Prior to joining CIVICUS she served as Chief Executive of India’s leading child rights advocacy organisation – Child Rights and You. At CRY, she led a team of over 200 employees in 7 offices based in India and overseas through a process of organisational transformation from a charity orientation to a rights-based approach. Under her leadership, CRY facilitated over 20 NGO alliances including a pan-India national alliance the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education which has over 3000 NGO members. Among its many achievements was the grassroots mobilisation that led to the amendment of India’s Constitution to make education a fundamental right. While working with CRY’s network of volunteers in over 20 countries she was exposed to the legal environment and constraints that voluntary organisations face across these countries and with the skills necessary to navigate their complexities. To read more about Ingrid Srinath’s background, please see her full bio on the CIVICUS website, available here.
Charlotte Whitton, the Canadian feminist said - "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." That aphorism was, in many ways, the bumper-sticker for women of my generation on our leadership journeys.
It was only when I went to college at the end of the 1970s in Bombay that I realised just how unusual, egalitarian and privileged, by India’s entrenched patriarchal standards, my childhood had been. Raised in a home where gender did not determine roles, power or privilege, educated in a girls-only school with extraordinarily progressive norms, and surrounded by strong, independent women and non-sexist men, I was dismayed by the discrimination and sexism, overt and covert, I encountered at university, business school and the workplace.
Tone, manner, language, dress and social activities all suddenly became minefields to be traversed with utmost care, with implications for one’s safety, inclusion or exclusion, and by which one’s morality and competence were continually judged. It was easier then, and, in many contexts, now, to pass as “one of the boys” if one was to stand a chance of being treated equally.
It was my selfish quest for significance and my distaste for the compartmentalisation between principles and practice that drew me away from the private sector to civil society. Further, living in India, one could not long remain blind to the foundations of injustice that one’s life, from womb to tomb, is constructed on.
As with many so-called “caring” professions and those that are poorly remunerated, I found greater numbers of women in civil society, at junior and middle levels at least. More significantly, I believe, effectiveness in this sector, even more than the others, requires a wholesome balance of head, heart and muscle rather than the limited, macho, left-brain-only style that the worlds of business and politics seem to prefer. It is a modus operandi that many women I have worked with seem more adept at than the average man. So too at striking the fine balance necessary between pragmatism and idealism. Even in civil society however, at more senior levels, on boards, at the institutions that shape our lives, and where remuneration levels reach sustainability, women are again reduced to a tiny minority. Too many women are still excluded from these positions by economic and social pressures, biases and our own diffidence at challenging the norms. Even those of us with access to the tools and tradecraft of leadership and supportive families willing to share our responsibilities are too often defeated by social expectations, including our own, and pervasive old-boys clubs. As long as the price of success is defined by sacrifice of family time and identity more women than men will continue to opt out.
As a consequence of the differences in the ways we are socialised, men and women do, in general, operate somewhat differently. Research across sectors has shown conclusively the benefits, in purely business terms, of diverse teams, organisations and governing bodies. Beyond those benefits, however, the question whether we, as a species, would be in the situation we confront today if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters and Brothers has resonance beyond its superficial humour. It seems clear to me that the current confluence of crises is, at its core, a consequence of the predominance of the worst so-called “masculine” traits – what Rebecca Costa described as "paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology."
Surveying the terrain 3 decades since I first left the comfortable cocoon of my childhood, women have clearly made remarkable inroads into decision-making across sectors. Yet, it is more than obvious that the forces of patriarchy in politics, business, media, religion and civil society will combat these advances with every fatwa, gigabyte, dollar, missile and sinew at their command. And that, despite pious platitudes from politicians and philanthropists, there is no country or institution where the battle has been conclusively won.
Women of my generation, and I personally, have been the beneficiaries of those who pushed out the boundaries of possibility before us. As our species struggles to invent a future beyond the false choices of authoritarianism vs. individualism and prosperity vs. sustainability, it is, I believe, our moral duty as women (and men) to ensure we stand firm in defending those hard-won freedoms and, regardless of the particular issue we focus our efforts on, bring our unique perspectives, values and experiences as we speak out, stand up and strive for a world where no one has to settle for a life less than the one they are capable of living.