Interesting article about how female executives in California’s tech industry work flexibly, successfully, and how women still lag behind men at the top of most careers, through a mixture of gender psychology, predispositions, and family time. Anything that could be applicable to the Indian legal profession here?
Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, one everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers…
In a chart comparing the "career cost of family" in elite workplaces – meaning the price people pay for taking time off – the economist Claudia Goldin floats the tech companies high above the rest. Women and men there can take time off and not take a big salary hit. Other industries, by contrast, suffer from "inertia" or "resistance to change"…
She was just doing that thing young women tend to do, which is hesitate before she'd even got started. "I watch it all day long," Sandberg told me. "Women are making room for kids they don't have, years before they try to get pregnant. Then, when they do get pregnant, they would be coming back to a job they no longer want." The men, meanwhile, are "super-aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. 'Can I do that? Can I lead this?' They don't have to be talked into things."
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It is in fact even more relevant in the Indian context where we're taught to work like a sweat-shop in order to be successful, and 'selfishly' negotiating and stating what you really want in ANY arena is not very comely of a softspoken and respectful woman (The bahu, beti), a young gentleman, or a fresher focussed on 'learning'!
Add to that the lesser openness in our society to career-experimentation and playing with socially defined age-absolutes, than in the western countries. We have to keep up with social expectations around reaching certain 'age-landmarks', and women who choose to not marry until 30 even are looked down upon and hounded by 'concerned' strangers, while men who do not make so-and-so until a certain age, to support a family, are reminded enough that they are 'losers'!!
As a society we simply do not have the freedom to choose. How can then we as individuals ever dream of it?
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