Circa mid-1990’s, it was the India of the post-liberalization era and Dr Saundarya Rajesh was a woman, who after a career break, was seeking to return to the workplace. Despite burgeoning career opportunities in a globalized economy, Dr. Saundarya noticed that women were receiving a raw deal. This was even more aggravated in the case of women who took breaks in careers. Observing the loaded inequities in the workplace for all underrepresented talent pools, she set up Avtar – a social enterprise focusing on creating diverse, equitable and inclusive organizations. Today, she is recognized not only as having created several thousand careers for women on breaks, but also for pioneering the discipline of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Indian workplaces.
For her path-breaking work of the past 20 years in this space, she has won accolades such as the Ministry of Women & Child Development’s #100Women Achiever Award, Twitter’s #Web Wonder Women Award, The Winds of Change 2019 Award by the Minnesota Forum on Workplace Inclusion, NiTi-Aayog’s Women Transforming India Award, Golden Aviator Award, Asia’s most Innovative Diversity & Inclusive Leaders Award and the list goes on.
An irrepressible advocate of the potential of women’s workforce participation, Dr Saundarya is the advisor of choice for an impressive list of organizations and leaders on the benefits of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In the last two decades, she has personally trained and mentored over 10,000 leaders in the Indian corporate sector. Through Avtar, which is India’s first DEI solutions company she has helped diversity champions create a strong Business, Talent, and Culture Case for their organizations to espouse diversity talent in their workplaces.
The team at Avtar, under Dr. Saundarya’s leadership is steeped in creating many innovative and effective DEI solutions along the lines of Experiencing, Enriching, Enabling and Embedding Diversity in organizations. All interventions from the house of Avtar take their origin in primary research. Training solutions such as “A&B (Allyship & Belongingness) of Inclusion”, “Unconscious Bias Training”, “Men as Gender Advocates” “Multi-generational workforce training,”, Audit & Advisory solutions like DEI Assessments and HR Policy Review, Recruitment solutions for hiring people from different underrepresented talent pools and most recently, India’s only diversity job portal – myavtar.com are part of Avtar’s offerings.
Under Dr Saundarya’s leadership, Avtar conducts India’s largest gender analytics called the “Best Companies’ for Women in India (BCWI)” that recognises the Top 10 and 100 Best Companies that have designed and implemented the best practices towards gender inclusion of India Inc. The half-decade long BCWI journey has seen women’s representation at the 100 Best companies grow from 25% in 2016 to 34% in 2020. In 2019, Avtar also created Corporate India’s largest Inclusion Index – The Working Mother & Avtar Most Inclusive Companies Index (MICI), to identify companies whose diversity intent transcends the strand of gender to include diversity of abilities, that of sexual orientation, age, culture et.al.
The results of these studies culminate each year in India’s most respected awards conference - Best of the Best (BoB) that Avtar hosts in partnership with Working Mother. Currently in its 5th edition, BoB witnesses several hundred leading lights in the space of DEI congregate and share best practices in the spirit of collective growth. Apart from BoB, Avtar conducts many successful large-format conferences which have been breakthrough platforms enabling under-represented talent groups and organizations intent on DEI to learn and grow. Other than BoB, some of other flagship DEI events include Diversity Job fairs, Power of I – Virtual DEI conference, Segue Sessions - Large format skill-building and networking platform for women.
Making her writing debut in 2018, Dr Saundarya Rajesh’s book The 99 Day Diversity Challenge published by SAGE is India’s first experiential book on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and has won several acclaims from industry leaders. In a captivating, unique format the book is designed to develop diversity and inclusion mind set in any organization or even individual within the proverbial 99 days.
An inspiring speaker, an author, and a very sought-after DEI strategist, Dr Saundarya’s inclusive vision is also to see young girls from underprivileged families create empowering white-collar careers for themselves. This she influences through Project Puthri, an initiative that instils “Career Intentionality” in the minds of under-privileged girl children from Corporation/Government schools. Presently Puthri mentors over 6000 girl children from below poverty-line families.
Dr Saundarya’s work in the space of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the workplace, is unparalleled in India. Her journey towards creating inclusive and equitable workplaces is inspirational. We can expect that her nation-building work in building organizations, communities and societies that truly harness the power of diversity will continue relentlessly for many more years to come!
