Working Women
Women in the Workplace: are we wasting a crisis?
If we want to achieve our aspiration of a 5 trillion-dollar economy, we have to bring women into the world of work in large numbers. Just as we have a target to make manufacturing 25 per cent of the GDP, we have to set gender ratios for our workforce.
Professional Women Have always borne the double burden of family and career – pre-Covid and during-Covid. Unless we make a conscious and concerted effort to change, it is very likely they will continue to bear the burden as our lives return to normalcy. I define normalcy as schools and child-care centres reopening, paid household help returning to work and elder-care responsibilities being shared with healthcare providers once again, without the worry of another lockdown setting us all back again.
The pandemic has turned lives upside down, more so for women. Sectors like travel, tourism and hospitality and others that employ more women, came to a screeching halt. Their employers had zero revenue while they continued to incur costs and no visibility into if and when they would resume operations. And their employees were the first casualty. As a result, women bore the brunt of job losses. The K-shaped recovery, that we are now seeing, continues to affect women disproportionately.
Women who work in the knowledge economy face a different challenge. Even before Covid-19 every day in the life of a working woman involves constant, dynamic reprioritisation – slicing time, attention and energy among multiple responsibilities of career and caregiving. According to the Time Use in India-2019 survey conducted between January and December 2019 by the National Statistical Office, Indian women spent nearly 5 hours per day in unpaid domestic work.
When India became America…
We rejoiced and marveled (and from one perspective, rightly so), at the speed with which knowledge work moved to Work from Anywhere (WFA) when the lockdown was announced. But in our admiration for hard infrastructure (access to computers, broadband communication, virtual collaboration platforms such as Zoom and MS-teams) and soft infrastructure (distributed teamwork), we overlooked the human element as home and workplace became one, paid household help vanished and India became America. And women who had juggled office-work and housework with the support of paid help, were expected to (and did) clean, cook, wait on the family, supervise their children’s online classes and care for older family members along with their professional commitments.
In addition, her employer believes that she must now be more available, because after all she is working from home – the 2+ hour commute has been subtracted
many women opt out…
Is it surprising that many women opt out? Physical, mental and emotional exhaustion is the norm.
So, if we want women, especially women in middle and senior management not to drop out, what do we need to do? A three-step framework could be the answer – Awareness, Advocacy and Action.
Build Awareness…
Women in India have a disadvantage that we don’t talk about. Their paychecks are considered to be an add-on to a man’s. For a man to lose a job is a catastrophe. A woman’s job is considered to be a nice-to-have. Women go to college, because their families believe it improves their own status and the opportunities in the marriage-market. Many women, if not most of them, don’t view their education as a means to a financial reward – which men consistently do. This social conditioning builds a serious lack of career-intentionality.
As a result, most of the women I speak to, are either unaware of the jobs and skills of the future or avoid them because they’re perceived to be difficult.
There are many areas where companies are struggling to find the talent they need. According to the Manpower Group’s Talent Shortage 2020 Report, 63 per cent of Indian companies that responded to their survey said they have difficulty finding the skills that they need – artificial intelligence/machine learning, digital content creation, edutech, online gaming, product management, personal finance, business/data analytics, blockchain, Industry 4.0, HR… – the list is pretty long. Online retraining is virtually ubiquitous. A focused 90-120 day learning and certification programme (https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020) gives anyone an entry into the less uncertain world of knowledge work.
Advocacy
To become truly inclusive and to improve gender ratios in the workplace, the conversation must include women and men – as partners, peers and leaders – in the conversation.
When we talk about 5 hours of a day going into caregiving, we overlook the fact that this is the time spent in the actual ‘doing.’ We need to add another 2 hours to this, for the ‘thinking about it’ part. Then at least two hours to recover physically and mentally from this constant demand. Do the arithmetic – 9 hours of the day gone! If we assume another 7 hours for sleep, it leaves this woman with exactly 8 hours in a day for professional work. This gives her no time to learn, socialise (network) or for entertainment. Is it fair? Is it even sustainable? Why do we want to penalise our women for having a family?
Building a gender-equitable society means those men must step up in every sphere of life. As partners, by sharing domestic and care-giving responsibilities – ideally and equally.
As peers and bosses, accept that employees (working from small apartments with many family members around) cannot be expected to participate in constant, on-demand video-calls and still deliver on commitments. And that working from home will mean time away to attend to family.
Above all, as leaders, respect the fact that knowledge workers benefit from thinking time, the kind that facilitates deep work.
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, (the company that owns wordpress.com), talks about his organisation’s autonomous, asynchronous and distributed work environment. Automattic’s employees live across 76 countries and speak 95 different languages. Imagine the number of time zones involved! When things go truly asynchronous, real-time meetings are few, decision making is slower and more deliberate and employees design their days to integrate their many responsibilities.
Companies that aim to make WFH/WFA the norm and recognise the need to redesign their organisations should take a leaf from Automattic’s playbook.
Action
To address the talent-crunch that India faces in future-skills, we need to do several things today.
One – Design workplace policies to encourage WFA, part-time and flexi-time work. Employment does not have to be all or nothing.
Two – Improve our processes to build autonomous, asynchronous and distributed workplaces that encourage learning and allow for thinking time. Rethink our reward and recognition metrics. ‘Time spent on the job’ is a lazy measurement that indicates poor planning and understanding of outcomes. It also does not reward efficiency and effectiveness.
Three – Develop career-intentionality among girls and women. While this should ideally start from middle-school, we do not have the luxury of waiting for 15 years. To encourage women college-graduates to retrain themselves and contribute to the economy, men need to step up as leaders and partners – to redesign a workplace that takes multi-dimensional lives into account and share caregiving responsibilities.
Four – Redesign, ramp-up and professionalise our care economy. Scandinavian countries offer a great blueprint. Technology solutions that allow the monitoring of health and well-being of children and elders, can make it easier for women to focus on their work, whether they work from home or commute to an office. This will have ripple effects too of creating more jobs for less qualified women. Governments can set national standards and certifications for paid care-givers and care centres at different levels.
In Summary…
The past year has been an eye-opener in many ways for all of us. Women who believed that WFH was the solution to all their issues have discovered that it is not a silver-bullet. Men who believed that caregiving effort was exaggerated, have had first-hand experience otherwise. Both have had to deal with the reality of unreliable infrastructure (power failure, choked broadband) and the challenges of trying to deliver on professional expectations in a small and often noisy home. Employers have had to contend with fractured attention and undependable infrastructure to reboot growth.
Let us not waste this crisis – we can use it to transform the work environment and make it truly inclusive.
Author is the co-founder of ‘indePenn’ to provide resources and support and a helping hand to women on a break wanting to get back to work.
