SCEB: 4th Session (Date: 24th Nov’17)

This session of SCEB was dedicated to the topic of ‘Women’s Celebration Day’, whether we should actually
celebrate women, is it just our notion of increasing gender parity with no real motive or efforts and
whether the world is witnessing an impact, not only at the top level but at the society too. We were asked
to participate in a small activity within our study groups on the above mentioned topic for the ‘Johnson
and Johnson’ company. As the lecture progressed, the class touched upon the rationale for celebrating
‘Women’s Day’, that being celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women
and a call to action for accelerating gender parity and few other keynotes of glorification, structural
changes in organization and society, biasness, implementation of ideas and their inclusiveness and their
substantial impact on the issue at hand.

We looked closely upon society and who takes the decision in the society. If there is a flaw in the decision
making body of the society, then whether we should replicate this model of society in the organizations.
We further debated on how women are generally perceived and portrayed in comparison to men in the
society. The main concern was to address the issue of what society should look like today.

Later on we talked upon the 8 rungs on the ladder of Citizen Participation which is about power structures
in society and how they interact and is a tool to see who has power when important decisions are being
made. The bottom rungs of the ladder of Non Participation signify the distortion of participation into a
public relations vehicle by power holders, not to genuinely enable people participation but just to educate,
cure and manipulate the citizens. The middle ladders of Tokenism allow the power holders to enable
citizens to hear and have a voice but they lack the power to insure that their views will be heeded by the
powerful. The top rungs of Citizen Power provide the citizen with increasing degrees of decision making
with full managerial power.