Women in Indian pest management

It is the right time to increase women's representation in Indian PCOs

Researching for this PCO Mentor issue, I found no information on the subject and relied on personal experience to discuss the subject.

Last month, visiting my ex-colleague and friend Hiraman Rathod of Seva Facility Services (Seva) at his home in Ravet near Pune, I learned that his wife Kalpana and son Himanshu were helping him in managing the company.  Thus, like most family-owned PCOs, Seva had all family members contribute to the business and take it forward.

In the Indian pest management industry, the pioneers had the founder’s family actively involved in the company.  During my stint at Pest Control India (PCI), I met the Late co-founder Mr. N.S. Rao and his wife, Late Mrs. Lily S. Rao.  Mrs. Rao was actively involved in managing PCI before my joining it in 2000.

Before 2000, I met Mrs. Leela Swarup, the wife of Dr. Sarup’s Pest Control founder, Dr. Anand Sarup.  She has been managing the company, one of the oldest in India, for over twenty-five years.

Closer home, at our workplace, at PECOPP Pest Control (PECOPP), the late founder, Mr. Chandru Balwani’s wife, Mrs. Viju Balwani, has been an integral part of the enterprise and has helped in its growth and expansion.  In her seventies now, Mrs. Balwani is very active in sales and guides the employees in how the company must stand out from the competition through superior customer service.

I have not surveyed the Indian pest management industry or its constituent companies to find out about its women leaders or the percentage of female employees.  However, it is certain that due to the proprietary nature of our industry’s constituents, many Indian PCOs historically had and even now have women as owners or co-owners.  Further, there are women in customer support, accounting, sales, operations, and leadership roles like the head of a business unit or region. 

However, from a superficial analysis, the percentage of women in the Indian PCO workforce is likely to be very low.  Women are less than five percent of the pest management industry employees in the United States.  However, unlike in India, the US, and the UK, you can now find lady technicians, which is a rarity in India.  Overall, we may not have women at more than 1-2% of India’s pest management industry workforce.

Every business segment’s major concern about future growth and expansion is the difficulty in finding skilled employees.  Such challenge is made worse by the knowing or unknowing exclusion of women, who are fifty percent of the Indian population.

The industry associations must survey the current number of women their members employ to determine the percentage of women and men in their cohort.  Like the American National Pest Management Association, the Indian pest management associations must promote the concept of women joining PCOs for flexible and rewarding careers.  The NPMA has a web page dedicated to Women in Pest Control with a video of women sharing their experience in the pest management industry.  The associations must also highlight the women leaders in their members and allot time to showcase the women achievers of the industry.

Diversity campaigns: The larger and mid-sized PCOs must run diversity campaigns to increase women on rolls in a planned manner.  Having more male employees or few female employees is not uncommon across industries.  However, larger companies have consciously inducted more women to increase their workforce representation. 

In roles like customer service, women with higher levels of empathy and patience will be more successful than men.  Even in other roles like sales and operations, women are likely to perform as well as their male counterparts.  Service scheduling, a complex activity to balance customer choice with available resources, is also highly suited for women.

Flexible hours and work from home (WFH): Many women do not join or leave the workforce due to domestic responsibilities, and several are willing to consider part-time employment and the freedom of WFH.  PCOs must be ready to adapt to the lady candidates who have requisite skills but prefer to work a few hours a day from home.  With cheap computer hardware, broadband connectivity, and internet telephony availability, employee physical location is no longer a constraint to performing most types of work.

Backoffice versus field roles: Most women in Indian PCOs are in the office functions such as accounting, customer service, HR, and IT support.  As the number of women in sales and operations is much lower than in the back office, PCOs must focus on adding lady employees.  An easy option is to offer those roles to back-office women employees.  The other option is to earmark a percentage of sales and operations roles for women.  In addition, by internally posting jobs of managerial and leadership roles, a PCO can evaluate the women in their team for higher responsibility.

Lady technicians: Among different employee levels, the Indian PCOs have a major challenge finding technicians.  Apart from finding good technicians, the challenge extends to making them deliver safe and quality pest treatments and remain with their employer for long periods of employment. 

Women are likely to be better technicians for many reasons.  Women are naturally more predisposed to higher hygiene levels and paying close attention to detail, two critical qualities to succeed in pest management.  When a lady technician visits homes for pest treatments, the women in the customers’ homes are likely to feel more at ease.  For residential pest management, women are likely to improve customer response and provide better service through thorough monitoring.

The average tenure of women at employers is higher than that of men, which will help PCOs to avoid constant re-hiring to replace employees who have left.

Challenges in hiring women in pest management as technicians include the physically strenuous nature of some pest treatments and their safety.  Though drilling during anti-termite treatments and carrying fogging machines during mosquito management are difficult, we may still find some women in India who can perform such activities.  In addition, every industry is now seeing women pioneer activities historically considered suitable only for men.  For example, there are now many women who drive trucks in India (though it was common for women to drive trucks in the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)), a profession considered suitable only for men due to its tough nature.

I foresee greater participation by women in the Indian pest management industry in the current decade.  Inducting more women across different organizational levels and functions will help PCOs improve their employee strength with well-qualified candidates who stay longer at their organizations as employees.  Women are also likely to perform as well, if not better, than their male colleagues.