Social Entrepreneur Spotlight

Prajakta

Kuwalekar

Founder of Engendered

Personal Information/Background

Prajakta Kuwalekar, India, BA Political Science

10+ years of experience working in policy advocacy and strategic communication across corporate, nonprofit and public sector organisations. Currently running www.engendered.co, a crowdsourced data initiative to bring more inclusion in Indian workplaces.

What motivates you? Why do you do what you do?

Having being born in a family of freedom fighters, social justice made an introduction in my life early on. My grandfather would often discuss issues of social importance like caste, superstition, religion openly with his contemporaries and encourage me to ask any questions I liked. That laid the foundational stones for the equality I intrinsically seek in the world.

Can you share more details about your initiative - what problem are you focusing? What is your mission?

I started Engendered to address the dwindling labour force participation by women in India. Our mission is to work with various stakeholders and support policy making in the area of inclusion for women in leadership and in the formal sector. We use data to inform the policies. Evidence based data is matched with data collected from adaptive tests. This assigns an Inclusion Quotient to the organisation. We want to create an India specific gender equity index and gender equity benchmarks that organisations can aim for while designing diversity and inclusion policies.

What did you learn on your journey until now?

I learnt that if gender professionals really want to create impact, they NEED TO BUILD A COLLECTIVE. Diversity and inclusion consultants are busy offering cheaper alternatives to cut through the competition leading to a crowded space that's beneficial for NO ONE but the corporations and clients. We can all work towards making the pie bigger. I have met women and men who work in this field constantly threatened by the work others are doing. Why? I think that is the reason why gender professionals haven't made even a dent in the vast expanse of the problem. We need to collaborate if we are interested in actually creating impact. Otherwise all of us will keep doing workshops for INR 5,000 and INR 10,000, nothing will really change for women at work and all the resource-hours will prove to be wasted. I am sure my opinion will attract some criticism but after 2 years of working in this field, I genuinely think EVERY gender professional in the for-profit and nonprofit must ask, WHY HAVE THINGS NOT CHANGED AT ALL AND COUNTERINTUITIVELY WHY ARE THEY GETTING WORSE BY THE DAY? 

Covid will set us back by a decade and if we are to accelerate, we need real commitment from the professionals to get together, be action oriented and SET HARD METRICS instead of optics like news articles mentions, number of likes and number of followers. 

Social impact management needs to become mainstream and impact measurement the norm.