Chennai: With a vision to provide a marketplace for second career opportunities for women in corporate India, Dr Saundarya Rajesh, a social entrepreneur, founded Avtar Careers in 2000. Her primary objective was to provide opportunities for women who had taken a break in their career and now needed to get back to the mainstream.
Today with a 3.5 lakh strong network of women professionals across India, Avtar Careers is probably India’s largest creator of career re-entries for women. With more than 15,000 placements, Avtar has revolutionised the lives of many women who wish to re-enter corporate world.
Avtar has ventured into areas of women’s empowerment and career creation to meet potential employers. Dr Saundarya Rajesh uses the butterfly metaphor to express her story. The butterfly effect began a couple of decades ago when after taking a break from her career, she planned to re-enter the workplace. She went for an interview but the person who interviewed her did not consider that women who took a break in their careers could make a good bet and a sustained professional.
But then he wanted to offer her a job so he gave her a job with a 40 per cent pay cut from what she had been getting two years ago. Dr Saundarya says, “The butterfly effect started here. I was filled with energy to not only challenge the status quo, but also make sure that Indian corporates realize that women who took breaks and wanted to re-enter could make a good bet. So my organization Avtar was launched 18 years ago with a logo of a butterfly symbolizing change and we have changed quite a few things. We have changed the perception that women who want to re-enter after a break are not good bets in the workplace.Today more than 66 organisations in India hire between 7,000-8,000 women annually who have taken breaks. We have changed the perception that unprivileged women who cannot be counted upon to be a strong talent pool in the workplace can actually become that.”
Project Putri is a vision to train 10,000 unprivileged girls from classes 8 to 12 to make them career intentional so that they can enter the workplace each year. Avtar partners with more than 50 companies for a second career and conducts training programmes to make the workplace more conducive to women employees.
Avtar’s annual research report which is called Viewport, addresses itself to several diversity issues from corporate India. Some topics that viewports have addressed include flexibility in women’s careers, career intentionality of women professionals, economic centeredness of women professionals and maternity management framework in corporate India.
Dr Saundarya Rajesh has been bestowed with the ‘Winds of Change award’ in the individual category conferred by the Forum on Workplace Inclusion, University of St Thomas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
