Mamaearth's Ghazal Alagh shares 'harshest lesson' she learnt while dealing with sexism

Many successful Indian women entrepreneurs have horror stories to share about their brush with misogyny and conservative thinking in professional settings.

This happens largely at investor meetings or networking events, they say, when finance questions will be pointedly directed at the males or the women will be subjected to mansplaining.

Ghazal Alagh, the 35-year-old co-founder of the beauty brand Mamaearth, took to microblogging platform X to share her bitter experience with sexism in the corporate world. This happened to her at an investor’s meet just before the company launched its IPO last year, she shared.

In her post, the former Shark Tank judge said that before the IPO was launched they met 100s of investors during their roadshows. While some of these interactions were very enriching and valuable for her, some conversations left a “bitter taste” in her mouth, she said.

Harshest lesson

It was also one of the harshest lessons she learnt, leaving her feeling “invisible” and bereft. This happened when a potential investor pointedly asked her husband Varun Alagh, also a co-founder of Mamaearth, "Would you hire her today if she wasn't your wife?".

Ghazal was very much present at that time and the way he ignored her made her feel unsettled and upset.

The noise you need to ignore

"Though it wasn't the first time i felt invisible, it took me 2 days to get over that feeling. That day, I learned that no matter where you are in your journey, there will always be people who won't believe in you. They are the noise you need to ignore,” she wrote in her post.

However, what Varun and their CFO Ramanpreet Sodhi said also stayed with her. They told the potential investor that this is where they start “blacklisting” and know who they don’t want in their journey while building the company.

Ghazal then said that she was happy that the people she worked with knew her worth.

Earlier too, Suchita Salwan, co-founder of LBB, which was bought over by Nykaa, had revealed that she constantly faces casual sexism despite having built a successful venture from the ground up.

These stories just highlight once again the sexism and gender bias that pervades the corporate world, and in the workplaces in general in the country.

UN report on sexism

The 2023 Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) report, released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) last year, highlighted that nine out of ten men and women worldwide hold biases against women.

The report stated that around 75.09 percent of the population in India holds an economic bias against women’s right to work and their rank in the workplace. This means that over 80.38 percent of men and 67.87 percent of women in India believe that men make better executives than women and that men have more rights to jobs.