The Hindu Business Line : Double standards

Recently, at a speech on women in management, the audience was bursting to ask questions or narrate experiences. The few men present tried to weakly explain their point of view on how women fit in, or don't, into the workplace. The speaker, a senior executive with years of experience in HR both in India and abroad, talked about the strengths women bring to the workplace, apart from the challenges they face.

Making it very clear that she was not a male-basher, Sujaya Banerjee, Vice-President, HRD & Personnel, Lowe, said women's skills were rapport, collaboration, intuition, validation and flexibility, while men's strengths tended to be their abilities to be detached, competitive, specific and factual. When women network, their focus seems to be on relationships, while men do so for connections. Women internalise things, men externalise.

Their approaches to work are different, too. Quoting from available research, she said women look for areas of agreement while men tend to look for gaps. Women are multi-thinkers, while men want to solve one problem at a time. Women want to explore every detail; men get straight to the point. Women look to justify things, men carry on regardless. Women bond in conversation, men in games and tasks. They share problems only when they want them fixed, but women discuss them because they want to.

According to male employers/senior management executives that Canvas spoke to, women are assets to the organisation because they are sincere and "there seems to be something in their nature that drives them to do a better job than men. It may be conscience, fear of reprisal or guilt that they are not giving 100 per cent to the job as they have family responsibilities". This is a debatable point — it is not as if men give their all to the job, though. Says a woman who works in a Government office, "They always seem to be going out for tea or on some mysterious business — they are never at their seats. How many women would do that? And bosses who turn a blind eye to that behaviour or even join them will certainly not allow that in a woman employee's case; at the very least, she will get dirty looks," she says.

Says Nina Vaz, who works in a call centre, "Many working women are dedicated, focused, and most important, keen to do a good job. The focus changes after marriage, but still they are trying to do a good job, given the constraints. They are nurturing with colleagues and feel it is important to maintain some form of professionalism."

On the challenges women face at work, she says it has been her experience that women feel dismissed. Something many of the women interviewed for this article testified to. Their opinions are rarely sought, and even if sought, they are ignored.

Many women feel patronised. "My boss treats me like his daughter" is a common complaint.

Women also feel excluded. "They seem to gang up against us, somehow," says Neela Samuel, who works in an office in Chennai with a fair sprinkling of women. "Even when I volunteer for a particular task, I always find it going to the male colleagues, not to any one of us," she adds.

Women also feel estranged because they cannot speak in the same idiom as men do. "Men use sports/war talk for strategising and I can't use that kind of language," says one woman. Women also feel they don't get into the real corridors of power. Says Vijaya Hari, who has 11 years of work experience, "Wherever I've worked, I'm always told that women are welcomed in that organisation, because they are more sincere at work than men. But I've rarely seen them in senior positions."

Her colleague, Meera Mallik, is hardly able to contain her scorn. "I think we are welcomed because we are good at `dog work' — sincere, loyal, willing to slog, and we lap up any amount of criticism along with the scraps of praise that come our way. How is it that bosses find it easy to shout at us at the drop of a hat but don't do the same when it comes to the lazy/inept men in the office? It must be some kind of warped male bonding at play, because I see the same bosses excusing the goofs made by the men," she says.

`Tokenism' is another complaint. The feeling that they were taken on at work because they were women is very humiliating.

Another thing most working women resent is that they feel tested. Clients and colleagues feel women just do not have what it takes. They are under more scrutiny, even by other women. And it's worse if a woman works in a male-dominated profession, like auditing.

Women also feel they've taken on male behaviour, says Sujaya. A point that many women corroborate. "I have to be more forceful and assertive than I normally am. I can't recognise myself and sometimes, I am not sure if I like what I'm turning into," is a common refrain from women.

As an aside, this writer remembers a trichologist saying some time ago that even women are beginning to bald these days because they are under as much or more stress than men are, an event that hardly occurred earlier.

Family is a very real constraint. Says Leena Virk, who looked forward to a great career in marketing in the US, "To strike a balance between family and work, women often have to tailor their jobs to family life. As a result they cannot accept greater responsibility and reap the higher wages that go with that. Unless the men in the family shoulder greater responsibility, the disparities at work will remain."

A mother of two, she herself had to quit work after a rocky time at work and home. Her employment agent let her know that despite her brilliant record it would not be easy to find a suitable position for her as, with two young kids, she was viewed as a liability to the employer, with the reasoning being that she would take time off to attend to the kids, or go on maternity leave once again. This agent also told her that a man in the very same situation would be regarded by a prospective employer as `settled and reliable'.

"I was asked quite directly by prospective employers about who would mind the kids if I were to take up full-time work. However, a male counterpart would not have to face this line of questioning," she says, adding that men are only too keen to brand women `incapable' or `inferior' without fully understanding or appreciating the dynamics and challenges that women face.

"Many brilliant careers have been sacrificed at the altar of womanhood," says Sujaya. Tracing the stages of a woman's growth and fade-out in a career, she says women go through the `I'm my father's daughter' stage to the `I have to be Somebody' stage to the Marriage and Motherhood phase to the My House, My Family stage and more often than not, end up in the `What have I achieved/got to show for myself' stage.

She believes that women shouldn't lose sight of self-actualisation. Once the woman remains committed to herself and her desire to work or do something with her life, then nature will find a way to let that happen, she says.

Says Neeru Surana, who runs her own business and has never stopped working, "Women would be doing themselves a favour if they stopped viewing themselves from the eyes of their male counterparts. They should be confident in their own strengths and radiate this strength for the world to see."

All identities have been changed.

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