Mae 00:16
From the Godrej DEI Lab, welcome to India Included. Here's your host, Parmesh Shahani.
Parmesh Shahani 00:28
Hi, this is Parmesh, if you're enjoying this podcast series, please do listen to all the episodes. You can listen in order, you can listen randomly, but you must listen. And then you must share with friends, and then, you have to act, because if all of us do what we can, then we will surely create a better, and a more inclusive India, which is the aim of this podcast and also of the Godrej DEI lab that I head.
Accha I am gonna say something dhamaakedaar - there has never been a better time to be a woman in India. Unbelievable, no? I also thought that only but you know, Supriya, who heads Research and Media at our lab is now holding up a placard in this recording studio and making me say this. She's done the research and it's true! Today Indian women live longer, eat better, have more education and give birth to healthier children than they did before. But these modest gains come with a whole set of challenges, whether at home, out in public and, of course, in the workplace. It's still very much a man's world, whichever way you look at it. For some women, progress is more difficult and it comes with fewer opportunities and more risk than many other women. Some of the most brilliant role models for women in Indian public life are Muslim - I'm thinking of journalists, filmmakers, artists, academics, but I'm also shocked by the violence they face on a daily basis on social media. You just have to go to the account of any prominent Indian Muslim woman to see the kind of vitriol she faces every day simply for having a public profile. In the corporate world, it's in some ways even more alarming, there's a near invisibility of Muslim women, especially at highest levels of leadership. This is true of almost every Indian business including our own Godrej Industries group. So there is open hostility in one sphere, near invisibility in the other. So how do we begin to ensure that a young Indian Muslim woman can thrive in this country? What does progress look like to her? I want to talk about this with someone who started working on this problem a long time ago, when she was first embarking on her own brilliant career, and she's dedicated her life to solving it. She's a doctor, a social entrepreneur and a startup founder. I first met her in February 2020 at the Harvard India conference where she was my buddy. Right after the conference, COVID happened and the world changed so much. She left Harvard and has founded a very special organisation called Led By which has been working on advancing inclusion for Indian Muslim women in the workplace for the past five years.
Dr Ruha Shadab, welcome to India Included. You happen to be one of my personal heroes. And you know, every superhero has an origin story, so I want you to tell all our listeners about your original story. You trained as a doctor in Delhi, and then you go to Harvard to get a Master's in Public Policy, where I met you. So maybe you can start by telling us why the shift?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 03:54
Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me, Parmesh. I think the continuous thread through my journey, whether it was studying medicine or working in global health, or doing my master's in Public Policy, and then setting up Led By has really been the arc of trying to create social impact. So even when people ask me this question of, "Why did I switch tracks, or why did I pivot", in my head, I'm like, "did I pivot?" Because in my head, I've been chasing the same North Star throughout.
Parmesh Shahani 04:26
But you felt that as a practitioner, as a medical practitioner, you could only do so much, and then you wanted to get that extra kind of expertise?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 04:35
When I was practicing medicine or even training to become a doctor, I was working in a government hospital in Delhi. Government hospital means urban setting, hospital that's catering to low income, lower middle class income. And a couple of things struck me. One was I knew I wanted to work in the government sector or in the public sector, but it struck me just how resource constrained we were. So even if you are a doctor, you still need your diagnostic machines, and you need access to treatment and drugs for your patients, right? And that can be limiting. I remember us not having enough tourniquets to tie to people's arms to be able to draw blood, and you would just use gloves to tie that around people's arms and draw blood. And this is like in a central government hospital. The second thing was, what happens in government hospitals, or at least in mine, was, if the patient is admitted, you need somebody from their family to be on call, 24/7, sleeping in the corridors of this hospital. because you would announce on the PA system; it would be something like "Shruti, pati ka naam Ravi, labour room number ek mein aaye", and that person would come. On a chit you would write some drug that is not available in the hospital. Then that husband would go run somewhere in Delhi to find that medicine and come back. And when I would exit the operation theatre, or whichever ward, and just cross these corridors, which are open to Delhi's elements and see hundreds of people sleeping, waiting on their loved ones. It just really made me think that what makes the world go round is not money. It really is love. And I want to be able to create systems where people don't have to go through so much pain and so much difficulty for ensuring just some of the basic rights and access to health for their families. So that's what started moving me more from clinical medicine towards public health and system change.
Parmesh Shahani 06:30
But you know, you had your Harvard degree in public health, you could have chosen either to stay on or to come back and work at some gigantic, maybe private hospital in India, which might not have had those constraints. You know, I've read that when you were applying to Harvard, even to go there to graduate school, you realized that you had no Indian Muslim women to turn to for recommendations. So tell me a little bit about that memory of isolation, of, you know, seeking role models. And then perhaps, I mean, from having spoken to you before, maybe that was one of the reasons why you...you came back to start...
Dr Ruha Shadab 07:06
Yeah, so for Harvard, you needed to get three letters of recommendation, and they were all written by people that I love and adore, who think really highly of me, because that's where I got it. But they were all upper caste Hindu men who wrote those application letters for me, but my essay for Harvard was about improving healthcare access for Muslim women in our country, because they just objectively have lower health outcomes. But again, that discrepancy of 'I want to support their basic access to health, but I don't see them in any leadership position', aka as like evidence from my small sample size of letters of recommendation. But what was interesting was my exposure to Muslim women or to Muslims and the lack thereof evolved in my journey. So I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and I was just surrounded by Muslim culture over there, and everything was in perfect sync, because the school hours and office hours would change during Ramzan. Eid was this big, big celebration in the community hall where we lived. I did have very, very close Hindu friends, Rachna, Vrinda, being some of them, but I never appreciated what they were going through when I was in Saudi and then when I moved to India in middle school, I remember moving the day of Diwali. It was middle of October in the late 1990s and getting out of the Delhi airport, being driven to Noida, and seeing all these houses decked in lights, kids bursting firecrackers. And the first thought that came to my mind was, oh, this is Diwali. Because the only thing I knew about Diwali was like, this 50 worded Hindi essay I used to write for class. I'm like, "Oh, this is Diwali. It is such a big deal. I never saw Vrinda or Rachna celebrate this festival." In fact, in Saudi you're not allowed to have idols. So a lot of the Hindu families for their house temples would just put up calendars with Hindu gods and goddesses on them, because that's the only thing you could bring into the country. So this acute appreciation for what how easy it was to be a part of the majority and then becoming a minority in India and then experiencing the other side of the coin, I think, just really shaped how I thought about life constancy and Harvard's application, was a moment where I actually like paused and reflected on what all of this means. What... what does being a minority mean in terms of leadership positions? What does it even mean in terms of getting just some of the basic Maslow's needs met for you? So that realization was very acute, but also something that wasn't one infection point that made it happen. It was just like a culmination of 28 years of lived experience.
Parmesh Shahani 09:49
Yeah. Ruha, before you went off to Harvard, you worked at NITI Aayog, just tell us what it was like being part of the government setup.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 09:58
It was an incredible experience. I work with some amazing people. Worked pretty closely with Amitabh Kant, so at that point, and what I took away from my experience at NITI Aayog was a greater appreciation for the pulls and pressures within which the government works. I had previously worked at a government hospital, right? And I was perplexed and disturbed by the resource constraints over there. I had then worked in a public health NGO, and had seen the other side of the development sector, even though we worked very closely with state government as a part of that NGO, and then when I finally became a part of the government. I was working at NITI Aayog on healthcare policy, I think I was able to appreciate why the government sometimes seems to be working at the pace that it works at, because there's just so much consensus building, there's so much stakeholder management that is needed. So I think I came away with a more mature and nuanced appreciation for this giant stakeholder, which is the government.
Parmesh Shahani 11:01
But you knew going into Harvard that you would start Led By or was it doing things like the India conference and everything else that kind of made the articulation more certain?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 11:12
I think it was doing the India conference, meeting people like you, learning what other folks are doing for different segments of society that gave me this idea. So I don't think it was super well conceived. It was heavily inspired from things that I experienced pre Harvard and during Harvard, for example, it was also during the peak of Black Lives Matter movement that was happening in the US, which made me think a lot about, "what is the level of policy conversation in the US, versus what is the level of policy conversation in India? And how can we elevate the latter?", which we probably get later into this show about why am I looking at this more top down approach, or a leadership approach, versus some of the other amazing grassroots work that we also have and still need in India.
Parmesh Shahani 11:57
No, let's talk about it now. I mean, why the top down approach? You know, a very focused cohort on accelerating Muslim women leadership. But I couldn't help but notice that in LinkedIn, your bio talks about Led By as a force for equity in the Indian workplace, and you don't specifically mention Indian Muslim women. So tell us through some of your thinking of both the top down approach and why this very particular route?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 12:22
Sure, I wanted to take an approach which really tapped into and unlocked the aspiration of Muslim women in India. Yes, we need grassroot work, right? We still do not have 100% literacy. We still do not have enough women going to school, but there are more women and girls going to school today. I want to think about 10, 20, 30 years from now, as these women are graduating from primary, secondary school, getting into college. Are we thinking about their education truly translating into employment, and then are we thinking of them crushing it at the workplace? And that's why it looks like a top down approach, but for me, it's just further down the value chain. And we as a country have been thinking about the initial parts of this value chain of education, but I think we need to start investing also in the latter parts of this value chain. I'll give you an example of this amazing Led By woman that I met yesterday. She comes from a very conservative family. She's a hijabi. She tried to get a remote job after fighting her parents. Was only able to maintain it for nine months, because the resistance from her parents was a lot, but maybe even fleetingly, her mother said, "ghar se kaam kar sakte ho, apna khud ka chala lo", "you can work from home, do something by yourself." And she latched on to that. She said, Okay, you didn't let me do this remote corporate job. I'm going to start something of my own. This woman learned about Led By through LinkedIn. She has attended one of her six month programs. She has signed up for the new entrepreneurship program that we're doing. She showed up yesterday for our meet and greet at Led By the amount of hustle this woman is putting in despite how much resistance she has, I think, is the kind of aspiration that Muslim women in this community have that we aren't talking about. It's not just about basic numeracy and literacy, right? The dreams are so much bigger than that. And who is creating space for that?
Parmesh Shahani 14:19
Yeah, tell us as of now, what are all the different things that Led By does?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 14:23
Sure. So Led By is a professional incubator for Indian Muslim women. And we do two major things. One is we have a fellowship program where we work with Muslim women who are either in college or trying to return to the workforce. Think mostly people in their 20s, and we professionally upskill them and then get them connections to land their dream jobs, to be able to accelerate their career, increase their annual income. Then there's also the demand side work that we're doing through the research and consultancy arm of Led By. What we do over here, Parmesh, is we conduct research to be able to quantify some of the entry and retention barriers for Muslim women. One of the things that I still get asked a lot is why Muslim women? The truth is that there are challenges, there are preconceived notions that we hold, which result in stereotypes, and then when decision-makers in the workspace action on their stereotypes, it leads to biases. We did a study a year or two ago where we looked at what is the discrepancy between a Hindu woman and a Muslim woman applying to entry level roles in India, and we saw after applying to 1000 jobs across the country that Priyanka Sharma, our Hindu candidate, got two times, two times more callbacks than our Muslim candidate, Habiba, for the same profile. And this is a major discrepancy, as it is a very, very tight job market right now. This Muslim woman, think about the woman I was just telling you, right? Who had to go through so many battles to be able to, like, land a remote job, only still to also lose that. You're telling me that she fights her family, right? She's not set up for success, even through the education that she's gotten.
Parmesh Shahani 16:12
But you can do the unbiasing also, right? You're doing the supply, you're doing the training, yeah, for some of the unbiasing, all of us in society will have to work.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 16:21
I agree.
Parmesh Shahani 16:23
Very very hard. I want to talk to you because you mentioned some of the structural issues, right? We're now coming on 20 years of the Sachar committee report soon. And you know, this was a historic government study that showed just the socio economic disadvantage that Muslims face in India compared to other religious groups thanks to decades of structural discrimination. And even over there, 20 years ago, and it holds true today, the position of Muslim women is even more precarious. Do you track and measure social progress and discrimination also? I mean, you know, one of the things was, you said the report that you do ,this hiring survey, which clearly showed there is a very distinct, say, bias. Do you track other social kind of economic indicators to see how you know women and Muslim women in particular, are faring?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 17:13
We do a lot of monitoring and evaluation of our projects, and then also some of the positive externalities that come out of it, but both quantitative and qualitative, to be frank. So the way we do that, Parmesh is by tracking multiple levels of impact. So for our fellows, so for the women who go through our programmings, we have a lot of self assessment questionnaires to just see how they feel in terms of their confidence skills, their professional skills, and their access to network and how they feel, that has evolved over a six month duration. So this is usually like the immediate impact that we see, then the midterm impact that we see is, say, at a three month to twelve month duration, how are they placed in the job market, and how has their income increased? And we often see like an income increase of up to 80% for most of our women, pre-Led By and the third way is the longer term impact, which we've also started calculating now, given that we are in our sixth year of operations, is the kind of pay-it-forward engagement that they have, which is also really important to us. So have they started any initiatives of their own? Have they started affinity groups in the companies that they're working on? Have they gone on to refer and get other Led By women or Muslim women recruited into their companies, which we also see a lot of happening within Led By ? So those are the three types of things.
Parmesh Shahani 18:39
You know, on one hand, we have the Priyanka, Habiba, you know, very clear kind of bias that you see. But do you also see you're Led By fellows getting placed? Do you find places welcoming them? Do you find positive stories of hope and resilience? Also, if you can tell us about some of these as well?
Dr . Ruha Shadab 19:01
Oh, I'm going to first ask you to tell the audience about glimmers versus triggers, because I actually want to use that language, but I think you do a better job at explaining what a glimmer is.
Parmesh Shahani 19:11
Well, sure it's something that I think one of my DEI lab team members only, because they are like, young and hip and happening, and they find all these things. And I have to explain. I have to ask very uncle-like what this means. But I think one of them only must have clearly, I can't find these things by myself, but it was just something that came up on Instagram that at this moment, everyone is so stressed, and there's all these things that trigger us, and it's important to be conscious of that, but we should also actively be looking for things like glimmers, which give us hope and joy and kind of make us believe in the world. And so I guess, yeah, I was asking about, what are your glimmers? Because situation is thoda sa dire and all of this is happening. But what gives you that hope?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 19:58
I really like the framework, because honestly, Led By did result from a lot of triggers, and now, I think what keeps us going is all the glimmers that we see in terms of society changing. It's definitely a non-linear path, right? I think in broader strokes, the kind of feedback and reception of Led By that I have received over the past half decade. I think it's been more than glimmer, it really has been sunlight. It has been like big, bright rays of sunshine, everything in terms of the number of people who joined us, right? We are a super lean team, if you look at folks who are fully dedicated to Led By, but if you look at our volunteer base, if you look at our advisors at any point of time, we are in the hundreds.
Parmesh Shahani 20:50
So these hundreds are across all religions, across all genders, across all backgrounds, right?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 20:55
Yeah, that was an evolution in our own journey. So I am married to the problem that we are trying to solve for right, which is the lack of Muslim women representation in India's workforce. I'm not married to the solution. We're very open to feedback, and are constantly evolving. One example of that is, when I started off Led By, we have advisors and residents who are these amazing unicorn women who have made it to the top or have made it to like senior-ish levels and our Muslim women who act as role models and conduct office hours with our young led by participants and fellows. But pretty soon, we started feeling like we had reached a plateau of the number of women that we could have on our advisor board. And I was like, maybe we need to expand this, and which makes sense, right? Because that is reflective of the problem that...
Parmesh Shahani 21:45
You're seeing who you want to create - Muslim women leaders
Dr. Ruha Shadab 21:46
Exactly right? I was like, Yeah, this is a little tautological, Ruha. So then we expanded to just women of all faiths and backgrounds and countries, and now our ratio is usually like 70 to 30, so 70% Muslim, 30% non Muslims. But when you're talking about it in the hundreds, that means you have hundreds of non Muslims supporting us as well.
Parmesh Shahani 22:09
Yeah, yeah. Also in terms of people wanting to give jobs, take the fellows on.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 22:15
Yep. Absolutely!
Parmesh Shahani 22:15
...and encourage them to succeed.
Dr Ruha Shadab 22:17
Yep, and from spaces that I would not have under expected, because, again, the mainstream narrative is so binary, right? There is this whole duality. It's good or bad, that's it, and bad. Like the good is like, maybe a smaller segment, but the number of upper caste men who run like medium sized enterprises, who have reached out to us for recruiting Muslim women, the number of retail donations we've gotten from non Muslims has been very, very, almost like inspiring.
Parmesh Shahani 22:49
Yeah, it goes back to what you started with, which is the idea of love, right? And there is so much more of that than hate, if you can just shine the spotlight on it. You spoke about the supply. I want to talk about your own supply. So you are supplying talented Muslim women to the workforce. But where are you getting the supply from? Like, how do you find these wonderful, incredible women that then you can put into your program and then churn out as leaders? Like, where do you look?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 23:16
We started literally from WhatsApp, just me sending out a bunch of messages. I still remember the first cohort that we started. I wanted to start a pilot, and was hoping to get 15 women to sign up. My plan was I'm going to circulate this Google Sheet, I'm going to get 15 people sign up, and those 15 will be my cohort, and within a couple of days, I had more than 200 people sign up for a 20 membered cohort.
Parmesh Shahani 23:46
and you set out the parameters early on, 18 to 30
Dr. Ruha Shadab 23:49
18 to 30 year old women who are looking for jobs, who are Muslim, who identify as women and who are Indian. And the next year, we had 2000 applications for 20 people. Wow, that's 2000 Muslim women interested in becoming professional leaders. But then we did a bunch of other things as well, Parmesh, we go to universities and conduct career workshops for universities, agnostic of what the crowd looks like, we continue to leverage social media a whole bunch. LinkedIn has also been really effective. And I've been actually very impressed by how many, Led By women, learn about us through LinkedIn and like proactively. Like, seek out Muslim women focused incubators, just hear about us. But my favourite one is, I would say around 30% of the people who apply to Led By, women, obviously, hear about us through a male family member who has told them about Led By. And I think that is the power of networks, right? Because these men are the ones who are talking, exchanging information, exchanging knowledge, and then are sharing it with their sister, with their niece, and are able to share, their access to networks.
Parmesh Shahani 25:10
That's also the power of allyship, right? In that sense. And so men can join the Behen Court as allies.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 25:15
Yeah, absolutely right. And think of this. These are, I'm talking about Muslim men, right? I am talking about some of the most villainized section of our country, and that is the narrative that you mostly see, which is completely abominable. But these are Muslim men, Muslim brothers, Muslim chachas, who are telling women in their families about that by about signing up, about. And usually are the ones who need to convince the father or convince the mother to let this girl go and be a part of this professional incubator. And I think again, these are glimmers, right? And these stories, I think, are more common than the stories that we otherwise hear in this narrative.
Parmesh Shahani 25:56
So what if you're one of these 1000s of people who apply? And you know, how do you get selected? And once you get selected, tell us about the journey.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 26:04
sure. So you apply through this three step process, which makes you reflect on a little bit of your own journey, your own leadership journey. And we review applications and make sure that we give feedback to every single applicant, you took out the time to apply. We appreciate that, and we are going to give you feedback and guidance on that. So even that itself is a learning experience for...
Parmesh Shahani 26:28
But who does this to thousands of...
Dr. Ruha Shadab 26:30
Oh, that's my incredible team.
Parmesh Shahani 26:32
Wow, wow.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 26:34
So that's step one, and then if you make it through, you get onboarded to the six month fellowship program. It's a virtual program where you're expected to spend around 10 to 12 hours a week doing offline work as well as attending curriculum.
Parmesh Shahani 26:50
It's in English?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 26:51
It's in English right now, yes, and our curriculum, which I'm really excited about, is focused on a lot of interpersonal skills, things that will really help you set apart yourself in the workspace, and we have curriculum such as on negotiation. How do you negotiate with your manager, everything from your workload to getting your promotion to getting your salary increased. We have communication workshops. We have Design Thinking workshops. And these are workshops that are usually conducted by professors from Harvard, from MIT. It's not about name dropping. What I find really cool, though, is the negotiations curriculum, for example, is taught through a case study mechanism, which you're familiar with, has been a part of US higher education system for a while, and now becoming more common in India. We have our case studies now written for Indian Muslim women, with them as protagonists, based on actual Muslim women's lived experiences. So for the negotiation curriculum, the Harvard Negotiation project actually interviewed a couple of folks in my network to build these case studies. So now I imagine, as a Muslim woman, you feel so unseen, and you show up to that by where not only are you now suddenly surrounded by another, depending on which cohort you are, 20 to like 60 people, we have multiple programs, but 20 to 60 professional, ambitious Muslim women, the curriculum that you're receiving is centred around you. I think it just like helps you feel so seen. So you go through that training, and you're also getting access to the advisors and residents that I spoke about, which are all these amazing senior women who are coming and sharing their knowledge with you. You're having one on one hours with them, office hours. You're expanding your network. You're also then as a part of an ingrained, paid forward mechanism being connected to middle school girls to act as coaches to them, and we make sure that each Muslim woman is then paired with a Hindu girl and a Muslim girl to pay it forward. And I think just the idea of a young Hindu girl looking up to a Muslim didi or baji, and thinking of them as a role model is such a beautiful way to reach communities. And then once you graduate from this program, you do become an alumni, but you continue to stay engaged with it by through a lot of offline events that we have. You were asking, who's helping review these 2000 applications? A lot of our graduates come back and are a part of our review committee, the other day, I got an email from one of our graduates who is now in a position to recruit someone, and said she wanted to look at our resume handbook to pick out somebody. So it really is a journey. It anchors on the fellowship, but even before and after, I think it's is an organization really, really focused on depth of impact.
Parmesh Shahani 29:42
Yeah, but you don't help with jobs and placements after or ?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 29:46
We do. We do so that happens again in a very bespoke manner. So we will filter our or scour our networks to find the right kind of job, to find the right kind of recommendation. But a lot of our curriculum, Parmesh, is also about teaching folks how to fish instead of giving them fish. So most of the crew actually from Led By, is what they land up doing very smartly, is they will learn all these tools through Led By, then be able to go out and come back to us and say, "Hey, Ruha, hey, Deepanjali, this is the company that I want to work in. Do you know anybody over here?" And then we will do some of the grind work, find the right connection, help them get that interview, and then they're gonna crush the interview and get the job. So it's really teamwork that we do.
Parmesh Shahani 30:30
How do you keep all of this running? It's a nonprofit. You make money. I mean, it's hard enough to run for profits in general.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 30:39
So we are. A non profit company, so we're a section eight company right now, and our programming is all fully funded, so the women do not pay. Right now, the funding comes from incubators that we're a part of and some high net worth individuals from the country that have donated. Let's see, we would want to expand and possibly move into a hybrid model at some point, but that's work in progress.
Parmesh Shahani 31:02
Yeah, you feel your time, you spend more of it in running the program, because other not for profit people I meet, spend so much time in fundraising, and that's crazy. I mean, how do you manage your time?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 31:15
My time is mostly spent on strategy development and fundraising. That is true. I haven't been as closely involved with operations, mostly because my team is 70,000 times better than me at it. I fully trust them. Sometimes I'm just wowed by events that they hold that I didn't even know about, and that is the best feeling I'm going to pat myself on the back for staffing and hiring the smartest and most passionate people out there?
Parmesh Shahani 31:41
Yeah, I want to ask you about the families of some of these incredible fellows.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 31:49
Sure, so many stories. So I think one of the most endearing experiences that I've had running Led By, was during graduation, which is an annual affair, we have parents of some of our graduates come and speak as well. And of course, we prep the parents with their speeches, because there is a large audience. And this one father that we had prepped was a little nervous. It was the first time he was doing a public speaking event, so when he wrapped up his prepared speech, he added something which was just so incredibly heart-warming. He said that Led By empowered my daughter, and my daughter has empowered me to speak at this platform and these kind of positive effects that you don't even envision, which take you by surprise. So that's one way the family comes in, is just like this beautiful, like positive movement in all sorts of directions. In other ways, we've seen families coming around, for example, so we had a graduate who ended up taking a remote job, well without parental support, let's say that, and when the parents did find out, they were not happy about it. But our Led By graduate, was pretty determined to continue pursuing this. And then finally, in year three of her remote job working from her parents house, her father came up to her and asked her to be a contributing member to the family pot. And that was such a big recognition for this woman, of her autonomy, of her agency, of her independence, to have her father go from somebody not willing to accept or let her have a job to saying that, hey, come help me pay for our family, because it was just her father and her then who were earning members of this five-six membered family. Because you said something about how the unbiasing is not just, you know, the advice work or the Muslim women's work. I think even the education and employment is not just the Muslim women's work. It's also a family and a community responsibility.
Parmesh Shahani 34:11
But there are now, at least in the recent past, there's a plethora of women's leadership programs and networks. How do you collaborate with them? I'm just thinking even this, ladies who lead there are so many. And besides that, you know, the national government, as well as state governments have all decided to focus on empowering and increasing women's participation in workplaces. How do you tap into and collaborate with some of these other networks, either as funnels or as pipelines,
Dr. Ruha Shadab 34:41
Partnerships is a huge platform for us for our impact, and I do believe that we shouldn't be reinventing the wheel. I do think the sum can be greater than its parts, so we do that through multiple ways. We have engaged in partnership with a number of state governments and their women incubators. We have partnered with industry associations of women, and then we've also partnered as a funnel for a lot of these programs. And I think that's been a major unlock, because it's a win-win situation for both, right? We are, as it is, upskilling these Muslim women, and then they go on to become part of other incubators and other cohorts, which I think has been really effective in terms of tapping into these networks. A lot of these schemes and organizations, for reasons that I understand do not factor in intersectionality very explicitly so the way we think of partnership with them is - Alright, you can't be explicitly intersectional, but then let us try to at least create these funnels of having Muslim women represented in your cohorts.
Parmesh Shahani 35:52
Yeah, that's what we can do at this moment, right? And this whole conversation has been hope and despair to and fro, which is so much of our, you know, our lives and our work in this inclusion space, going back to the bias survey, for example, that you ran right and then seeing that result and then saying we've got to change this and doing all of this work - how do we tackle some of the structural biases, including what we just said of, you know, so many programs, but not actively looking, you know, Led By is a great exemplar, but it's still like one drop. And in really, how do we get to change more and more of society structurally in terms of that? Okay, maybe I'm rambling. Maybe you don't, of course, maybe you don't know...
Dr. Ruha Shadab 36:34
I have, I have the answer, I've just chosen to keep it to myself. No, if I had the answer I would I would love to have a magic wand to be able to undo all of this, but I have always had a very strong desire to change the world for the better. But as I grew up, I evolved on my definition of what the world is, yeah, and what the world to me is, it's India. And then within India, it is a community that I understand and a community that I belong to. Now within that the work that we're doing, I completely agree it's a drop in the ocean. I completely agree it's a tiny segment of the value chain of education and employment. The great thing about India is that even a drop is a massive sea when you look at the rest of the world's population, so you can still meaningfully move even if you are a drop. I think there are multiple solutions. I think what we are doing is one way to do things to talk about, increasing professional leadership within Muslim women, preparing for what the further end of the value chain could look like. I feel like we need to continuously have more and more people think about structural problems, bring their own interpretation, experiment with their solutioning in our country, and keep just fighting to move this forward. I don't think there's like one magic answer. I think it requires a thousand Led Bys, and that's something we are trying to do as well through our foundation all this curriculum that I was talking about, the programming, the structuring of the fellowship, which I have maybe blocked out just how much hard work it was to do this. We share our materials with any organization that asks us for it and let them white label it and use it. We've supported organizations that focus on North Easterns. Shared it with folks that are working with lower caste people in South India. We've shared it with organizations focused on LGBTQ communities in the National Capital Territory, and I think that's another way of us helping some of these structural barriers. There is, again, not just one solution. It requires a whole bunch of people working on this without gatekeeping, right? I could just sit on my curriculum and my case studies and not share it, but I know I'm not going to get to the end state of India that I want by myself. We need millions of people to be doing this by sharing resources of all sorts.
Parmesh Shahani 39:25
Yeah, and I'm so just grateful to hear this - your approach towards seeing the struggles as intersectional and building alliances of solidarity with others, perhaps not finding that same solidarity when you know your cohort applies or is part of...you know, is not thought of in other pipelines, is extraordinary. So thank you. I want to ask you about how you track and measure progress of Led By so far, and you know, as you scale up, what indicators might you use?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 39:59
There are three levels of indicators that we'd mentioned earlier, and I think the evolution that I hadn't shared was even within the immediate indicators about how your personal growth fees are during a fellowship, and then your medium term indicators about how your incomes improved, and then your long term indicators about the kind of positive impact you've created. We've continued to evolve, and talk of the indicators that we take within that as our programming has evolved and even as time has gone on, I think the part that we need to work on a little bit more is indirect measurement of impact when you talk about breadth and depth as a non-profit. Our indicators right now are all very depth focused. There might be an evolution where we start to also articulate some of our indirect impact, like I think so much of the community level work that we do, the engagement with families, the impact of the paid forward mechanism that our fellows do, especially post graduating from Led By is something that we are defining a framework to be able to capture. So that's going to be the evolution in phase 2.0 if I can call it that,
Parmesh Shahani 41:12
Or sharing some of this curriculum with other groups as well.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 41:15
Oh yeah that's true. Exactly. We do not measure that. I think we do way more than we measure
Parmesh Shahani 41:19
Tell us about the new research. I mean, this LinkedIn, this profile thing, was quite impactful, and it created a lot of news. Tell us about some of the new research you're working on, because you said there's a whole research wing, right?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 41:30
So there's so many questions that came out of the hiring bias research. A lot of it was from folks who read it and asked really pertinent questions. For example, does this vary depending on whether the organization is led by Muslims? Does this vary if the HR is Muslim?
Parmesh Shahani 41:47
And?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 41:47
From what we think, we don't know about HR, but whether the company leadership matters? There was no visible pattern in the sample size that we had, and that might just be because the cultural values of a company might not be seeping down all the way till whoever is the decision maker for resume vetting, for example.
Parmesh Shahani 42:08
By company leadership, you mean if the founder happens to be Muslim. Because in terms of at least a lot of the other work that I read is there's very few Muslim leaders level in terms of
Dr. Ruha Shadab 42:18
The sample size is too small
Parmesh Shahani 42:18
At MD and CEO level, in terms of…
Dr. Ruha Shadab 42:23
So again, size was too small to articulate that properly. But there have been a lot of questions that have come out of the research, such as, does it vary industry by industry? Does it vary in terms of the functions? Does it vary in terms of regions within India? The research did make it seem like it varies a little bit. I'm not going to articulate that over here, because we weren't satisfied with our statistical significance of that one. And then the ultimate question was, this was, again, just at the resume level, right? What happens if the woman does suppose get called for an interview? Is it worse then? This research, by the way, is very unsurprising to Muslims in India. This research is meant for non-Muslims. This research is meant to quantify our anecdotal experience, which sometimes is dismissed as mere the anecdotal. So the next question then comes is, what is the experience of a Muslim or a hijabi in the workspace? So these are some open research questions that we're right now doing a very thorough literature review, and are going to then define some more research questions for the next level of work that we do over here. But I will tell you this research was received very differently in North India and South India within the Muslim community. So I did say that it was not surprising to Muslims, but let me correct myself. This was not surprising to North Indians, but actually quite surprising to South Indians, and which is why I love this country so much, because I really don't think you need to look beyond this country to find solutions. First of all, Muslims themselves are so non-homogeneous in this country. One thing that we do with our cohorts, Parmesh, is we are very intentional about the geographical representation. So we try to make sure that we have people from all regions of India. We also try to make sure that there's representation in terms of your religiosity, your educational background, and even how you place yourself on the gender spectrum. So anyway, there's a whole big heterogeneity aspect over there. But coming back to the geographical representation, we were hosting an event in Kerala right after the research had come out, and we presented these results, and the Muslim women, their reaction to this was "Ruha, if you did this, Led By, if you did this research in Kerala, you would not see these results". Like for them, this bias was incomprehensible because they haven't faced it, and they don't think Kerala is a space like that, and it isn't, right? Like the women over there are so hyper educated. In fact, I think that's really interesting, that in Kashmir and in Kerala, Muslim women actually have pretty good educational parameters. Even within our country, the lived experience of Muslims can be so different, yeah, and there's so much to learn from each other over here itself.
Parmesh Shahani 45:25
These are some of the directions in which your research is going to go. Do you think you're going to venture into the area of maybe solutions?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 45:35
Absolutely, I am a nerd, but I am a academic practitioner, is that the term, I think it is, yes. So it's definitely a very solution oriented activity, and even the research that we did with hiring bias.
Parmesh Shahani 45:52
So you said, here's how you can solve...
Dr. Ruha Shadab 45:53
These are suite of solutions that you could do. And that's why our research arm is actually the research and consulting arm. So we do work with companies to conduct social audits. We do help them to just look at their hiring practices and see how they could be more inclusive.
Parmesh Shahani 46:08
Can you give us some solutions from that for our listeners, those who don't want to consult them, who just want to listen.
Dr. Ruha Shadab 46:15
I think the easiest thing is to just take stock. I think let's just start from there. So if you are interested in this, and if you are in a position of power or decision-making in your company, just ask yourself, Where are you recruiting from? How many Muslims applied? What was their selection, progression rate? And see how you can improve if it was worthy of. I think it is just small steps. There's nothing big, you know, just ask private questions of yourself and of your team to understand what the situation is. And then, if you're like, "Hey, Ruha, actually no Muslim women applied. So what am I gonna do?" Come to Led By and we'll hand you a resume handbook of some incredibly brilliant women, yeah.
Parmesh Shahani 47:02
But also, there's some other things that other organizations have done, and like removing the name, name markers and things like...
Dr. Ruha Shadab 47:07
Yeah, so, I agree, like one is taking stock, right? If there's an issue, then number two would be, what removing name markers, which definitely helps. In fact, that makes me clarify something about the hiring bias research that we did, Parmesh. So we had built two similar resumes. They weren't identical, yeah. So it was Priyanka Sharma, Habiba Ali, and there were subtle differences in their background. So for example, Priyanka had gone to Hindu college and volunteered at Helpage India, and Habiba had gone to, I think, Lady Sri Ram and volunteered at Zakat Foundation, like a very obviously Muslim sounding NGO. But we also, after 500 applications, flipped the resume. So even when Priyanka was working at Zakat Foundation, and like had more Muslim name institutions on her profile, she still had a higher selection rate. So I guess maybe that's like a very strong point for why just think, as simple as removing name markers could be helpful.
Parmesh Shahani 48:12
Could be useful. For those listening, there's a ton of resources within the inclusion space itself. And actually we, on our Godrej DEI Lab website, have a have an incredible resource section with some of our own resources that we've developed within Godrej, as well as, I think, four or five hundred incredible external resources. So if you're listening, please check out some of these. There's white papers, there's videos, there's tools. What gives you hope for the future?
Dr. Ruha Shadab 48:41
What gives me hope is the resilience that I see amongst people in the country and amongst Muslim women. I really, truly think that the kind of grit and resilience that they have is so inspiring and very little is needed to unlock it. And I think that's what almost like physically hurts me, is that, again, Led By, right? Drop in the ocean, yet it has been so impactful. So it is the amount of effort that my community is willing to put in to chase their dreams, despite having not the best set of odds with them, what also gives me hope is the number of non-Muslims who have come to support Led By is just the most validating experience, because it validates my father's decision to move back to India from Saudi Arabia. He could have gone to the UK, he could have gone to the US, but he came back to India saying - which back then made no sense to me - he's like we would be second class citizens anywhere else. And I know as Muslims in India, we sometimes still feel that, but I know in the core of India's DNA, there is no space for creating hierarchies of citizens, and I think that belief is constantly validated when you see the kind of incredible people that come out to support Led By.
Parmesh Shahani 50:24
Ruha, thank you so much for this honest, moving and just wonderful conversation, and thank you for coming and spending this day with us at the Godrej DEI lab. Very, very grateful. And lots and lots of love, I will continue to follow, enourage and cheerlead Led By as you grow from strength to strength.
Mae 50:48
Thank you for listening to India Included. If you enjoyed this episode, tell us, please subscribe, or follow, or leave a rating and review on the podcast app you're listening to to find out more about the work that they do visit Godrej DEI lab.com. You can also find them on Instagram and LinkedIn at Godrej DEI Lab. Stay tuned for more.