Women having it tougher than men in their careers isn’t anything new globally. Female professionals, especially in India, rarely experience smooth linear progress.
One of India’s best-known bankers just put her finger on the three specific points that ultimately weigh heavily on a woman’s career.
What is the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit 2019?
Under the theme, Innovating for India: Strengthening South Asia, Impacting the World, the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit 2019 will convene key leaders from government, the private sector, academia and civil society on 3-4 October to accelerate the adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and boost the region’s dynamism.
Hosted in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the aim of the Summit is to enhance global growth by promoting collaboration among South Asian countries and the ASEAN economic bloc.
The meeting will address strategic issues of regional significance under four thematic pillars:
• The New Geopolitical Reality – Geopolitical shifts and the complexity of our global system
• The New Social System – Inequality, inclusive growth, health and nutrition
• The New Ecological System – Environment, pollution and climate change
• The New Technological System – The Fourth Industrial Revolution, science, innovation and entrepreneurship
Discover a few ways the Forum is creating impact across India.
Read our guide to how to follow #ies19 across our digital channels. We encourage followers to post, share, and retweet by tagging our accounts and by using our official hashtag.
Become a Member or Partner to participate in the Forum's year-round annual and regional events. Contact us now.
Speaking at the India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum in New Delhi, Arundhati Bhattacharya, former chairman of the country’s biggest retail lender, the State Bank of India (SBI), said: “There are three times when a woman decides to leave (her career), the most common of them being the childbearing years.”
The second point, she said, comes when the child is preparing for competitive exams—especially classes 10 and 12 in India: “It is expected out of the mother to take the child around for various coaching classes and to wake him (or her) up in the morning with a hot cup of Complan (milk).”
Have you read?
Bhattacharya, who also once headed SBI’s human resources department, explained how the mother is held responsible for a child’s poor performance in studies. Given this assumption, a woman has to divert her attention from her career to the children, she said.
“The third reason we found that women are leaving is to take care of their parents or parents-in-law, because geriatric care in India is quite costly. And then at that point, female workers feel absolutely guilt-ridden and…give up jobs,” Bhattacharya said.
The other panelists at today’s India Economic Summit session were union minister Smriti Irani, tennis player Sania Mirza, and Bangladesh’s education minister Dipu Moni. They discussed the changing roles of women at their workplaces and shared thoughts about how due to societal pressure women choose to give up their careers to focus on their children or other family responsibilities.
Bhattacharya then listed the steps taken under her to solve the problem: “I made two-year sabbatical for child and elderly care that could be taken by the employee in three slots. And about two years after we did a survey to see the success of the initiative, we found about 676 women had availed it and one of them even told me that due to this change my entire career has been saved.”
