Arundhati Bhattacharya

"Given this assumption, a woman has to divert her attention from her career to the children"

"Women having it tougher than men in their careers isn’t anything new globally. Female professionals, especially in India, rarely experience smooth linear progress"

"The third reason we found that women are leaving is to take care of their parents or parents-in-law, because geriatric care in India is quite costly. And then at that point, female workers feel absolutely guilt-ridden and…give up jobs"

"You have to be very nimble and agile on your feet to acquire the latest technology, which the private sector could do much more easily than the public sector"

"I used to tell them that in your time, you will have many careers. And one of the things you should be passionate about is learning, unlearning and relearning, and that’s what the new world is going to be like. When this position was offered to me, I thought of walking the talk"

"They have the philanthropic model of 1-1-1, which is giving away 1% of your time, 1% of your products and 1% of your profit or equity to philanthropic initiatives"

"I’m always a little bit of a sucker for a challenge"

"Every function earlier used to report to Marc (Marc Benioff, founder & CEO of Salesforce). There was no India head. Going forward, the functional reporting will remain, but there will also be an India-reporting structure. India’s scale is unprecedented; if you have solved for the scale in India, you’ve solved a lot of problems globally.These are the synergies we want to bring about"

"There are three times when a woman decides to leave (her career), the most common of them being the childbearing years"

"I made two-year sabbatical for child and elderly care that could be taken by the employee in three slots. And about two years after we did a survey to see the success of the initiative, we found about 676 women had availed it and one of them even told me that due to this change my entire career has been saved"

"And in many cases, where I have to file, for instance, reports, etc., the statute has to come up to show that I have the powers to do this... They said either you go for a change of the Act, but till the change comes through you will be known as Chairman. So I scrapped the cards thinking I had far larger battles to fight at that point. I accepted the term Chairman and went on with it"

"it’s not going to be the same as mine... you’ll have multiple careers and you need to be able to unlearn, relearn, keep learning all the time. So, when I got the Salesforce opportunity, I told myself that I’ve been giving a lot of gyaan, a lot of advice. Here was a chance to do it myself, to have multiple careers"