Struggling with women’s issues

Corporate Issues: A letter: Struggling with women’s issues (2006):

For the past few weeks, my focus has been shifted from developing women to self-preservation. I am not very confident of whether I will survive this battle and if I do, what shape I will be in. B’s advice was to learn the rules of the game and have some perception management strategies. This is valuable advice from someone who has made it, against the odds. I need advice from someone who has fought such battles for self-preservation and won. I need advice from someone who has succeeded in bringing about positive changes in corporate society and corporate social order.

If you know any such person, please put me in touch with them. I have read and continue to read Gandhi and Nehru.

They both were lawyers who knew British Law. (They won freedom for India.) I need to understand the rules and laws of the corporate. I also need to formulate clearly the goal that I want to acheive for women in the workplace. It has to do with a level playing field, it has to do with developing women, it has to do with dissolving prejudice.

According to Gandhiji and I believe this: when women achieve equality in the workplace, their social status in the family will also improve. This will stop the social problems of women in India such as female foeticide, girl child “un”-education, dowry deaths and a bunch of other problems.
Sunday July 30, 2006 – 08:18pm (IST)

The ability to take concalls from home is a great corporate leveller from a working mother’s perspective:

This is commonly available in most software companies in India, but it was not available in one organization that I worked for in the division that I was in.

A general e-mail to the managers trying to find out who would support me in this venture only resulted in criticism, discouragement, back-biting comments and negative feedback from my manager asking me if I thought that people before me were idiots. I told him that technology would have changed, laws would have changed and I would give it a try.

I found a senior manager willing to support this effort, a few members of my team who were willing to exert themselves and a champion for business process improvements willing to guide and back us.

The team did a survey of what was available and at what price and they created a whitepaper. With the support of the senior manager, we presented it at various levels, to various people in the organisation answering questions, popularising the results of our survey and generally just keeping at it.

On the day before my last day at that organisation, I was told that the solution we had recommended was approved.

So what worked? Teaming up. The idea came from a thinker, the work came from an executor, managing the senior management came from the senior manager, process support came from the champion and the drive/leadership came from me.

Good or bad it is organised teaming up that wins. When people from various levels and different abilities come together to achieve something, they generally win.

(Unfortunately my ‘evil’ detractors who did not like the changes that I worked for, teamed up too and drove me out… Hmm…)

Write-ups on other women’s issues:

• Safety of corporate women working late. 
• Status of a housewife in the perception of some working women.
• Need of girl students to network into student groups to overcome prejudice.
• Working women’s hostels and undignified perception about women not staying at home.
• Traditional dresses and untraditional responsibilities of women driving and commuting.
•  Lack of sensitivity of married men and women towards issues of single women.
• Should a Mother Work?
• Mothers of grown up children emotional issues: Graduating from Motherhood!     Graduating from motherhood.  The world owes us… nothing!
•  Problem of an Adivasi woman protesting for her rights.
• Housewives: internal pressure to talk a lot.
•  Peacefully Passing on to a brighter world.

Stories related to women’s issues:

• Old Letters  about divorce
• Come back?  about reconciliation
• Fire about passion
• Papanasanam about reconciliation
• Re-Marriage? about re-marriage
• Sita’s options. about re-marriage
• Thoughts in Sringeri about self-determination and freedom.
• Crying into the kitchen sink…  A mother’s helpless tears in a world turning crazy.