Women In Public Affairs Are Growing, But It Is Still Early Days

Traditionally, corporate affairs is a function in a company that looked after liaisoning with the government and this was traditionally done by men. Over the last decade or so, Public Affairs (PA) or advocacy by companies and industry associations emerged to bring their strategic voices closer to the government towards influencing public policies. Even after the 1991 reforms when the economy and the government opened up, women’s influence did not go up. But, today, more and more women are joining the PA function. 

One of the main reasons for this was that corporate affairs worldwide has traditionally been dominated by lobbying some of which in India was perceived as an activity that was not fully legal. Echoes of the Bofors scandal and the illegal involvement of agents resonated in corporate and government corridors. Nira Radia comes to mind.  

But in the last few years, the PA landscape in India has been steadily changing and one dimension of that change is the greater involvement of women in PA. There is a growing number of senior PA leaders in India today. These include to name a few, Vinitha Sethi, Deepshikha Dharmaraj, Neelima Dwivedi and Shweta Rajpal Kohli.  

There are many reasons for this. Says Ajay Khanna, Co-founder, PAFI, “The scope, shape and content of PA has changed. The prism is changing. It is now a holistic function that often includes corporate social responsibility (CSR) and communications and is more strategic in nature. It collaborates with non-profits, think tanks and industry associations. Increasingly, more and more women are involved.” Vinita Sethi, Immediate Past President of PAFI and Senior Vice President and Chief – Public Affairs of the Apollo Hospitals Group says, “PA is at an inflexion point as far as the participation of women is concerned. They are good at building strategic partnerships and crisis management. In the past while many women dropped out from PA as their careers matured, today that is not happening.” 

The second reason why there is a greater number of women in PA is that many of them opt for public policy courses in organisations like the Parth Shah and Luis Miranda co-founded Indian School of Public Policy (ISPP) or the Ashoka University. In fact, it is estimated that at ISPP, students are equally distributed between women and men. Additionally, there are now mature think tanks like the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) where there are a good number of public policy researchers. While many of them opt for pure public policy assignments, there is a good share that joins the PA divisions of companies. In short, there is greater capacity building and professionalisation of public affairs today. 

Third, women are increasingly helming industry associations like the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and FICCI from the side of companies. Shobhana Kamineni and Sangita Reddy from the Apollo Hospitals group and Naina Lal Kidwai come to mind. This is an impetus for these industry associations to hire more women in the secretariat for public policy functions and often many of them join the PA departments of corporates.  

Fourth, the share of women in Indian bureaucracy is gradually going up. This also gives greater comfort and confidence to women PA professionals. For example, in the civil services exam of 2023, not only have women topped the exam in many years, but in 2023, about 320 of the total 920 candidates selected were women. Over the last few years, the number of women in the bureaucracy at the union and the state levels has gradually been increasing. This also empowers PA women leaders.  

What does the future hold? Despite much progress, the journey is still quite early for women in PA. For example, in one of the NCR-based Indian companies, while there are both men and women in its PA division, the women managers are typically involved in pure public policy and men do the liaisoning with the government. It is time the stigma of corporate affairs is removed. Although PAFI is a pioneer among PA groups in the country, just like there are more industry associations at the national and state levels, we need to have more PAFIs with increased women so that those at the regional level also step up. Finally, as a next agenda, the women pioneers and leaders in the PA profession should actually mentor and train the younger group of women in the profession.  

(The author is a New Delhi-based business journalist with more than three decades of experience of covering the corporate world. Views expressed are personal.)