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Being a female CEO has its own challenges, such as raising capital or being taken seriously. This is particularly true if you are the young woman director of a mechanical engineering company in India, headed by a predominantly male staff and offering menstrual hygiene solutions.
This is Suhani Mohan's work description. It takes these challenges and more with confidence and creativity. And she ensures that her male employees do not secretly harbor sexist opinions.
Mohan founded Saral Designs in 2013, while she was only 23 years old, with her business partner Kartik Mehta, to address the glaring lack of access to sanitary napkins in India. At that time, reports showed that over 70% of women in the country did not practice proper menstrual hygiene because they could not afford towels or tampons. Although the situation has improved in recent years, at least 40% of women in India still do not have access to proper menstrual hygiene products.
Unlike other companies that were trying to solve this problem in India (and other low-income countries) by manufacturing low-cost buffers, Mohan reversed the business problem. She realized that making cheap tampons was a difficult task for a particular reason: small-scale manufacturing was too expensive; on a large scale, they are too expensive to distribute.
Enter Saral Designs. The Bombay-based company does not manufacture tampons, but rather manufactures automatic stamping machines (the first ones manufactured in India). The idea is that local contractors can afford the machines, then can make a volume of buffers large enough to offset the production costs, but small enough to be distributed in the local market. Saral Designs works with companies to customize machines according to their specific needs.
Annalisa Merelli For Quartz
"It's the idea of a business in a box," says Mohan. The machine allows entrepreneurs to start a small to medium size stamp manufacturing business very quickly, without having to research how to make the products themselves. Saral Designs manufactures two types of tampon-making machines: semi-automated and fully automated.
The model has been successful and Saral Designs has sold its machines to companies in several countries in Asia and Africa. Today, at the age of five, the company employs 28 people – it is perhaps surprising that the majority (19 employees) are men.
While client-related roles have a strong female representation, the team that designs, builds and tests the machines is predominantly male. "A lot of work is engineering-related," says Mohan, "and we find it difficult to recruit women because very few women [have] a background of mechanical engineering. "
As CEO, Mohan spends a lot of her time recruiting new employees and is very clear on one point: she will not hire sexist men (or women). She is so serious about it that she has developed a recruitment tool to detect sexism, even in a subtle way, among candidates for hiring.
Annalisa Merelli For Quartz
Annalisa Merelli for Quartz.
"Now we have a questionnaire asking them, for example, what is their opinion about menstruation," she explains, "and we take [their answers] seriously."
"The concept was actually evoked following discussions with Acumen Fellows (social entrepreneurs) as I shared the challenges of building an inclusive culture in an engineering and product driven company," says Mohan. .
For Mohan, given the nature of his business, it is important that all employees have a comfortable relationship with their rules. Having employees who, even in the back of their heads, find this disappointing can not be good for the company's performance.
Culturally, there is still a lot of stigma around menstruation in India. Some women (religious or traditional) may be deprived of certain practices as soon as they reach the age where they may have their period. Many people, men and women, will not talk so much about menstruation. Mohan does not want any of this in Saral Designs.
Thus, Saral Designs' potential employees, even those whose roles only concern the workings of the company, answer the questions of the interviews on the rules and the reproduction system, in addition to the more traditional surveys on the subject. Work experience or education.
But the questionnaire goes beyond that.
For example, he asks employees to take a stand on reproductive rights, the # MeToo movement and their opinion on women who are higher than men in the workplace hierarchy. "We have very abstract questions to check sexism," says Mohan, who calls the questionnaire a "filter for sexism."
To develop it, the main team has come together to list the key values of the company, such as empathy, gender equality, efficiency, transparency and leadership. "Keeping this in mind, we have designed specific questions to test alignment with these values," says Mohani.
Mohan found it was not efficient to ask if an employee thought that women had the same rights as men because the "correct" answer was too obvious. Instead, more nuanced questions, such as one that presents a scenario of inequality and asks how the employee would behave in this way, are more useful in determining whether the candidates are actually feminists or simply playing the role in maintenance. The questions also draw on news and current events to try to gauge the candidate's opinions on socially divisive issues, such as caste politics or sexist religious practices.
Mohan says that she found the tool effective. The best proof is the number of unsuitable candidates she helped identify. "We actually rejected a lot of good technical candidates because of that," she says. "When there is a cultural inadequacy, it sooner or later creates a conflict," she explains. "So, by experience, we prefer to wait to find the right candidate, rather than hire someone and ask him to leave."
Mohan says she's shared the concept with friends who are the CEOs of other start-ups, and strongly believes in the importance of broadening the scope of "filters of sexism" across businesses. "Companies need to go beyond the compliance tests and the inclusiveness and diversity mentioned in the annual reports or act only in response to a bad case," she said.
This story is part of How We Will Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of gender equality in the workplace. Read more stories here.
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