This brings me back to the subject of your choosing to be a homemaker instead of following your career in law or microfinance that you followed for a short while. Often in the world, women who are homemakers are not given the same place in society that a working woman is given. Sometimes the work place is taken over by debates on gender inequality.
For me, the experience of heading an organization that has been home to some of the most dynamic working women in this country, was a journey of learning. Maybe growing up in a family with almost no women made me gender neutral in the way I looked at women in the work place. I think in the quest for seeming politically right, we have built a lot of biases into our workplaces, without realizing it. A lot of times this is because we perceive a situation different from the way the women see it.
A lot of times a woman, I suspect, is given a different set of responsibilities not because she cannot do it, but because of someone’s belief that it is not right or fair for her to be asked to do it!
My first lesson in understanding that a woman looks at this differently came in 1996 at ICICI. I was the Chief Executive Officer at that point and it worried me when women employees would take late night flights back home or if they worked late into the night at office. At one of the meetings with the team, which included a sizeable number of women, I raised this concern and asked them about how secure they felt. All I got in return were blank stares; none of them even responded to my query. I realized then that it was best to alleviate our own anxieties about the perceived risk instead of limiting what the women colleagues were capable of doing.
Women have different approach to risk and their jobs and we (society or men in the organization) unnecessarily build stereotypes around them.
At ICICI, we did nothing special to get the equations right. We were gender neutral from the recruitment stage itself. But the honest truth is that not every man has the same mind and so the balance gets skewed occasionally. Somewhere we let biases get in and the only way to avoid this is by being constantly alert and to not let that happen. The answer lies within us, not outside.
At ICICI, once the merit process was put in place, there was never any question of gender inequality. We had a merit and performance-based ranking of employees which was reviewed every year and people got responsibilities that they were capable of taking on. When this is done, you get to a situation where you are not conscious of a gender mix at the table at all and that is when you can say your organization has truly become gender neutral. It took us about three to four years to reach there, but it was well worth it. Despite the debate about the need for affirmative action at the work place, I am convinced that a ‘no affirmative action’ policy is the best way, but we have to make sure we too have a neutral mind while doing so.
Often, quick affirmative action is very risky and holds the danger of creating a hostile situation for the women colleagues at the work place. In the long run, I can say only merit works.
Ajnya, when I see you with your children, I often recall my own childhood. Sometimes I may differ with you about your rather strict ways of parenting, but I also know that it is right for you to be firm with the children. It is only the grandfather in me that makes me question that.
Growing up, you have had your grandparents and your parents push you to take on leadership qualities and in many ways you did, displaying a fondness for experimenting with various things, such as learning Japanese, when it was not fashionable to do so. Your mother has a strong mind of her own but she has chosen to take on a supportive role in our family. She raised you and your brother and maybe you take after her. She made it her full-time job raising our children and you are doing it now. I see how supportive you are with everything that your husband and children do. And I admire the way you facilitate everything by having a very clear demarcation of responsibility in running the house.
Ajnya, you have learnt a lot of things about life from just watching your parents and your grandparents and I hope you realize that your children will learn their attitudes by watching their parents handle life. Children pick up from the parents their attitude towards the immediate family and their relationship to the larger community around them. How you treat the people around you will have enormous bearing on the minds of your own children and I know you will remember this at all times. The same applies for ethics and integrity too. Children look at their parents for pointers on this and what they see becomes embedded in their subconscious.
I would like to end with this thought that parents expose their children to several aspects of life and are unable to expose them to other aspects for various reasons. I think parents will do the greatest
