Why we need moms for management lessons | Eye News,The Indian Express
The hand that rocks the cradle may not rule the corporate world yet but company policies and campaigns are helping new mothers get their rightful place back, in the boardroom and on office floors
When Ranjani Krishnaswamy was thinking about a storyboard for jewellery brand Tanishq’s Mother’s Day campaign, she didn’t want a saccharine concept of the forever giver, nurturer and restorer. She wanted to keep it real and honest. And she found it from women around her, among consumers or colleagues. The brand’s general manager (marketing) figured that maternity was a liability for working women, who got passed over for promotions, sidetracked from prized projects or simply offloaded if they wanted to take a longer break for their children. That’s when she decided to flip the narrative of denial.
Tanishq’s latest TV commercial breaks the “maternity jinx” at the workplace as its protagonist, who had quit her top job to care for her newborn for 14 months, decides to re-apply for another job after a break. When the interviewer asks her why there was a gap in her résumé, she simply says she had devoted herself to a start-up project, Life Bootcamp Corp., that required her to be on the job 24×7. A solo enterprise, she was leader and multi-tasker all at once. And after 14 months, the start-up could run on its own with a little help from a partner. She then shows a picture of her start-up unit, her child and husband. Needless to say, she was hired, as she had, in under a minute, convinced the board how maternity had helped her top up her skill set. It was indeed a bootcamp in leadership and modern management.
“With 7.5 million views (on YouTube) and countless shares, the sentiment has definitely caught on and we are getting responses from both men and women. The fact that the protagonist calls her husband a partner has definitely acknowledged the need for gender parity in caregiving roles,” says Bengaluru-based Krishnaswamy, 44. She herself has lived through the post-maternity returnee phase determinedly in her career. “Agreed, women need to be given a fair chance and a level-playing field and organisations have to build that culture. But women tend to be understated and this inhibition limits us. I never played on the backfoot. Motherhood chisels you as a professional because it springs up life force, empathy, collaboration, dedication. And if she has come back, know that a woman is as keen and fierce to get ahead,” she says.
Of course, it’s not at all hunky dory. There’s stone-cold seriousness in some of the responses. Like the one about “how it looks good in a film and not so much in reality, where a gap-year mom has to reconcile to reduced roles vis-à-vis male counterparts who have overtaken her space.” Or how the recruiter is almost always male in the absence of many women at the top of the corporate ladder. Or, distressing experiences of a mother, who has to pump breastmilk for her child, to be fed by the nanny, leave early for work, run against time, not hang out with colleagues, all this, just so that she can stay one up in the productivity game. It is a 100m dash for a life-long marathon that many don’t sign up for.
This angst was borne out by the Genpact Centre for Women’s Leadership in their 2018 study, which said 50 per cent of working women in India left their jobs to take care of their children at 30. Even among those who returned, “a huge fraction dropped out within four months of rejoining.” After becoming mothers, “only 27 per cent of women advanced in their careers… Of the women who returned to employment, a meagre 16 per cent advanced to hold senior leadership positions.”
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