Pooja Bangad, the co-founder of SheWork.in — a platform that connects women with flexible work opportunities in the tech industry — remembers what got her started as an entrepreneur.
“Coming from a traditional joint family, I am a first-generation female entrepreneur. After my graduation, I wanted to work and travel overseas. I got a good opportunity in the United Kingdom to work and study, but my family did not allow me to go. I remember my relatives asking me, ‘What if you get a high-paying job? How will we find a suitable marriage proposal for you?’ I also remember people saying, ‘What will you do with so much education’. [After listening to such comments] I decided to be independent and do something on my own,” recalls Pooja, a native of Pune, in a conversation with The Better India.
Following a master’s degree in computer science, she joined a reputed multinational company (MNC). What she witnessed there would go on to determine her professional choices.
“As a very junior employee of an MNC, I remember the struggle my female manager went through for her promotions and on-site opportunities. Working at that company for two or three years, I always saw her professional ambitions stifled compared to other male managers in the company despite her experience and skills,” she says.
“She never got on-site opportunities that other male managers had because she was judged for having two children. Nobody asked her whether her family was flexible to the idea of working on-site. She would work round the clock, support every member of her team, and even support her colleagues working on-site even though that opportunity was denied to her. I vividly remember feeling very bad for her. I desperately wanted to do something for her but couldn’t because I was still a very junior employee with no voice or power,” she adds.
Since college, however, she kept in touch with her friend and batchmate Tejas Kulkarni, who is now the CEO of SheWork.in. As Pooja recalls, “During our many discussions, Tejas and I always envisioned wanting to do something for women working in the tech industry.”
In 2019, Pooja and Tejas quit their respective jobs at different MNCs and started their software company called Telemerge IT Services Pvt Ltd alongside Pune-based entrepreneur Tushar Kulkarni and made their foray into the tech industry. At the outset, they established an informal rule that they would give more opportunities to women in their company to identify how it goes, before solving this problem for bigger tech companies in India. Suffice it to say that they encountered different challenges when it came to hiring women.
While running Telemerge, they learnt that women looking to rejoin the workforce after a sabbatical or maternity leave were hesitant to get a job in the tech industry because they felt trapped, found travelling a challenge, and were struggling to strike a balance between household and office work. This was a problem they were going to target.
“We also tried to identify other such problems. By March 2020 we created our own platform called SheWork.in, specifically for women talent in India, under the aegis of Telemerge. As a priority, we have created a community where our talent advocates/mentors talk to women (particularly those coming back to work after a sabbatical) and help them restart their careers,” explains Pooja.
“We joined hands together to launch SheWork.in because Tejas was inclined to my aims and supported my vision to start this initiative exclusively for women. Given my experience, I wanted to help more women to become financially independent so that they have the freedom to choose their path and not be stifled by their parents, husbands, or families,” she adds.
Over time, they collaborated with companies like Xebia, Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra, etc. Today, SheWork.in is partnering with more than 150 companies of different scales.
What does SheWork.in solve?
At SheWork.in, they are solving the problem of the lack of women in the tech industry, primarily in leadership or mid-level roles working on specified technologies.
In an earlier conversation with The Better India, Pooja said, “We are trying to work with developers or people in leadership roles with anywhere between three to 12 years of experience. We do have plans in the future to help women in other industries, but today, our vision is to try and solve the problem in the tech industry.”
“Our main focus is not just to solve the problem of women’s talent. We also have to look at the companies who are going to hire them. Companies also have to trust women to give them a chance. Our focus lies in balancing their respective needs,” she added.
SheWork.in is focused on seamlessly reintegrating women with three or more years of experience in the tech industry back into the workforce after they had to leave it for reasons like marriage, relocation, childbirth, etc.
But why start with women with three years of experience?
Speaking to The Better India, Pooja says, “As per our statistical findings, it’s usually after three years in the workforce when women get married and relocate to where their husbands work. Once they cross the five or six-year experience threshold, we find that women have their first child, go on a maternity break, and as a result, their promotions get delayed.”
She goes on to elaborate, “The percentage of women in leadership positions in the tech industry is still very low. Our focus is to first increase diversity at the leadership or C-level (chief-level jobs that are the highest tier of executive jobs within an organisation).
“If the management is liberal or open to hiring more women at their level, that is when they will guide their subordinate teams to hire more women. See, the market is very competitive. Nobody wants the other person to get ahead of them. This is why our journey to make the workplace in the tech industry more inclusive starts at the leadership level because that’s where they are going to promote and help women come back and rejoin the workforce,” she adds.
SheWork.in helps companies to hire more women. But this does not mean they ask companies to give their women applicants only remote working opportunities.
“We are not asking them to establish exclusive policies to hire women but inclusive ones. Speaking to companies, we explain to them why it is important that they also give women an opportunity for the same role as they give men. Unlike days in the past, women today also travel and do night or second shifts while technology has upgraded and companies have the salary cap space. So, why not hire more capable women instead of leaving them out?” says Pooja.
What’s particularly unique about SheWork.in is that they are focused on delivering well-experienced talent for tech companies with a turnaround time of 24 hours.
“When we get a requirement from a company, we give them matching job profiles within 24 hours. Following this, you have the standard hiring process by a company. Once the company completes their rounds of tests and interviews, the person who is selected joins the company within a day. We are focussed on delivering the right job (for the candidate), and the right candidate (for the company) at the right time,” claims Pooja.
“In terms of job profiles, we are focused on project managers, designers, mobile-based application developers, web-based application developers, the front end, back end, full stack developers, testers, etc. We want women to have more opportunities in tech,” she adds.
What is the current state of women in the tech industry?
SheWork.in is currently working with a lot of companies that are hiring talent through the robust online community they have developed.
“Shework.in offers a platform called Tech Pundit, which connects mentors and mentees for personalised guidance and learning experiences. When we have tech mentors talking to women in our SheWork.in community, we help them navigate the latest trends in technology and what skills they currently lack. Through our community, we are trying to help them up-skill,” says Pooja.
But despite regularly hearing catchphrases like ‘diversity’ and ‘diversity hiring’ during recruitment drives by various companies, Pooja observes that they are not ready to give women equal pay despite having the requisite skill set. That is a major challenge they face.
“We still have to convince companies to upgrade their salary packages for women. If companies offer a person a certain job profile because they are capable, they should also pay them accordingly. That is something which I feel is still lacking in the tech industry,” she says.
“If they hire, for example, a person as a ‘Project Lead’, they are doing so because they find their skill sets appropriate. As a company, they are not hiring talent because they want to fill up some diversity ratio. After all, that will affect productivity and profits,” she adds.
According to Pooja, the gender pay gap in the tech industry stands at about 20 to 30 percent. This isn’t a definitive figure and it depends on things like the number of gap years a person has taken from the workforce “but statistics largely show that women earn 20 to 30 percent less than men”.
“If a woman has not worked for three years, but has taken the necessary training and courses to make up for that gap, they are offered a salary of juniors with two to three years of experience. Recently, I came across a post of a company hiring project engineers, software engineers, and .NET developers with experience of six to eight years. In the post, they mentioned a willingness to accept job applications of persons with a gap of up to four years,” she recalls.
“The feedback we got from those applying was that they were offered a salary of just Rs 25,000 per month. When asked why the applicants were offered such a low salary, the companies said that they will help applicants undergo training for three months. After a year of working at the company, these applicants will qualify for appraisals. Given the paucity of opportunities, many end up accepting these low-ball offers and that’s unacceptable,” she adds.
How is SheWork.in addressing this pay gap? It’s difficult because they’re not the ones hiring.
“At present, we are engaged with more than 150 companies to hire more women in their workforce. Our team speaks to these companies, discusses their salary bands, and tells them what the industry standard is and what they should ideally offer. If the companies express a willingness to interview our applicants and discuss salary offers commensurate with the experience and skill set of our applicants, we make the effort to help them diversify their workforce. If the companies are hesitant, we step back and ask our applicants not to compromise on their salary demand and not go for their interviews,” she says.
“SheWork.in makes efforts to ensure that every person they recommend to companies is capable of taking these job interviews. In the background, we are running a lot of programmes to make sure the applicant is capable enough. As I said earlier, we connect these applicants to mentors who help them catch up to the latest trends in the tech industry and fill up the necessary gaps in their skill sets. Moreover, these mentors also interview our applicants for certain roles. So, we only deliver these interviewed people to the companies. So, we make sure that the person (applicant) is capable and that the [job] profiles are filtered at our end,” she adds.
Beyond the pay gap, Pooja also argues that at the recruiter level, there is still an unconscious bias against hiring women.
“What we see is that if companies receive five CVs (three women and two men), they will interview the two men and give them priority. If these men are rejected, only then will they give the female job-seeker a chance. That unconscious bias still exists at the ground level. Despite all the noise around hiring more women, recruiters at the ground level still lack the confidence to do so. This unconscious bias has to change,” she says.
Companies can take a variety of steps to address these biases by providing some basic gender sensitivity training to their recruiters.
“Meanwhile, at SheWork.in, what we do is mask the CVs sent to companies. All we give them is their first names and skill sets. We do not put up their marital status, surnames, genders (although that’s sometimes difficult with first names), etc. When we send their CVs, we highlight their skill sets, the projects they’ve worked on, the work they have done, roles, responsibilities, etc. Once they are selected for interviews, we communicate to the panels at these companies overseeing hiring to record them. We want them to record the interviews so that our candidates aren’t asked questions that go beyond the scope of their professional capabilities. Recording these interviews makes recruiters conscious of the questions they ask,” claims Pooja.
Moreover, the nature of work has also changed. But that doesn’t mean that SheWork.in applicants are only looking for remote opportunities for women.
“We are not telling companies to only give our applicants remote opportunities. The current trend is moving towards hybridisation. So, we ask companies to give our applicants hybrid work opportunities but with some flexibility as well. For example, if an applicant just had a baby six months ago and has come back from maternity leave, we negotiate with the company to go the extra mile. For example, if companies have a five-day policy of coming to the office, we help our applicant negotiate for three days because she has a baby,” notes Pooja.
“Thankfully, we have some industry leaders supporting our work. They are lending us a helping hand in making their workplace more flexible. On our end, we encourage our applicants that if they want equal pay and opportunity, they also need to work a little harder,” she adds.
On their part, SheWork.in has also come up with their Gyno-Care Program, which offers free health check up camps for women IT professionals in association with partner companies
Need more help from families
Based on her experience, Pooja believes that the greatest resistance [to women working regularly in the tech industry] usually comes from families more than companies in this case.
“What women really need is more help from their families like their husbands, in-laws, and relatives, especially when it comes to household work. They must contribute a little more to unburden women from the responsibilities of household work,” she says.
“Despite the availability of daycare facilities in cities, there are families who do not like their children to be put up there. Of course, it’s a personal choice whether you want to put your child in a daycare facility or not but as times change, so should families. If families can support the idea of putting their children in a daycare facility, it would help working women a lot,” she adds.
Companies, meanwhile, must do more to accommodate women by investing and setting up creches and day-care facilities for children, she argues. “During a recent visit to Sydney, I remember visiting a company that had a feeding room for new mothers and a creche facility overseen by a qualified caretaker, where children could play. Companies in India can afford to invest in such facilities and must progress with the times,” she says.
(Edited by Pranita Bhat; Images courtesy SheWork.in and Shutterstock)
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