'When I started out, there were no women in marketing': Visa's Sujatha Kumar
Find out who Visa's head of marketing, Sujatha Kumar shared the spotlight with at Storyboard18's Share The Spotlight event.
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Sujatha Kumar, head of marketing at Visa has been working in the field of marketing for over 28 years. “When I started there were no women,” she said at Storyboard18’s Share The Spotlight event.
Kumar shared that eventually when she became part of the leadership team at an organisation, she was part of a group of 14 leaders out of which 13 were women.
“From a very young age I decided to try and get more women in the work world and try and keep more women in the work world. There are three M’s for why women stop working. Marriage, mobility and maternity,” she said.
Kumar added, “In an MNC like Visa, we today have 40 percent women in the workforce. That’s almost half the size.”
At the event, Kumar shared the spotlight with Nidhi Chawla, CEO and co-founder of Silver Talkies, a social impact organisation focused on enriching and empowering the lives of older adults.
Chawla shared that one of the challenges in her career came from her home. Her father was fond of sketching and after retirement, Chawla’s gift to him was a bunch of art supplies so that he could enjoy doing what he loved. However, in a few weeks he got bored of sketching and painting. Chawla realised that her father had no intrinsic interest to keep him going. “He had gotten used to the lifestyle of running errands, watching TV, going for a walk. Secondly, he didn’t have any outside motivation from his social circle either that would keep him inspired. So, when I went looking for solutions for him, there was nothing happening for seniors,” she said.
Chawla also made the observation that more often than not, when people ask their parents about their health, they are referring to their physical health and not their emotional and social health. Changing that mindset in people is one of the challenges that Chawla shared she is facing.
Thirdly, she shared that whenever she mentioned that she worked towards doing something for seniors, people would always think that she was running an NGO. Silver Talkies is not an NGO. “There is huge potential to marry social impact with a profitable and sustainable organisation because that’s the only way to do it,” Chawla said.
