Day 1 Keynote GHCI 17
The annual GHCI conference, GHCI17 this year was held on 16th and 17th November at the Bangalore International Exhibition Center. You can learn more about this event here. This event over the last couple of years has seen over 90% participation from Bengaluru, unlike this year where Bengaluru had 56% participation. Other significant participation being from cities Pune and Hyderabad. Pankajam Sridevi, Managing Director, ANZ Operations and Technology India Pvt. Ltd presented the opening day keynote.
She shared her personal experiences in her journey from an Engineer to her current position. Pankajam chose to stress upon Narratives, Developing Financial Acumen, Celebrating Success and Building a Support ecosystem for women to be successful professionals.
Her stories touched upon topics, like having work-life Integration rather than work-life balance. Also, how she chose and made decisions and sacrifices to keep a healthy progress in her professional life, while also ensuring necessary care for the family.
She requests women to be assertive on what they want professionally.She calls upon women to have narratives corrected. Since, women are being adjectivized as “Motherly, Good, etc”. She says though it does not offend, it requires that these narratives be corrected like ” but I am also Strategic” or “I also am a Visionary” at times.
Pankajam called upon women to improve on Financial Acumen. Her examples state the relevance in current times for women to have a sound understanding of Financial matters in order to be independent.
Question Answers
The keynote was followed by a Question-Answer session. Many queries were answered. One of them which stood out, by a girl student. She was mentioning her concern with remarks from her male classmates. Regarding women having easy access to jobs due to gender diversity factors in organizations. Though she felt she was equally capable and she didn’t want to have any special considerations. Pankajam mentions, during such transformation there is a lot of noise, which should sometimes be ignored.
You may also like to see the GHCI17 Day 2 Keynote by Rebecca Parsons here.