Fair play

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!