People are waiting to see you fall, immense pressure on women: Naina Lal Kidwai

“I think for all of the women who embarked on the careers in the early 80s felt like goldfish in a bowl. You always felt you were on display and there were people just waiting to see you fall, ” says Naina Lal Kidwai, former president of FICCI.

The veteran banker is of the view that women face a lot of pressure in their workplace. “I had done a book on 30 women CEOs, their voices, their stories. And pretty much every one of those women CEOs had felt that pressure of having to work twice as hard to be heard, to be understood, and to make their way. Don't forget that working hard doesn't just come from the office environment, but also from trying to balance all that happens at home, where the social pressures of being the ideal wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and daughter, all of that also weigh on women,” Kidwai said in an exclusive conversation with Udayan Mukherjee, global business editor, Business Today TV.

On the former ICICI Bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar episode, Kidwai said that there was additional scrutiny around it. “I'm glad that there were so many other competent women there at the time, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Shikha Sharma, and others that have emerged after that as well, which has maybe not made it a man/woman issue, after all, there are men who been in similar situations too. So, it is one of those incidents, which while very unfortunate, did take some of the sheens of women CEOs,” former country head of HSBC India added.

Commenting on getting businesses to act on climate change, the senior adviser of Rothschild & Co India said, large companies are getting pressure from investors. They're getting pressure from the banks, foreign investors, and foreign banks. Kidwai said, “the issue is really much bigger when we look at the MSME world. And, I think there we need to really look at corporate parks, where the provision of these services is happening at a global climate sensitive stance which is providing these services, energy as renewable energy or circularity of water being addressed.”

Naina Lal Kidwai has several firsts to her name. She was the first Indian woman to get an MBA from Harvard in 1982, the first woman president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and the first woman to head a foreign bank’s operations in India.

Kidwai also works for causes that are closer to her heart: environment, sanitation, access to water, and women’s empowerment, to name a few. She thanks her husband’s work with SEWA, an association of self-employed women, and the India Sanitation Coalition, which the couple founded in 2015, for helping her understand women and empowerment at the grass-roots level.

Here is the link - https://youtu.be/rNEgFw0MhVA

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