In line with this yearโs theme of women’s dayย โWomen in Leadership : achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 worldโ,ย XLRI– Xavier School of Management, celebrates International Womenโs Day by setting up aย Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusive Leadershipย atย Delhi-NCR Campus to promote women’s participation in economic activities and help bring more balance in the society.
The new centre will be led by Prof. Shreyashi Chakraborty, an Assistant Professor in the area of Organizational Behaviour at XLRI. Her primary research interests are inequalities, diversity management practices in Indian workplaces and career experiences of women employees. She had also won the Emerald Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in the area of HRM in 2017.
The centre will be housed at the newly opened Delhi-NCR campus, which was borne out of XLRI’s desire to further strengthen the Industry-academia interface further. The NCR region is a hub of manufacturingย and a centre of the knowledge economy and will help facilitate the new centre’s functioning.ย Theย Delhi-NCRย campus is nestled in a serene,ย 37 acre green campus close to Jhajjar, a 45-minute drive from Gurgaon, and has world-class infrastructure.
Prof. Shreyashi Chakraborty, said, โIn September 2020 the World Economic Forum published their 14th Gender Parity Report. The research report was alarming – India ranks very low. The Top-5 countries have closed 80% of the gender gap – Iceland leads at 82%. India is at 112th position – a 4 spot decline, behind several LATAM, Caribbean, middle-eastern, and north-African nations. Globally, the economic participation and opportunity gap expanded in 2020 – a worrying sign that women are persistently less present in labour-markets than men. WEF report calls out that economic opportunities for women are extremelyย limited in India (149th rank) at just 35.4%, followed only by Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.ย The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified the gender-related challenges. There is a severe need for promoting women to participate in economic activities for theย betterment of women’s economic empowerment.โ
Fr. P Christie S.J, Director,ย XLRIย commented,ย “Our ambitious goal is to significantly increase the participation of women in the workforce within the next 5-10 years through strategic and broad-based interventions. As a first step, we are setting up the Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusive Leadership.”ย Interestingly, Jesuits as an order decided to focus on women empowerment in 1995 (more than 25 years ago). They committed to the inclusion of women via a formal decree signed in that year.”
XLRI as an institution has always been a pioneer in taking up various issues like Ethics, Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship much before they became fashionable. The centre brings together a large group of professionally well-established alumni and industry practitioners who will collaborate with XLRI to design and deploy a wide range of interventions to transform the daily livesย of Indian women.
