What Happens to All Those Brilliant Female Students in India? - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The top 3 spots in the rigorous and all important Indian Civil Service exams this year were taken by girls. Girls have posted higher results in the overall school examinations for the past 11 years.

• So, asks Namita Bhandare in her biweekly column for the national business newspaper Mint, why aren’t there more women leading Indian businesses and ministries?

• Bhandare faults economic and cultural factors that limit women’s independence even when they seek to express it … with many women themselves questioning any opposition to those factors.

• The economics come in the form of lack of ownership — most working women have no control over their pay and other assets, with either their husbands or, if unmarried, their families (read: fathers) controlling the money.

• The culture figures in the “social conditioning of an either/or attitude to marriage and career” — a pressure that has changed much on the surface but little in mind-sets, Bhandare writes.

• “Women are conditioned to be responsible for everyone and everything: their homes, their husbands’ careers, their children. But we are never taught to be responsible for ourselves, to take control of our lives.”

• For women to truly succeed, India has to change its approach to its daughters, Bhandare concludes: “When they excel, or even if they don’t, they must be encouraged to pursue their dreams.”

Namita Bhandare’s column in Mint