I was at a school last weekend, interacting with 9th and 10th graders on their career ambitions.
I want to be an astrophysicist, said a boy. Is it possible to maintain work-life balance as we grow older, asked a girl.
This isn’t the first time.
In all the interactions I have had with school kids so far, girl children inevitably ask me about work-life balance.
Our childhoods are conditioned, consciously and unconsciously, about our primary and secondary jobs.
A woman’s primary job is towards the family, a man’s primary job that of a breadwinner.
And that is the biggest contributor to the “leaky pipeline”, the stages of life and career when a maximum number of women quit their jobs.
We see or talk most about the exit soon after childbirth, and that definitely is the biggest.
But, even if the working woman stays the onslaught of childbirth, post partum, and toddler years, a growing child has many needs. Medical issues and school demands aside, many women quit when their kids are in tenth or twelfth, those make or break years for all teenagers in this country.
This period also coincides with the elders in the family ageing and needing more support, which doubles as another reason for women to stay at home full time.
So, around the time when men are becoming CxOs and vying for the corner office, making it to the CEO seat, women quit the workforce because finally, the first job, the one towards the family, wins over everything else.
Despite all this, if women still manage to work in paying jobs, given all the demands of the family, more often than not, they go for part-time or remote jobs.
Those that are jobs, not careers. A topic for a different day.
When I hear the work-life balance question from young girls, I tell them not to assume or accept the demands placed on them by their families and the society, to push back when near and dear tell them they have to get married by x age and have a child by y age, to find partners who would be open to “equal partnerships”.
True and important as all these are, they answer for only one side of the coin. And, just girls and women doing this is not enough to push boundaries and change the nature of the pipeline.
What about the other side, that companies / governments can do, to plug the holes, intentionally and consistently?
Make care-giver leave Universal: Extending leaves and sabbatical policies beyond early child care to other segments, including elderly care and school-going, for both men and women.
Offer psychological safety: Helping women talk openly about needing flexibility in short spurts, without running the risk of being judged or having their immediate performance ratings and promotions adversely impacted.
Engage with an intent to retain: Have a process in place to understand and arrive at midway solutions when women decide to leave because of family commitments. Most companies do this today when an employee gets another job, why not extend the same energy and effort to finding options for women whose priorities are getting conflicted.
Normalise outsourcing home-care responsibilities: As a society and country, can we normalise care-giver outsourcing, particularly elder care? Most often, women are guilted into roles because “what will people say”. While, of course, this is a function of women changing their mindset, it is equally important for the rest around them to toe the line.
If we work with intentionality and consistency towards plugging the holes, the impact, sooner or later, will be obvious.
P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.