaching client in her leadership meeting when I watched this brilliant woman apologize six times in 30 minutes. 1. “Sorry, this might be off-topic, but..." 2. “I'm could be wrong, but what if we..." 3. “Sorry again, I know we're running short on time..." 4. “I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but..." 5. “This is just my opinion, but..." 6. “Sorry if I'm being too pushy..." Her ideas? They were game-changing. Every single one. Here's what I've learned after decades of coaching women leaders: Women are masterful at reading the room and keeping everyone comfortable. It's a superpower. But when we consistently prioritize others' comfort over our own voice, we rob ourselves, and our teams, of our full contribution. The alternative isn't to become aggressive or dismissive. It's to practice “gracious assertion": • Replace "Sorry to interrupt" with "I'd like to add to that" • Replace "This might be stupid, but..." with "Here's another perspective" • Replace "I hope this makes sense" with "Let me know what questions you have" • Replace "I don't want to step on toes" with "I have a different approach" • Replace "This is just my opinion" with "Based on my experience" • Replace "Sorry if I'm being pushy" with "I feel strongly about this because" But how do you know if you're hitting the right note? Ask yourself these three questions: • Am I stating my needs clearly while respecting others' perspectives? (Assertive) • Am I dismissing others' input or bulldozing through objections? (Aggressive) • Am I hinting at what I want instead of directly asking for it? (Passive-aggressive) You can be considerate AND confident. You can make space for others AND take up space yourself. Your comfort matters too. Your voice matters too. Your ideas matter too. And most importantly, YOU matter. @she.shines.inc #Womenleaders #Confidence #selfadvocacy

We talk a lot about women supporting women. But what happens when that support stays performative? I’ve been in rooms where the woman at the top made it harder for the next one in line. Where the mindset was: “If I had to fight for this seat, you should too.” This isn’t empowerment. It’s internalized scarcity. Real empowerment? It doesn’t happen on panels. It doesn’t happen through hashtags. It happens in moments no one claps for: — 💼 When you teach a younger colleague how to negotiate like she belongs in the room. — 👥 When you introduce her to people who will actually open doors. — 🧠 When you offer her insights she won’t learn in business school or a trending carousel. — ✍🏼 When you share the mistakes you made so she doesn’t have to repeat them. We keep saying representation matters. And it does. But what matters just as much is transference. The transfer of wisdom. Access. Network. Power. I’ve seen too many women given a platform, but never handed the playbook. Mentorship isn’t a bonus. It’s the missing lever. If we want more women in boardrooms, building companies, shaping capital— We need less rhetoric and more real support. 👣 Start here: Who's one woman you’ve helped behind the scenes this year? And who's one woman you can reach out to today? Let’s move beyond optics. Let’s build something that lasts.

India’s Economy Has a Missing Engine: Women Especially women from lower-income backgrounds. A McKinsey study estimated that India could add $770 billion to GDP by 2025 by simply advancing gender parity in work. But instead, female labor force participation fell from 32% (2005) to ~20% (2020). https://lnkd.in/dvys4E6f Despite progress in some areas, female labor force participation in India is among the lowest in the world, even lower than some Sub-Saharan African countries. Why Are So Many Poor Women Underemployed or Not Properly Utilized? 1. Social and Cultural Barriers • Deep-rooted patriarchy restricts women’s mobility, especially in rural or conservative areas. • Girls are often seen as temporary earners, their “real role” is expected to be at home. 2. Safety and Mobility • Public transport is unsafe or unavailable, making it harder for women to travel to work. • Fear of harassment, especially in cities or during night shifts, keeps families from letting women work. 3. Unpaid Labor at Home • Women spend hours daily doing unpaid work: cooking, cleaning, child care, elder care. • This invisible labor is neither recognized nor redistributed. • Poor women, in particular, bear the double burden of poverty and gendered expectation. 4. Lack of Suitable Jobs - There is no structured pathway from informal to formal employment. 5. Policy & Structural Failure • Skill development programs often don’t reach women or are too generic and disconnected from market realities. • No large-scale, nationwide push for rural women entrepreneurship, decentralized production, or employment guarantees for women. • Schemes exist, but access is broken due to middlemen, corruption, or lack of information. Poor women: • Walk miles for water • Raise children with limited resources • Cook without clean fuel • Manage micro-budgets like CFOs of households Yet the system never sees them as ‘employable’ or ‘productive’. What Can Change This? 1. Localized employment: Bring dignified work to villages (e.g., food processing, crafts, decentralised manufacturing). 2. Safe, affordable transport: So women can commute without fear. 3. Women-led cooperatives and micro-enterprises: Let women own their work, not just participate. 4. Recognition of unpaid work: Design policies around time poverty, not just joblessness. 5. Mindset shift: From “allowing” women to work to realizing they hold the key to national growth. We talk of “demographic dividend” but leave half the population on the sidelines. A country that sidelines its women isn’t just unjust, it is chronically underperforming.

Bihar created India's safest public transport by understanding what women actually need, not what others think they need. In 2025, when most states were debating women's safety in theory, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took action. He didn't just add more police or install more cameras, but understood the real challenge: women needed their own safe space. The insight was brilliant: → Regular buses: 90% women, overcrowding, harassment → Pink buses: 100% female environment, breathing room, dignity The execution was even smarter: They didn't randomly plan routes. They studied women's movement patterns: → Colleges like Magadh Mahila College, Patna Women's College (Autonomous) → Hospitals like Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) and AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi) → Markets where women shop → Railway stations for working women They didn’t just hire staff - they created jobs for women, by women. Female conductors now earn ₹15,000/month, women are being trained as drivers, and nodal officers overseeing operations are women too. The technology wasn't generic either: → Charging phones and microphones → CCTV cameras in every corner → Panic buttons within easy reach → Security features controlled by drivers from their seat A 19-year-old conductor Nandani Kumari says: "This job is my family's lifeline. The bus feels safe to work in since all passengers are women." But Bihar's masterstroke? The pricing strategy: → ₹450 monthly pass for students → ₹500 for working women → ₹6-25 single journey fares The result? 750+ women using the service daily in Patna alone, with demand so high they're expanding to 80 more buses. What other public services need this kind of women-centric redesign? #womenempowerment

“If she’s left out of the data, she’s left out of the solution.” This isn’t just a slogan—it’s the hard truth many organizations overlook. When women’s experiences, contributions, and challenges are not captured in data, strategic decisions are built on partial truths. We cannot address what we don’t measure. I remember working with an organization during a DEI audit where gender representation looked fairly balanced on the surface. But when we dug deeper, the data told a different story: • Leadership roles were overwhelmingly male-dominated. • Performance reviews showed a bias in language—men were described as “ambitious,” women as “cautious.” • Promotions for women plateaued at mid-management, despite equivalent performance metrics. The solution wasn’t more policies or more workshops—it was more data. Data that captured not just headcounts but lived experiences. Data that told the story of pay equity, growth opportunities, and workplace culture. When women are left out of these metrics, they’re left out of the growth, the opportunities, and the solutions that move organizations forward. If you’re serious about equity, start with the numbers. Measure what matters. Because if she’s not in the data, she won’t be in the boardroom either. #diversity #equity #inclusion

🧾 The cost of being seen isn’t the same for everyone. For women, it’s a "Surchage" no one talks about. 👩 Take Ling, a regional sales director. When she speaks up in strategy meetings, she’s told to “be mindful of her tone.” When she stays quiet, she’s labeled “not strategic enough.” It’s not a leadership gap. It’s a cost-benefit calculation, rigged against her. 👩 Meet Rina, a product lead. She’s built three go-to-market launches. Each one a success. But when promotion time comes, her boss says: “You’re doing great. Let’s not disrupt the team dynamic.” Her competence became the excuse to keep her contained. 👩 And then there’s Julia, a COO candidate. She’s been asked to mentor the next generation of women leaders. But no one’s sponsoring her to be the next CEO. 👉 Because championing others is celebrated. Championing yourself gets complicated. But the problem is, the system charges women extra for the power move: • Speak up? Pay the “too aggressive” tax. • Stay humble? Pay the “forgettable” fee. • Stay silent? Pay with your career.    ⚙️ So how do you stop overpaying for power? You fix it by changing the cost structure. Here are 4 strategic power moves to change the terms: 1️⃣ 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗚𝗮𝗺𝗲. Most women try to optimize for comfort: "How can I be visible without making anyone uncomfortable?" Wrong question. Ask: "What does this room need to believe about me to attach power to my name?" Then behave in a way that enforces that belief, consistently! 2️⃣ 𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁. Workhorses get thanked. Strategists get promoted. Shift the conversation from "how hard you worked" to "what changed because of you." Make people dependent on your thinking, not your labor. 3️⃣ 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁, 𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗺. When women lead, people often don’t know how to process it. So they fill in the blanks, with assumptions. Don’t let the room guess. Tell them why you’re doing what you’re doing. Say 👉 "I’m recommending this because it moves us closer to the long-term goal." 👉 "I’m raising this because keeping quiet will cost us more later." 4️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗼𝗼𝗺’𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. Decisions about you happen in rooms you’re not in. Those rooms won’t remember your to-do list, they’ll remember the shortcut version of you. Make sure the phrase people repeat about you is a power narrative, not a service narrative. Keen to own your narrative? 📅 Join our online workshop on July 24th 7:30 to 9pm SGT 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 👉 https://lnkd.in/gVT2Y59Q 👈 For women who are done paying extra just to be in the room. 👊 Because if you keep paying the power tax quietly, you’ll be subsidizing other people’s promotions forever.

Yesterday was International Day of Rural Women , a day that rarely trends, yet these women are the central actors of Africa’s economy. The theme this year, “Rural Women Rising – Shaping Resilient Futures with Beijing+30,” is a reminder of how much resilience lives in Africa’s rural heartlands. While my reflection today is not about the aspirations of Beijing+30 per se, it’s about the women who till the soil, trade in open markets, process food by hand, and keep entire communities running often without ever being recognized as “entrepreneurs.” Across the continent, rural women contribute up to 60–80% of food production, yet most remain locked in subsistence cycles : producing, feeding, and surviving, but rarely scaling. The barriers are not just financial; they’re systemic. Limited access to credit, gendered land rights, exclusion from digital finance, and low participation in value chains keep many of their enterprises from moving beyond survival. But the story is not all grim. Over the years, I have witnessed incredible transformations from women’s cooperatives in Nigeria that pooled savings to start cassava processing centers, to smallholder farmers in Mozambique who are now supplying formal markets after gaining access to tailored financing to a young female chili farmer in Nyanza that has gone beyond owning and cultivating 1 plot of land to half hectare. These stories matter because they demonstrate that with the right combination of finance, capacity, and policy reform, women don’t just lift their households, they lift entire economies. If we want “resilient futures,” then rural women’s enterprises must move from subsistence to significance. It is time we stopped treating their contribution as charity and started recognizing it as the powerful economic engine it is. So, as we celebrate Rural Women’s Day, let’s do more than applaud resilience , let’s fund it, formalize it, and scale it. Because the future we are building in Africa is only as strong as the rural women holding it up. #InternationalDayOfRuralWomen #WomenInAgribusiness #FinancialInclusion #GenderFinance #AfricaRising #BeijingPlus30

Gold Loans Are Not Just About Collateral. They Are About Courage. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently released its draft guidelines on Lending Against Gold Collateral, 2025. I feel it is important to share what I’ve witnessed firsthand through my work with women in rural India - where gold loans are not just financial tools, but lifelines. At Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank Limited run by and for rural women, gold loans are more than a product. They are part of our story - and the stories of thousands of women who rely on them to meet urgent needs, invest in their children’s education, or keep their small businesses afloat. In patriarchal households, gold is often the only asset a woman truly owns and controls. During COVID-19, our emergency gold loans allowed women to meet critical needs when other credit dried up. It was fast, dignified, and humane. Rural women don’t buy gold for ornamentation. They acquire it slowly - through informal savings and credit. A bangle or earring becomes an emergency fund. A quiet form of financial independence. A bridge to the formal economy. In the 2012 drought, I met Kerabai Sargar, a cattle farmer who mortgaged her gold to buy water and fodder to save her animals. Her gold gave her the power to stay and fight for her land. That loan wasn’t just a transaction - it was resilience. In the early days of Mann Deshi, I met Sona Bai, who came to our bank in tears, asking for ₹50 to treat her sick child. She offered an earring as collateral. Our branch manager gave her the money without taking the earring. Two weeks later, she returned and repaid the amount. The RBI’s draft proposes stricter documentation, end-use monitoring, and proof of ownership. While reasonable in principle, in practice these measures may exclude the very women they aim to protect. How do you prove ownership of gold inherited from a grandmother? Or show receipts for wedding gifts received decades ago? How do you tell a mother that her child’s fever must wait for paperwork? I urge regulators to consider the lived realities of rural borrowers: Allow self-declarations for small-ticket gold loans. Recognize informal and inherited gold as legitimate collateral. Ensure emergency lending remains fast and dignified. Once, at an RBI meeting where Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam was present, I was asked, “Why do women still mortgage gold for loans?” Dr. Kalam shared how his aunt had mortgaged her bangles to fund his college education. As we build more robust financial systems, let’s ensure they are not only safe - but also sensitive. Because gold loans are sometimes the only thing standing between a woman and a moneylender. Between dignity and debt. Hope and hunger. Mann Deshi Foundation Rekha Kulkarni Shinjini Kumar vandana bhansali Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship Yale World Fellows Ashoka #FinancialInclusion #RuralWomen #GoldLoans #WomenAndFinance #DignityInFinance #InclusiveBanking

Creating space for others is a fundamental part of leadership. As women leaders, we have a responsibility to open doors, elevate voices, and shape environments where more women can rise, contribute, and lead. Here are a few ways I’ve put that into practice with my own team: ➡️ Building meaningful feedback loops: Make sure women are heard in meetings, then follow up to see if their input and ideas are being carried forward. If not, help amplify them. ➡️ Recommending women for stretch projects and speaking opportunities: Visibility creates momentum, and the right opportunity can change someone’s path. ➡️ Creating space intentionally: Whether that means starting an internal community for women or advocating for them when they aren’t in the room, these actions matter. When we lead with purpose and lift others up along the way, we build not only stronger organizations but also a more inclusive future. #Leadership #Mentorship #WomenInTech