Last week, at an industry forum, I was chairing a session on 'Gender Diversity in a VUCA world'. A comment made by one of the panellists set the context in strident terms. “The term VUCA might be new, but what it signifies is not. Volatility, Ambiguity, Complexity and Uncertainty have always been there. Actually, there was never a point in history when it was not VUCA!” he said.
I believe the same applies to the conundrum of women's careers. Challen-ges around her many roles have always plagued not just the woman herself but even talent managers. According to a study by the AVTAR Group in 2012, the top three reasons for the drop in women's workforce participation (from 37 per cent in 2004 to 29 per cent in 2009-10) was: the lack of flexible working options (77 per cent); lack of support systems at home (74 per cent) and long working hours (74 per cent). The lack of affordable day-care facilities, family pressure to quit work, longer commute time to work, night shifts and unsafe work environments are other reasons Indian women call it quits.
A 2011 study on Asian Women Professionals found that the largest drop of Indian women from the workforce was seen between junior and middle career stages, unlike in other Asian countries where it was between mid and senior stages. The most common life cycle model for an Indian woman is that she gets married around the same time as she enters her career, or even earlier. Motherhood follows and juggling professional responsibilities while catering to the needs at home becomes a virtual struggle. The 3 Cs — cooking, cleaning and caring — take up the bulk of her time and even well into her marriage continue to be thewoman's responsibilities in most households.
The biggest culprit is India's gender chore gap — the difference between the amount of household work done by women and men. This gap in India is the largest for any country for which data is available, according to the WEF's Gender Gap Report 2014. On an average, Indian women spend 300 more minutes than men, every single day, on household chores. This is more pronounced in cities than in villages. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation 2011-12, some 39 per cent women in rural areas and about 50 per cent in urban areas spent most of their time on domestic duties. According to the Working Mother & AVTAR Best Companies for Women in India initiative, most companies placed the onus on the creation of a set of policies as career enablers, but some companies focused on the manager's orientation. The change that we see is when a manager does not dismiss a woman professional's work-life concerns but includes her personal challenges too as being of importance. Support systems and organisational initiatives can serve the cause of women's careers only when women themselves want career progression.
In a 2015 AVTAR Group study on Career Intentionality of Indian Professionals (intentionality is the extent to which a professional deploys intention to chart his/her career trajectory), it was found that though women are intent on career achievements in the early and mid-career stages, they do not invest in it and are less likely to network, seek mentors or build professional rapport with peers or superiors. This difference in the way women and men nurture their careers could results subsequently in disruption in the career progression.
The woman professional who has invested in education and skilling must ask herself why she did it. She has to launch a persistent campaign in her own mind to question her lack of intentionality, if any. Should she be thoroughly convinced that her deeply embedded need requires her to pursue a career, and successfully, then, it is time to look around for gender inequities and root them out. The stories of great women leaders in corporate India have but one moral: to a truly intentional woman, nothing can stop her if she doesn’t want to.
(Dr Saundarya Rajesh is the founder of AVTAR Group and an award-winning social entrepreneur best known for her pioneering work in creating second careers for women)
