[Women in STEM] Shikha Rai, Vice President, Canon India

An IIT Kanpur Alumnus, Shikha Rai graduated as a mechanical engineer. She started her journey as an engineer on the transformer shop floor in BHEL. Later, she joined Bausch and Lomb as the MRP project manager. She has also headed the IT at Duracell. In her 19 year-long stint at Canon, Shikha recently heads the IT function at Canon India, in addition to leading the HR and QEHS functions. “Working with Canon for the past 19 years, I have had the privilege to work with great leaders and enjoyed leading exceptional teams,” she states.

Apart from her professional roles, Shikha also volunteers at the NGO – Pragati. Pragati works in the field of primary education for the underprivileged. “My association with the NGO keeps me grounded and allows me to make a difference around the community I live in,” she underlines.

In conversation with CiOL, Shikha outlines her role at Canon and her opinion on Women in STEM. Excerpts from the interview.

What are your roles in Canon India? What are your immediate goals for the company?

During my close to 2 decades with Canon India, I have donned many hats. I am responsible for aligning IT strategies with the business as well as bringing excellence to the HR space. I also head the Quality, Environment, Health & Safety functions.

Due to the unprecedented times, immediate attention is to maintain the health & safety of the employees. Business continuity is our top agenda, and all functions are aligning to keep our business strong. Support to employees working-from-home along with digitization & automation is being prioritized. From the HR perspective on the gender diversity agenda, as a mid-term goal, we aim to improve the women strength from 12% to 20% and looking at collaborating with technical institutes to build a pipeline for women field service engineers.

Has the inclusion of Women in STEM changed over the years? How can the change be snowballed?

I do see better percentages of women in STEM studies compared to 30 years back when I did my engineering. However, the bigger challenge is for women to continue in their careers. We experience many women dropping out at crucial junctures as they are unable to cope with the demands of both, career and family.

For the change to snowball, it requires a major shift in the mindsets of both men & women, infrastructure, support systems, in fact, the complete ecosystem. Addressing unconscious biases which label women unsuitable for STEM, creating infrastructure & systems that provide safe & accessible support to working parents, framing policies that give fair representation to both genders are few ideas to promote women in STEM. Also creating forums for women to meet achievers in the STEM domain could help; there are not enough role models today.

The impact of women in technology is undeniable. What do you think should be the ways to keep women engaged and appreciated in the workforce?

Following are my thoughts to have an equitable work environment:

• Be an equal opportunity employer. Ask for equal representation while recruiting for a position, then select based on merit.

• Conduct sensitization workshops for all managers so that they can address any biases that they may hold around this issue.

• Create opportunities for open communication so that it helps bring up any kind of discrimination for discussion and resolution.

• Create policies that are fair and transparent. For example, a woman should not be appraised adversely due to maternity leave.

• Employee development – training, mentoring, and coaching should be provided depending on need so that each employee is allowed to reach his/her potential.

In the new normal, how are the roles of Women in Tech changing? What are the new challenges for Women in Tech?

The new normal has brought in both opportunities and challenges. Remote working is becoming more acceptable which gives an opportunity especially for women to work from homes making it perhaps easier to balance work & home better. Tech roles more specifically can be managed well remotely and therefore this is good news for women in Tech.

However, issues like burn-out, isolation, becoming disengaged and so on are fallouts of remote working. We need to keep them in mind for all employees in such roles.

In senior roles, how many women are on the top at Canon India?

In Canon India, women constitute 15% of the senior management team. We are cognizant of the fact that we need to make further efforts to reach a better gender ratio. To address it, the first step is to measure where we are - we collate statistics around department-wise gender ratio, representation at the time of hiring, exit analysis, post-maternity assimilation, pay-parity and so on.

What is the company doing to bring equality in genders in senior leadership roles?

We have introduced a program called WE@Canon (Women Empowerment at Canon). The CEO is the sponsor, the senior management as the steering committee and the senior women making the advisory board. We have taken a goal of improving the gender diversity in the organization from 12% to at least 20% in the mid-term. If at the entry-level, the funnel is large enough, we would have a good start. Therefore, for any new recruitment, we push our placement agencies for equal gender representation. To introduce women talent in our field service, we are in discussion with a technical institute to train women employees on copier service to create an employable pipeline of women candidates.

We have various development interventions for all employees – coaching being a key one. Senior leaders are trained in coaching techniques and they take up coaching assignments internally, cross-functionally. This helps employees find solutions to any hurdles impacting their performance. We provide networking opportunities by inviting leaders from industry, especially women leaders, to share their stories and how they overcame difficulties or biases.

We give post-maternity transition support by providing options for part-time work. Also, we have an initiative called Re-boot. Here, HR meets the returning mom and her manager separately. He/She helps iron out any hiccups after the maternity break. Focused group discussions with women employees help to capture any unique problems being faced or expectations from the organization.

By holistically addressing the gender diversity issue, we are confident that more women will find it fulfilling to pursue their careers with us and reach the senior leadership levels.