Women in Automation
Published on : Sunday 22-03-2020
Dr M Arokiaswamy
India has slipped to the 112th spot – down from 108th it held a year earlier – in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2020 released in December 2019. What is more worrying is the fact that the economic gender gap runs particularly deep in India. Only one- third of the gap has been bridged (score of 35.4%, 149th, down 7 places). Since 2006, the gap has gotten significantly wider. Among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap is larger than the political gender gap, the report states. Now in its 14th year, the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender parity in four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment. At the global level, the report says it will take nearly 100 years to close this gender gap.
That is some food for thought. But we are making progress, albeit slowly. Across the country, enrolment of girls in higher studies in increasing, and their performance in general is on par, if not better than boys. More fields are opening up for women that were an exclusive male domain previously. This edition of Industrial Automation celebrates the success of women in the technology arena, talking about their experience on the eve of the International Women’s Day celebrated universally on March 8.
Just as the world was looking for a better economic performance in 2020, on the New Year’s Day came the first news of several flu-like cases in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province with 11 million population. While the initial reaction of Chinese government was slow, once the enormity of the crisis was revealed, it swung into action. The fact that the Chinese New Year holidays in January caused large scale movement of workers from the affected province to far flung areas of the country only made matters worse. As this edition goes to the press, the crisis has spread across the world, albeit in small numbers. There are enormous implications of this crisis in terms of human lives as well as lost business. For example, Schneider Electric has reported a $300 million hit on account of shutting down of its factories in China during the month of January. That is just one company out of thousands that have massive operations in China.
Man has conquered many frontiers but nature always has surprises. It is time to draw the right lessons from this crisis when things settle down. In a globalised world, no country is going to suffer alone. Either we progress together, or suffer the consequences without discrimination. This editorial is from the magazine for the month of feb 2020 to here from the experts & industry proffessionals subscribe now by visiting this link.(https://www.industrialautomationindia.in/subscription).
