Skip to main content

Uneven Fairness

I was fortunate enough to work from home for over fifteen years and my run of good luck might be running out. Before the pandemic, it meant finding jobs in the local market that allowed me flexibility or something with a large, dispersed global presence. I was not able to take the opportunities that my peers in bigger cities had access to. It was a choice I made - to stay where I was for the greater good of my family even if that meant limited career opportunities. Remote work brought by the pandemic allowed me to work for companies that would have been completely out of the realm before that. I jumped in and it has worked great so far - both for me and my employers. 

Around the world, I am sure there are millions of such stories. Of women, disadvantaged people of different stripes who magically had doors opened for them that had until then been out of their reach. Once in, the realized to their surprise and happiness that they were more than well-qualified for these roles that had been inaccessible to them. The companies benefited too from the diversity of talent coming from traditionally overlooked areas. All good things come to and end and no surprise that women will pay disproportionately more for it. This story is an example of the kind of trade-offs a woman is forced to make

This fall, the Manhattan-based advertising agency she works for decided to go from remote to a hybrid in-office schedule. She knew that "wasn't going to be sustainable," not only because of the long commute since she's moved further away, but also because her newborn will only eat if being breastfed.

For the health of herself and her baby, she reached an understanding with her boss that she would not come into the office regularly, although she said had she not been a new mother, she would have been pressured to come in.

Replace the newborn baby with other needs that bind the woman to her home - lack of after-school care, her desire to take care of her health and well-being while being a mother, wife and employee. If employers do not value what these women bring to the table and create conditions that make employment untenable, it is as much their loss as it is for the women. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more