The Procurement Email That Should Make Every Corporate Legal Team Pause

Somewhere in India right now, a corporate procurement team is drafting an email that reads something like this: “We are looking for a female self-defense instructor for our upcoming women’s safety workshop. Please confirm if you have a female trainer available.”

It sounds professional. It sounds considerate. And most people would read that email without a second thought.

But here is what that email actually does. It sets a gender-based criterion for a professional engagement. It tells a qualified service provider that their expertise, experience, credentials, and methodology are secondary to their biological sex. And it creates a documented record of a procurement decision based on gender.

For companies that pride themselves on fair procurement practices, transparent vendor selection, and compliance with anti-discrimination laws, this is a conversation worth having.

Why Self-Defence for Women Requires Crime Science, Not Just Physical Tricks

Before we examine the legal dimensions of gender-based vendor selection, it is essential to understand why this conversation matters beyond procurement policy. Most people assume that self-defence training is simply about learning a set of physical techniques. A wrist escape, an elbow strike, a defensive kick. Following that assumption, they conclude that the instructor’s gender is a relevant selection factor, believing a female instructor would naturally relate better to women participants.

This assumption, however well-intentioned, misses the entire point of what effective self-defence training must deliver.

Why Reaction-Based Self-Defence Tricks Leave Women Vulnerable After an Attack Begins

The vast majority of self-defence classes, regardless of who teaches them, focus almost entirely on reaction-based tactics. These are techniques designed to respond after a crime is already in progress. Someone has already grabbed you. Someone has already cornered you. Someone has already initiated a physical assault. And now you must execute a technique you practised in a calm classroom against a person who is bigger, stronger, heavier, driven by adrenaline, and fully committed to causing harm.

The physical disparity between men and women is a factor that no honest self-defence system can ignore. The average man carries 40 to 60 percent more upper body strength, greater grip force, and a significant size and weight advantage. Once a violent encounter has started and the attacker controls the position, relying only on reaction-based physical tricks creates an extremely difficult path to safety. This is not about doubting anyone’s strength or courage. It is about respecting the laws of physics and physiology, and designing training that accounts for reality rather than ignoring it.

How Criminals Plan Attacks and Why Instructor Knowledge of Crime Outweighs Gender

Here is what most conventional self-defence programmes never address: crime is rarely spontaneous. It is planned. A criminal selects a target. He chooses a location that favours him. He picks a time when the target is isolated or distracted. He may carry weapons. He may work with accomplices. He engineers the ambience, controls the method, prepares his tools, and maps his escape route. The attack itself is the final step in a sequence that began long before the first physical contact.

Because of this reality, an instructor’s value cannot be measured by physical techniques alone. The instructor must possess deep knowledge of criminal psychology, predatory target-selection behaviour, pre-crime environmental cues, weapon dynamics, and the decision-making architecture that criminals use to plan and execute attacks. This expertise comes from decades of specialised study and field experience in crime science. It has nothing to do with whether the instructor is male or female. It has everything to do with whether the instructor understands how crime actually works.

How the Power to Women Corporate Self-Defence Workshop Merges Israeli Krav Maga with 21+ Psychological Skill Systems

The Power to Women Corporate Self-Defence Workshop was created to address exactly this gap. It is not a martial arts demonstration repackaged as a safety session. It is a scientifically engineered programme built on the fusion of two critical knowledge systems: the Israeli military Krav Maga self-defence system and over 21 psychological skill frameworks drawn from behavioural science, crisis response psychology, and criminal profiling.

The programme operates on four strategic pillars that go far beyond physical technique: Prevent crime before it begins to form, Avoid dangerous situations through trained perception and deliberate positioning, Diffuse threats using verbal, behavioural, and psychological tools, and Escape when physical confrontation becomes the only remaining option. Physical response is the last resort, not the foundation.

Here are the psychological and tactical skill systems integrated into the workshop:

• Pro-Active Combat Science trains women to own the first move and shape the encounter on their terms rather than absorbing whatever an attacker initiates.
• Guerrilla Hit and Run Deception repurposes the asymmetric strategies that criminals depend on and hands them to the defender as escape tools.
• Neuro-Behavioral Crisis Management rewires the brain’s threat processing so it delivers clarity and action under danger rather than freezing in terror.
• Warrior Mindset Conditioning constructs the psychological foundation that separates those who act decisively from those who remain paralysed.
• Fear Counterinsurgency takes the overwhelming flood of panic during a crisis and channels it into structured, deployable tactical energy.
• Pro-Failure Conversion Technique treats every mistake made in training as raw material that strengthens the next response and the one after that.
• Critical Decision Life Safety Skills builds the capacity to choose correctly and instantly in the narrow window where hesitation leads to irreversible harm.
• Psychological Anti-Stress Conditioning proves through structured practice that composure during chaos is not something you are born with but something you build.
• Dynamic Scenario Analysis Strategy develops the skill of reading fast-changing threats and recalibrating responses in real time without freezing or overthinking.
• Pre-Conflict Situational Awareness trains women to perceive and interpret danger signals long before the threat has a chance to fully form.
• Threat Perception Development sharpens the ability to sense predatory focus and hostile energy even when no weapon or overt aggression is yet present.
• Post-Battle Quick Response prepares women for the critical thirty seconds immediately following a violent encounter, the window that most often determines whether someone reaches safety or faces further danger.
• Stealth and Evasive Tactics teaches the highest form of self-defence: ensuring that the confrontation never needs to happen in the first place.
• Active Warfare Emotional Balance maintains rational thought and focused decision-making even when the nervous system is overwhelmed by adrenaline.
• Verbal Modulation Instructions develops the voice as a precision tool for projecting authority, commanding space, and disarming aggression verbally.
• Violence De-Escalation Techniques provides structured methods for collapsing a threat entirely before it crosses the line into physical violence.
• Crime Radar Deterrence Manoeuvre trains women to project behavioural signals that cause predators to assess them as high-risk targets and move on.
• Criminal Profiling and Crime Psychology gives women a functional understanding of how an attacker evaluates, selects, approaches, and commits to a target.
• Pain Compliance and Pressure Methodology uses precise anatomical knowledge to generate maximum defensive impact when raw physical strength is not sufficient.
• Emergency Risk Analysis and Management develops the neural pathways for executing life-saving decisions accurately within fractions of a second under extreme pressure.
• Decrypting Pre-Crime Sequence trains women to recognise and act on the subtle behavioural micro-signals that appear one to three seconds before every attack is initiated.

This level of training requires a professional who has spent decades immersed in crime science, military combat methodology, behavioural psychology, and the study of human performance under life-threatening stress. It is not something that any martial arts practitioner, regardless of gender, can deliver based on a belt ranking or a fitness certification. The procurement question for any serious corporate should be: “Does this instructor have the tactical mastery, the psychological expertise, and the scientifically validated framework to genuinely prepare our women employees for the realities of crime?” That is the question that leads to training that actually saves lives.

How Vendor Procurement Laws and Anti-Discrimination Frameworks Apply to Self-Defence Trainer Selection

Most large corporates have detailed procurement policies. These policies typically include provisions about fair evaluation, merit-based selection, transparency, and non-discrimination. Many of these policies explicitly state that vendors and service providers shall be selected based on competence, quality, cost-effectiveness, and track record, not on the personal characteristics of the individuals providing the service.

Now consider what happens when a company specifies that only a female instructor is acceptable for a self-defense workshop:

• A qualified professional is excluded from consideration before credentials are even reviewed.
• The selection criterion is not competence, methodology, or tactical expertise but gender.
• The procurement process now contains a gender-based filter that would likely violate the company’s own vendor selection guidelines.

Indian Legal Provisions That Prohibit Gender-Based Vendor and Trainer Selection

• Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees equality before law. This principle extends to how entities, including private companies, engage with professionals and service providers.
• Article 15(1) prohibits discrimination on the ground of sex. Indian courts have progressively extended this principle beyond state action to include private sector practices.
• Article 16(1) and 16(2) guarantee equal opportunity and prohibit gender-based discrimination in matters of employment and engagement.
• The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 (Section 5) prohibits discrimination in recruitment for the same work or work of a similar nature.
• The Code on Wages, 2019 (Section 3) reinforces the prohibition of gender discrimination, and while it specifically addresses wages, its philosophy of gender-neutral treatment extends to conditions of professional engagement.
• The Companies Act, 2013 and SEBI corporate governance guidelines require companies to uphold principles of fairness, transparency, and non-discrimination. Procurement practices that include gender-based filters could be inconsistent with these standards.

International Legal Standards Including ILO, CEDAW, and Title VII That Apply to Gender-Based Hiring

• ILO Convention No. 111, ratified by India, prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation based on sex.
• CEDAW, also ratified by India, specifically aims to eliminate gender stereotyping, which includes the assumption that certain professional services can only be delivered by a person of a particular gender.
• Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act, 1964 prohibits sex-based discrimination in employment, with only extremely narrow BFOQ exceptions that do not apply to teaching or instruction.

How Gender-Based Procurement Emails Create Legal and ESG Compliance Risks

Here is something practical that legal and compliance teams should consider. When a company sends an email, issues a request for proposal, or communicates a vendor requirement that specifies gender, it creates a paper trail. That paper trail documents a gender-based procurement criterion.

In an era where companies are increasingly scrutinised for their diversity and inclusion practices, where ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting is becoming standard, and where stakeholders expect consistency between stated values and actual behaviour, this kind of documented gender-based filtering can become a liability.

It does not matter that the intention was good. What matters, from a legal and governance perspective, is that a professional was excluded from a job opportunity based on gender. That is exactly the kind of practice that anti-discrimination frameworks, both domestic and international, were designed to prevent.

“Every email that says ‘we need a female instructor’ is a document that says ‘we exclude professionals of another gender from this opportunity.’ Good intentions do not change what the words actually mean. And in a compliance audit, it is the words that matter.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

TEDx Talk: Specialist Franklin Joseph on Why Crime Science Must Replace Conventional Self-Defence

Specialist Franklin Joseph is also a TEDx Speaker who has publicly addressed the systemic failures in how women’s self-defence is taught, procured, and understood across corporate India. In his TEDx talk, he laid out why training built solely around physical techniques fails women in real crime situations and how a programme grounded in the convergence of Israeli military Krav Maga and over 21 psychological skill systems can fundamentally shift the outcome. He demonstrated that women’s safety requires a scientific approach built on preventing threats before they form, avoiding danger through trained perception, diffusing confrontations using verbal and psychological command, and escaping when physical force becomes the last option. The framework he presented on that TEDx stage is the exact architecture behind the Power to Women Corporate Self-Defence Workshop, proving that the difference between a workshop that looks good on paper and one that genuinely saves lives lies in the depth of tactical expertise and psychological conditioning behind it.

Watch the TEDx Talk here: Specialist Franklin Joseph TEDx Talk on Women’s Self-Defence

Why the “Female-Only Trainer” Standard Fails the Equality Test When Reversed

Let us try a simple thought experiment. Imagine a corporate sent out a procurement requirement that said: “We are looking for a male trainer for our leadership development workshop. Please confirm if you have a male facilitator.” Every HR team in the country would flag it. Every DEI committee would object. Every legal advisor would caution against it.

Now ask yourself: why is the reaction different when the specified gender is female? The legal principle is exactly the same. Discrimination based on gender does not become acceptable depending on which gender is being specified. That is not how equality works. Equality is, by definition, consistent.

If your company would not accept a gender-specific requirement for any other professional service, it should not accept one for self-defense instruction either. The standard must be the same, or it is not a standard at all.

“Flip the gender in the requirement and see if it still feels acceptable. If it does not, then the original requirement was never acceptable either. Equality does not have a preferred direction. It applies to everyone, or it applies to no one.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

How to Build a Legally Sound and Tactically Effective Self-Defence Procurement Process

Companies that want to make genuinely good decisions about self-defense training should build their procurement criteria around what actually determines training quality and effectiveness:

• Expertise in crime psychology and criminal behaviour: Does the instructor understand how criminals think, operate, select targets, and exploit vulnerabilities? Can the instructor decode an attacker’s decision-making process and teach women to recognise it?
• Comprehensive tactical and psychological methodology: Does the training cover pre-crime awareness, during-crime response strategies, and post-crime recovery guidance? Is it designed to prevent, avoid, diffuse, and escape crime across all four pillars?
• Psychological depth and conditioning: Does the program address freeze responses, social conditioning, ingrained fear patterns, and the mental barriers that prevent effective self-defense? Does it build composure under pressure through repeated, structured training?
• Integration of military-grade systems and psychological science: Is the programme built on validated frameworks such as Israeli military Krav Maga and psychological skill systems covering threat perception, crisis decision-making, verbal de-escalation, and pre-crime behavioural decoding?
• Real-world applicability: Is the training based on actual crime scenarios, or is it essentially a martial arts demonstration repackaged as self-defense?
• Track record and verifiable results: Can the instructor provide verifiable client testimonials, case studies, and evidence of behavioural change in participants?
• Professionalism and learning environment: Does the instructor create a respectful, supportive, and psychologically safe learning environment for all participants?

These criteria are gender-neutral, legally sound, and directly focused on what actually matters: the tactical preparedness, psychological resilience, and genuine safety of your women employees. Apply these filters, and you will find the best instructor for the job based on competence, depth, and proven outcomes.

Moving from Good Intentions to Legally Sound, Tactically Effective Women’s Safety Procurement

I want to be very clear about the spirit of this article. I am not accusing any company of intentional discrimination. I know that the request for a female instructor comes from a genuine desire to take care of women employees. That intention is admirable, and I have deep respect for companies that invest in the safety of their people.

But good intentions deserve to be supported by good processes. And a good process does not include gender-based exclusions that contradict your own procurement policies, your own DEI commitments, and the legal frameworks your company operates under.

The next time your team is drafting a requirement for a self-defense workshop, I would simply encourage you to ask: “Are we selecting based on tactical competence, psychological expertise, and scientific methodology, or are we selecting based on gender?” If the answer is the latter, it might be worth pausing and reconsidering.

Ask whether the instructor understands how to train women to command an encounter rather than merely react to one. Ask whether the programme builds the brain’s capacity to function under extreme threat. Ask whether it teaches women to project signals that cause predators to abandon their plans. Ask whether it covers the one-to-three-second warning signs that precede every attack and the critical thirty seconds after violence that determine survival. These are the questions that lead to training that genuinely protects your workforce.

“The best procurement decisions are the ones that can withstand scrutiny from every angle: legal, ethical, and practical. If your vendor selection criterion is gender, it will not withstand scrutiny from any of those angles. Choose expertise. Choose methodology. Choose results. Those are criteria that stand up.”

Read Franklin Joseph Corporate Women Empowerment / Self Defense ArticlesCall 9886769281 for Corporate Workshops

– Specialist Franklin Joseph