BY Rituparna Chatterjee
Special to India West

SAN JOSE, Calif. – When you schedule a conference for Sunday morning, you might as well expect few people to show up. But the annual Indian Business and Professional Women’s (IBPW) Career and Mentoring Conference held this Sunday proved otherwise. A variegated list of panelists and speakers lured students and professionals alike to abandon their Sunday chores and plans and head to Holiday Inn instead.

President and CEO, Commonwealth Club of California as well as the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Gloria Duffy, kicked off the conference with the challenges in hold for the next President — immigration, homeland security, budget deficit, health care, the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor, global warming, the issues in the Middle East, etc. While addressing the rising budget deficit issue, Duffy suggested increasing gas taxes. “This could encourage automobile companies to make better fuel-efficient automobiles, which in turn could help combat global warming,” she said.

Stressing on her neutral stance, Duffy said that more public campaign finances like National Clean Money or California Clean Money were the need of the hour. These cause the candidate to focus on real issues because he/she is then not accountable to his/her sponsors.

After Duffy’s impressive opening keynote, the conference progressed to its four panels – i) Succeeding in Corporate America, ii) Women in Leadership, iii) Minorities in Public Office and iv) Career Transition Strategies and Personal Branding.

Executives asserted persistence, listening and respecting others’ points of view and collaborative action as stepping-stones to corporate success. Former Chairperson, Commission on Status of Women, Annie Dandavati-Chandra asserted on a more balanced male-female ratio in society. “Today we have 16 female and 84 male senators. We have a long way to go,” she said. That is the case not just in politics, but elsewhere as well. Former Vice Mayor, City of San Jose, Cindy Chavez said that among other things, the way women measure women is at fault. “For example, many of us are measuring Hilary Clinton in a more rigorous manner than other male presidential candidates. That is not fair.”

The next batch of panelists asserted that minorities should realise that they can make political differences and hence, ought to vote. Moreover, they should participate in local politics to be the change as well. Council Member, City of Fremont, Anu Natarajan, explained why minorities stayed away from politics. “First generation immigrants tend to carry political stigma from their home countries” But there is more hope from the following generations. “Second generation is not limited by such stigmas. Having grown up in the US, their culture and ways of thinking are different.”

IBPW’s Career and Mentoring Conference seemed more socio-political. Perhaps having realised this, the conference finally decided to concentrate solely on career issues in its last few hours.

Dilip Saraf, Author and Career Coach stressed on personal branding as a crucial weapon for a successful career. “People let careers happen to them rather than being in the driver’s seat…People get so entrenched in their resume and what they have done that they forget who they really are” said Saraf. His co-panelist Jean Fuller, CEO Career Coaching echoed his opinion, “Self-promoting one’s self without beating one’s chest or aggression is important for a successful career. People apply a lot of intelligence to a business but they rarely do that for themselves or their resumes. This is a huge stumbling block.”

The last speaker, Michele Bolton (Principal Partner and Co-founder, Executive Edge of Silicon Valley, LLC and author) drew attention to inaccurate corporate retention policies. “Many companies tend to use the same retention strategies for both male and female senior executives – higher pay packets, golden handcuffs like a better position on the company’s board, etc,” said Bolton. “But women at that stage of their career often want to do something different, which is what very few companies understand.” However, Bolton said that at least one company was indeed doing things differently. It gave senior female executives the option of working part time and hired another employee to do the rest of the job.

Fuller and Saraf concluded the conference with a mentoring session along with mentors Saima Hasan, Senior, Stanford University, Ajay Mirwani, Speaker-Author-Mentor-Technologist and Deepika Bajaj, President Invincibelle, Inc.