Force Re-Awakens
Despite contrarian statistics, women in Corporate India tell PREEJA ARAVIND that they are doing their bit for bringing other women back into the work-fold
Even though world over women face similar challenges while trying to juggle their careers and family, there are companies, started by women of course, to empower the working mother/woman, such as a chief financial officer and she will only hire a woman for that role. Bawa’s partner and Has Geek’s CTO, Kiran Jonnalagadda, explains that, for him hiring a woman, for any role makes more sense. “As long there are companies that are unwilling to hire women, there is a talent pool whose career prospects are lesser than a man holding the same level of skill.
I am willing to hire from that pool and someone else is not, because I have less competition for her as an employer.”
Sarita Panda, head of HR at Thyssen Krupp in Mumbai, who herself resumed full-time work after
Uphill task, definitely
It has never been easy for women to strike that perfect balance between career and family. Unlike her first break from work, where a combination of reasons were at play—she was pregnant, and her husband got a lucrative offer abroad—Panda’s second sabbatical was more a choice than a necessity. “Of course, when a woman goes back to work, there is apprehension. Like I see this colleague of mine struggling to balance the work and home. I am not doing this job to get away from my household responsibilities and I have time at my hands. I learnt that the hard way: There will be days when your child falls ill, there will be days when you will miss PTA meets. The day a woman decides to step out of the house, she has to leave the problems of the house back home,” she says.
Nidhi Jain, too, took a year-long break from work in 2012 after spending 10 years at a desk. Jain, who is now an assistant VP with a top Mumbai financial firm, says it was challenging to resume working because your “equity in the market has been unmarked for the duration of your break”. “You will be taken in and compared at that point. Of course, when a woman returns to work there is apprehension and it took me about two months to get into the groove of working full time. And instead of feeling insecure, women should understand that there are employers who are looking at their skill set and willing to hire them,” Jain says.