Women & Productivity – How damsels-in-distress can Save the world

It’s usually hard to talk about women, without getting slapped in the face (or raising a set of eyebrows) from both worlds. But putting aside the debate of women’s rights and gender specific roles for another day, I thought I’d talk about something that rarely receives significant attention.

In traditional organizations, the involvement of women in work is either for ornamental reasons (receptionist, secretary etc) or on the rationale of cheap labour (garment workers, proof readers etc). Since women do spend a lot of time decorating themselves and since society doesn’t expect them to play the role of the breadwinner of the family, this works well enough. But society also expects women to look after the babies, which usually doesn’t work very well for them in career development.

Yet we all know the positive sides of the feminine brain. There’s this thing called Intuition, there’s the ever popular Maternal instinct, and last but not least the beloved ‘blonde innocence’ that almost always manages to take the seriousness away from death-defying moments.

Women are therefore great for managerial positions in any organization. We recently visited Loadstar, the largest solid tyre manufacturing factory in the world [surprisingly situated in SL], and even though most of the heavy work was carried out by men, there were women involved in the higher and middle management.

I’m generalizing here, but most women have an uncanny knack for public relations and have the ability to get things done- quickly and effectively. They are not afraid to be wrong, and they’re not afraid to stop and ask for directions; which also makes them flexible leaders.

Most of all, women bring the important factor of gender dynamics to an organization. There was an interesting presentation by Prof. (Mrs.) Ratnayaka on real life examples of how active participation of girls in the Moratuwa University boosted the overall performance. Interestingly enough this is also portrayed by the relationship between our National GDP and women employment in the past years. Have a look at the statistics if needed.

But women in general, do have their weak points. They are not very skilled at analytical thinking. Don’t get me wrong, they’re superb at lateral thinking, seeking out patterns and building up stories. But their strong creative Right brain, usually suppresses their analytical Left brain, and hence discourages them to engage in tasks such as mathematics or heavy scientific reasoning.

This is one of the grounds that you don’t find many girls opting to do mathematics for A’Ls. And one of the many reasons you don’t find many women engineers among the decision making positions in the country. But why should something very insignificant like mathematics be hindrance to learn Engineering? (After all, not all of us are specializing in rocket science)

So, we thought we’d try to make a difference. Starting on the first week of September we’ll be conducting a programme called “Inspiring Prospective Women Engineers” for the Grade 11 students in five girls’ schools in Colombo. The Women Engineers Forum of the IESL will help us by giving their resource persons.

Hopefully we’ll inspire some of the girls to follow upon a path of Science & Engineering and perhaps persuade them to get actively involved in the development of the country. Even though we won't be able to make a huge cultural paradigm shift, we'll at least give hope to the young women who want to escape from the typical damsel-in-distress stereotype and explore the unknown.