BJP Defends Reservations for Women, Corporates Disagree

New Delhi, India, 6 November 2014 – Meenakshi Lekhi, National Spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party, today defended her government in the face of India’s slide to 114 out of 142 countries ranked by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014.

Questioned during a televised session on gender equality at the India Economic Summit on the role of quotas in promoting female political participation, Lekhi said “I am all for reservation within the party system, because then you’re empowering women to contest elections.” Although the BJP has a 33% reservation, women currently represent just 23% of the political party.

Lekhi emphasized the need for women’s representation at every level of politics down to panchayat, where women can receive a five lakh grant to take part in the panchyat political process.

Arun Das Mahapatra, Managing Partner of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, India, agreed that “gender diversity in India today in the corporate world is one of the hottest topics,” but said corporates do not see reservations as the solution. “There is a desire among corporates to bring in more diversity,” he said, “[but] corporates are not talking about quotas.”

The biggest question in the corporate world, according to Mahapatra, is: “Where are the women? Where are the numbers?” According to the Global Gender Gap Report, the level of women’s participation in the Indian labour force is among the 20 worst countries in the world, and continues to fall.

Speaking on the rape cases reported from India over the past few years, Lekhi countered that “the rape capital of the world happens to be New York, not Delhi” and complained that the cases were over-reported compared to similar cases in the West. Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, representative for the South Asia Office for UN Women, took the view that “when you see statistics of rape rising, we should see that as a positive sign, because women are coming forward.”

Hunting for root causes, film director Shekhar Kapur said the fact that, “in India, a woman is seen as a man’s property” is an idea that needs to be expunged. He said that Bollywood reinforces gender stereotypes and called on everyone in media, including film and advertising, to take greater responsibility to challenge these stereotypes. Of his own experience he said, “For me, making the Bandit Queen was a completely liberating experience because I managed to shed the burden of masculinity.”

Picking up on this theme, Reichmann Tavares said that “men are also imprisoned by the gender roles assigned to them” and called on women to “form better partnerships with men” to help them understand more clearly the position of women within society.

Taking a longer view, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, Documentary Filmmaker, SOC Films, Pakistan, a Co-Chair of the India Economic Summit, said she is encouraged by the women across the region that are rising up and choosing to be part of a “silent revolution”, taking up roles that their mothers never did. She added: “The next generation will have the idea in their head that violence against women is wrong.”

Following almost three decades of collaboration, the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) hosted the India Economic Summit in New Delhi from 4 to 6 November 2014. Over 700 participants convened under the theme, Redefining Public-Private Cooperation for a New Beginning.

The World Economic Forum works with a number of governments worldwide to create an enabling environment where women are better able to fulfil their professional potential. These Gender Parity Task Forces aim to provide a data-driven approach to addressing the challenge of gender disparity; to enable interaction and collaboration among a multistakeholder community and; to exchange or share tested interventions that have closed the economic gender gap through private- or public- sector initiatives.

Notes to Editors