When career meets family

By admin on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 15:24

In spite of the rosy stories companies would like to tell you about their women-friendly policies, Padmalatha Ravi discovers reality is quite the opposite

“You have been out of work for a year now. Do you think you can cope up with the latest technology?”

“Do you have plans of having a family in the near future? This project is on a tight schedule, so we need to know if you will go on maternity leave.”

These are some of the questions working women have to answer when it comes to being a mother and building a career. Divya Sharma, a mother of two girls, took a year-long break from a very demanding IT job to take care of the second child. “When I had my first baby I couldn’t take a long break. I felt so guilty about leaving my baby with someone else. However well taken care of the baby is, you still worry. So after the second child I decided to take a break. Now after a year, I am finding it hard to get back to work. Very few companies are willing to trust that I could be up to date with the technology and that I am willing to take the plunge” she says.

Twenty-five-year-old financial analyst Nidhi Choudhary had a baby a year ago and decided to go back to work after the maternity leave. Despite having a full time maid to take care of the baby, she still worries. She says “I am constantly thinking about my little girl. I try to finish things at work quickly. I even skip lunch to meet deadlines so that I can go home by 6 pm. But somehow in the workplace it is the number of hours you put in that matters more than the quality of your work. So the fact that I finish job on time is forgotten and my manager tells me I can’t rush out of office at 6 sharp.”

If this is the case in the high flying corporate sector, outside that, life gets even tougher for working women. Garment factories in and around Bangalore employ over 1.5 lakh women. But the conditions in which the women end up working are hardly congenial. Ambuja, a 23-year-old working at a garment factory on Mysore Road, says asking for sick leave even for one day is impossible. So the question of maternity leave does not arise at all. She says “Most of my colleagues work till the day of delivery and are back after two days. Any absence beyond two days is considered as quitting.”

Women comprise more than 30% of the workforce in the IT and other similar corporate sectors; while in sectors like hospitality and garments, a majority of them are women. And motherhood is a reality one can neither deny nor ignore but very few companies have comprehensive policies to address this. Sahana Shetty, a HR professional in an IT company says “The companies should realise that people will work better when they have less hassles to worry about. And for women, caring for their children are their biggest worry and so companies should work to support them on that front. There are few companies which do this but we need to make this happen across board.”