Gender discrimination exists even today

There is no glass ceiling; however, the ascent from middle management to senior management certainly gets tougher for women with drive, ambition and an appetite to take on both internal and external challenges, which include unfair competition from insecure male colleagues and meeting with society’s unrealistic expectations of the perfect home–work life balance.

The more fortunate women, who have apparently succeeded, are those that have a great supportive structure in place by way of friends, colleagues, both male and female at work and a committed family including spouse, children and in laws living the dream with them.

The key driver for success is having the passion for the work you do, being aware of the unique gifts you have been blessed with and the knowledge on how to utilise them to make a difference to as many lives as possible around you.

My passion at PharmaLeaf is international regulatory affairs and the unique gift of being able to connect the in obvious virtual dots across development and commercialisation in order to advance access to quality safe and cost effective medicines for the global patient.

I have faced gender discrimination in my 24 years of industry experience and am also aware that gender discrimination exists even today, which is worsened by functional discrimination due to varying perceptions in the nature of work where one function is treated differently against another instead of fostering team spirit and establishing joint deliverables for the company. For example the medical function is given more importance than regulatory function and in turn regulatory more important than quality assurance, whereas each function has its unique role to play which is interconnected with each other to succeed.

At Pharmaleaf, we work in a virtual, globally networked and harmonised environment, where our priority is to encourage diversity, break away from all discriminations of gender, culture, religion, state etc. and dissolve departmental silos to foster team spirit between global stakeholders collectively responsible for meeting joint project deliverables and timelines.

There have been instances when gender discrimination issues were ‘resolved’ based on the perceptions and maturity of the decision makers involved. Yet there were other instances wherein the issues were beyond resolution necessitating one to recognise the politics and hence either flip the page or change the book itself and move on instead of fighting the system.

Every challenging experience makes you a tough professional, resilient and yet positive to be able to cope with changes in life and undoubtedly at work during your tenure in senior management engaging and mentoring persons from all walks of life.

My strategy is to remain focused on my dreams and stay connected to my close network of family, friends and colleagues in finding creative solutions to move forward, every time I face a new road block.

PharmaLeaf has a NGO partner called Zun Foundation (‘Zun’ means ‘woman’ in Persian), with a CSR focus on women and children’s health, education and family welfare. (www.zunfoundation.com) On IWD, PharmaLeaf usually organises activities such as medical camps, well woman talks/ presentations sharing useful health information and simple lifestyle tips to the general public to create awareness on the quality of women’s life with topics related to anaemia, reproduction/ fertility, cancers, menopause etc.

– Shenaz Z Khaleeli, Co-Founder & Technical Services Director, PharmaLeaf India