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Procter & Gamble Announces Newest Commitment to Gender Equality Across the Indian Subcontinent, Middle East and Africa region
MUMBAI: Procter & Gamble (P&G) announced a new commitment around a number of initiatives that will promote gender equality across the Indian Subcontinent, Middle East and Africa (IMEA) region. The declaration, which was made by P&G’s IMEA and APAC President,MagesvaranSuranjan during the company’s inaugural #WeSeeEqualSummit in partnership with UN Womenin Mumbai on February 18, 2019, is part of the company’s citizenshipfocus on being a Force for Good and Force for Growth.
“Gender equality is a core belief at P&G. Creating a world free of bias with equal representation and equal voice for everyone is both the right thing to do and the right business choice,” explained MagesvaranSuranjan.“We also want to spark conversations and change mindsets as championsfor the cause of gender equality across the region. We will leverage the full strengths of our business and operations, and our advertising voice to tackle gender bias and encourage women’s economic empowerment.”
Over the next 3 years:
• P&G aims to spend $100 million on deliberately working with Women-Owned Businesses in IMEA with a $30 million commitment to India
• P&G will educate more than$23 million adolescent girls on puberty and hygiene across IMEA. In India, P&G has been working with young girls in various groups across the country to understand the needs in the areas of Health & Hygiene, Personality Development etc. The company’s flagship Mother Daughter Menstrual Hygiene Program has been successfully running across the country since 1995. Today, P&G runs this program with the active support of 20,000 schools to educate about 4.5 Million adolescent girls annually and educates them on the importance of menstrual hygiene
• P&G and its brands will use the company’s voice in forums such as the #WeSeeEqualSummit,brand advertising like Ariel, Whisper, Always & Gilletteand multi-stakeholder efforts to spark conversation and motivate change. Notable campaigns from India that have sparked social change include Ariel ‘Share the Load’, Vicks ‘Touch of Care’, Whisper ‘Touch The Pickle’, to name a few.
Co-hosted with UN Women, P&G’s first IMEA #WeSeeEqualSummitbrought together business and government leaders, and influencers to share inspiration and surface insights around the myths that prevent us from accelerating our progress for gender equality.
Dr. PhumzileMlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UN Women, said,“To get irreversible progress in gender equality takes sustained, intentional action. We need to work together on this wherever those inequalities are present – in schools and offices; in the media; in sports arenas, farms, factories and houses of parliament. We’re driving for practical changes, like supply chain agreements that bring good business to women-owned companies, at the same time as we change the narratives about the place and power of girls and women in society – so they are both seen and treated as equals.”
Guest Speakers included:
– India’s Mary Kom, Olympian and six-time World Boxing Champion
– South Africa’s television star, business woman and philanthropist BonangMatheba,
– Egypt’s actress and philanthropistAmina Khalil,
– Award Winning Indian Actress Richa Chadha,
– Actress & TV Personality India’s Neha Dhupia
– Indian Actor & Model AngadBedi
P&G has been steadily working to improve gender equality by leveraging its unique strengths. Some of P&G’s achievements globally and in theregion, include:
– Leveraging its voice in advertising and media to tackle gender bias, spark conversations and motivate change. This includesAlways ‘Like A Girl’, Ariel ‘Share The Load’, Always ‘Saudi Generation of Firsts’, and Whisper ‘Touch the Pickle’ advertising campaigns
– Focusing on removing barriers to education for girls and economic opportunities for women through the company’s social impact programs and advocacy efforts in partnership with organizations such as UN Women, WeConnectInternational,CARE, Sesame Workshop and Galli Galli Sim Sim. Examples of current P&G programs include:
i. Puberty education campaignssuch as Always Keeping Girls in School in South Africa, Kenya & Nigeria and P&G Shiksha in India
ii. Deliberate intention to hire Women-Owned Businesses in South Africa, UAE, Egypt, India & Nigeria are long standing examples of this focus.
• Internally, P&G is working to create an inclusive, gender-equal environment with 50-50 representation of men and women at all levels and all parts of the company. P&G hires 50% women into management across the world, and an increasing proportion of women gets promoted into leadership roles into their next assignments at the same progression as men. This is consistent with P&G’s history in IMEA. P&G India hires 50% women into entry level management roles and lays special emphasis on their progression to next assignments. In a first for FMCG industry in India, P&G’s Hyderabad plant was one of the first plants to have 30% women across the workforce. What is unique is that these women employees operate across all shifts and operate manufacturing equipment and are not limited to peripheral tasks. In an unprecedented move, the company collaborated with the government and got legal approval to allow women to work across shifts.
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Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
