Another year was drawing to a close and my mandatory annual
blog entry was still pending. This had been the most eventful year in my life
which included my getting married and getting gifted the first pair of Aldo
shoes! Despite such life changing events, my blog still awaited a refresh
I had to google creative writing ideas to start penning my
thoughts down. A scan of the preceding pages of my blog showed the rigour with
which I wrote, I expressed about things I felt or about things that mattered to
me. Did I stop feeling? Or worse, did I stop thinking or is this what happens
when you cross your thirties?? Did I just suddenly inherit reticence out of
nowhere? Or am I scared to say things out loud?!
Over the last few years of my working life, I have come to
form an opinion about sustenance of women in corporate. I work with an equal
opportunity employer. What I have concluded off-late is that opportunity is not
a concern, the working environment is. It was further fueled after reading Lean
In. Over the years I have interacted with a lot of internal and external
stakeholders. When I was introduced as a project lead, team lead, point person
etc, an immediate response would be – ‘Which batch of MBA are you?’ Over time,
it became easy to realize that what follows this question is a judgement on
lack of experience and a question mark on capability. It is not easy to accept
a young manager, more so if it is a female manager. There is a fair amount of
scanning and guesstimation of age – more so if you are single. Senior women
leaders and mentors at times agreed that it helps to ‘look’ older. A woman who
is capable but cannot drink with her male counterparts or partners at work,
also at times takes longer to rise up the corporate ladder. This somewhere makes
the entire premise of equal opportunity fallible. Most women I know had no
choice but to move companies post their maternity leave because the growth
options upon their return were limited or not thought through at all. What is a
bigger concern is that most women accept a base rating during the appraisal
year if they have taken a maternity leave. It is further expected that women
make 2-3 career compromises. First one, at the time of marriage. Almost always,
the would-be bride relocates because a fellow woman (mother-in-law) feels that
the son’s career is more important. Second or third compromise comes at the
time of maternity depending on the number of kids she decides to have. A
prospective company feels it is their right to ask a woman candidate her
marriage thoughts or family plans because corporations weigh business continuity
far higher than sensitivity. Be it 8 am or 8pm, calls, reviews and meetings, working
Sundays just go on to show disrespect towards personal life and more so for
women who also have to probably instruct the maid, feed the baby, replenish the
grocery of the house or pack tiffins
Women tend to bring a lot to the table; dedication,
compassion and a silent determination which is also sometimes perceived as ‘not
enough aggression’. How could I miss hurling abuses as a must-do in the upper
echelons of the man’s world? A woman is judged for the way she dresses, she
speaks, she abuses, her food as well as her drinking/ smoking habits. While
everyone has to prove their worth, a women additionally also has to justify her
standing shoulder to shoulder with a male colleague; more so at senior
positions. I would also like to mention that some women also make principle
level compromises and these are encouraged by her male colleagues. This makes
the rest of the world believe that women have it easy. It is unfair but true,
because few women chose to be ‘easy’
All said and done, women in corporate today are role models
to young girls for whom good education and a great career is the sole way leading
to a better life. The group I work for takes care of creating a conducive work environment but on a larger scale the efforts need to be a lot more
conscious. What we need is not just equal opportunity employers, but sensitive
employers as well as colleagues who would encourage and enable women to give
their best!
