Debjani Ghosh is used to being the only woman in the room, be it a board meeting or a seminar or a brainstorming session. A colleague once gave her a tip to deal with such situations: “When you are in a room and stick out like a sore thumb, remember that everyone is looking at you. So decide what you want to do—either hide under the table or turn the situation to your advantage.”
Ghosh, the first woman president of NASSCOM, the umbrella body of India’s software industry, has been taking this advice to heart for decades now, stealing the thunder in most rooms she has been in.
It is a fight she has gone into with all guns blazing. While her professional role of championing the cause of India’s tech ecosystem keeps her head busy, just as important for her heart is being the torchbearer for women in the workplace in corporate India.
In fact, her career-changing stint at Intel came about precisely because there was another woman in the room, for a change. Deborah Conrad, then chief marketing officer of the American chip giant, asked her the right questions. “She [asked] me brilliant questions related to my goals, aspirations and career, [and not] the usual questions like when I would marry and have kids,” Ghosh recounted.
“I don’t consider myself the ‘token’ woman because I do add value to whichever table I am at,” she said in another interview. Ghosh calls it the ‘five-minute challenge’, when she gets condescending looks at an all-male meeting. “It is a little amusing as I am the only woman in the room but that is only till you start talking. Then you can see the perceptions changing around you.”
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By now, she is used to changing not just perceptions. For someone in the cockpit of India’s software industry, Ghosh’s background is surprisingly non-tech—graduation in political science followed by an MBA. And her career track has seen her sprinting between sales, marketing and, before NASSCOM, hitting the spotlight by expanding the India business of Intel. “It gives you a 360-degree understanding of the business,” she said.
Ghosh took over as NASSCOM chief in 2018, after two decades at Intel. Interestingly, prior to this, she had been president of the hardware umbrella body MAIT (Manufacturers Association of Information Technology). “Ghosh is an accomplished professional with global exposure that she today brings to the Indian industry ecosystem,” said MAIT’s present president Nitin Kunkolienker.
Ghosh’s vision for Indian IT has been three-pronged: talent development and re-skilling, developing the culture of innovation and working with foreign countries to open new opportunities. It is a blueprint that has acquired an added impetus following the new normal the pandemic has thrown up, with an emphasis on digital.
Right at the advent of the first wave, Ghosh spearheaded the desi IT industry to be prepared for future skills, besides launching courseware on subjects like artificial intelligence, big data and cybersecurity in an attempt at skill-proofing for the future. “Agility is going to determine the leaders of the new norm and so will resilience,” she wrote in an article after the pandemic hit. “We will have to have an adaptable mindset above all in this journey and learn from our mistakes and successes as we go along.”