It took a pandemic to reveal the leadership power of women: Industry experts

While the global pandemic has led to a lot of disruptions, hardships and life-changing transitions in everyone’s life, the impact has been especially a significant one on women professionals. Adgully’s marquee Women Disruptors 2021 event turned the spotlight on ‘Impact of Pandemic on Women in Marketing, Media and Communications’.

Taking part in the discussions were:

Amit Gujral, Chief Marketing Officer, JK Tyre & Industries

Deepa Bhatia, General Manager, YouGov India

Meera Krishnan, Principal Consultant, Dua Consulting

Mona Jain, Chief Revenue Officer, ABP Network

Susan Josi, Managing Partner, Havas Life Sorento

Vaishali Sharma, Head - Marketing & Communications, Sony SAB & Sony Max Hindi Movie Cluster, Sony Pictures Networks India

Commencing the discussions, Amit Gujral noted how the pandemic period was also a celebration of the uniqueness of every woman leader, who embody infinite possibilities.

Deepa Bhatia here presented the findings of an industry-wide study commissioned by Adgully to find out how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted specifically women in MarCom. She pointed out that women in MarCom, as with women professionals in every sector, faced the double whammy of increased office work load as well as household responsibilities. But this did not deter them from taking up the challenge and they adapted well.

Women also appreciated the flexibility that came along with the pandemic, especially the Work From Home transition. Most women agreed that Work From Home will become a permanent phenomenon in the future – for a majority, but not for everyone.

Bhatia further added that a large majority of professionals believe that women make for better leaders than men during a crisis. Their ability to multitask and display empathy makes them more competent than men at handling such situations, and the COVID-19 crisis amply showcased this.

Gujral here remarked how corporate culture today has become more equitable and has led to appreciation of the leadership style of women.

Agreeing with this, Vaishali Sharma remarked how the pandemic saw a very interesting thing emerge, which is countries with women leaders seemed to have arrested the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, such as New Zealand and some other countries. “What happened during the pandemic is that the higher appreciation of women as leaders, because at this time of uncertainty and a lot of stress and not knowing what the future holds, we saw a lot of women leaders rise up to the occasion and use the softer skills to motivate and aid the process of working in an environment which was really stressful,” Sharma added.

Mona Jain, too, highlighted how the corporate culture has evolved and that women leaders now are being recognised, especially the way in which they have been able to balance the entire COVID-19 impact and successfully straddle between their work and corporate life.

Watch the complete conversation HERE.