Suman Gopalan bags Accenture Vaahini Equality Champion of the Year award for promoting diversity, inclusiveness at workplace

Credited for leading the overall talent strategy and championing the cause of diversity at the workplace, Suman Gopalan, Chief Human Resources Officer, Freshworks, was awarded the 'Accenture Vaahini Equality Champion of the Year' at the ETPrime Women Leadership Awards 2021. Increasing the representation of women in the organisation workforce to 40% by 2023 is a personal goal, and Freshworks is well on the path to achieving the target. The Accenture Vaahini Equality Champion award honours and celebrates individuals who have made significant contributions to enhance the practices of equality and diversity in their organisation, and community.

Gopalan, who advocates gender diversity and inclusion at the workplace, feels that gender balance is essential, and companies should strive for equal numbers rather than just getting satisfied by 20% or 30%. In 2020, Freshworks announced growth in women in the workforce to a third, and efforts were underway to ensure diversity across all levels and teams, including engineering, product, or finance. Today, Freshworks is inching towards 35% women globally and is striving for 50%.

Before joining Freshworks in 2018, which creates cloud-based software solutions for businesses, Gopalan led the global and regional HR teams for Nielsen, Dell Technologies, and Whirlpool. She holds a post-graduate diploma in Human Resources Management from Xaviers Labour Research Institute in Jamshedpur.


Gopalan feels that times are changing, and there is a lot more recognition now than it was 25 years ago. "Since it takes time to bring about changes and there is a large section of the country for whom diversity and inclusion are just words. The government has done a lot for girls, especially in access to education and healthcare facilities in the interior parts of the country," she said. However, she feels that work needs to be done in two areas, "The first is to increase the participation of women in policymaking and another place where there is a need to push the needle is at the workplace."

Gopalan says women enter the workforce in the same number as men; even at Freshworks, it is almost 50-50 at the entry-level, but the number tends to fall off. She elucidates that women take breaks and never return to work. Gopalan herself took a break when she became a mother; she said, "Taking a break does not make a woman less knowledgeable, and she does not lose the edge. There are various ways we can remove different barriers and make it easy for women to resume work rather than making it tedious for them." One initiative of hers at Freshworks that was praised by all was the CHRO Open Door Policy and partnerships with daycare centers for working mothers with very young children.

Gopalan and her team at Freshworks initiated a Career Restart Program for women who took a break. The program executed an outreach to over 4000 employees who recently left the company. She says that it is essential to push the envelope to ensure that half of our population shying away from participation in decision-making, policymaking, or organizations are brought in. "Women's participation in the workforce is meagre. For the country's economy to move forward then we cannot have half the population not participating in the economy," added Gopalan.

She further said an organisation should ensure a level playing field for men and women. "And of course, make sure that you are taking a hard look at how you're promoting, who you're promoting, how you're measuring success, what you're calling success, and (that) it's a level playing field for everybody," she added.

Apart from Gopalan, the nominees for the Accenture Vaahini Equality Champion of the Year award were - Deepshikha Mukerji, Regional Human Resources Director, Abbott; Nandini Sarkar, Global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Leader, Boeing India; Shobha Pandey, Regional Talent Management and Diversity Leader, John Deere and Swati Rustagi, Director Human Resources, Amazon.

The full exclusive interview with Suman Gopalan, where she shared her views on the several initiatives she started at Freshworks and has helped the organisation achieve the steep diversity targets, can be viewed here