Navigating workplace womanhood
This year marks my 20th year of navigating the world of work. I currently head People & Culture for a startup in Bangalore. Last week on my way back from a leadership offsite, I got into a conversation with R, a colleague in her mid twenties. She had helped me plan and execute this offsite.
“Why do you feel like you can’t speak to anyone in the group? You shared that you cannot be authentic”
“Not sure, maybe because we don’t have any topic of mutual interest or I haven’t really spent too much time with them. So I guess the trust is missing.”
She was silent after that and I decided to be authentic with her. “I think my gender comes in the way,” I added. I’m the only women on the leadership team of 10.
“I thought that might be a factor but didn’t want to ask you directly. How come you feel it at your level too? I was hoping it gets better as I get more experience”
“In a way it does get easier, but mostly it changes.”
This conversation has been weighing on my mind for about two weeks now. My response to her weighed on my mind. When did it become so oddly matter of fact for me to acknowledge these instances of exclusion?
I think about this 20 something year old, start of her career, very little agency over authority and am transported back to being a 26 year old entering my first workplace.
When I started in 2007, there was no PoSH law. Not that the PoSH law has changed much. There is enough resistance till date to report cases. Women do not come forward for multiple reasons associated with shame and the fear of consequences on their career. The law does not make it easy either. Finding proof, the three month window period to raise an alarm, and also the consequences rendered to the perpetrator makes it an untrustworthy tool.
Most men getaway with a written warning and some training. Training which has no impact on future behaviour. Imagine continuing to work with the same person you complained against?
My first organization put every new joinee through a training program followed by an exam and then a live project to be worked on. It was common practice for new joinees to go through a barrage of questions as they presented this live project in front of the senior leadership team. Everyone gets assigned a mentor to help navigate this project.
“Oh, you!” was the first expression from this mentor. He had a smirk on his face. He then continued, “I’m not keen, I have a girlfriend, but I can think of 10 other guys who would be super keen on mentoring you. Especially S, he has a huge crush on you. Anyway, you are stuck with me but go to him for help. He will do anything for you. Use it to your advantage. Now tell me, you want a difficult project or an easy one? Think carefully and answer”
I muttered “difficult one”. Words failed me in that moment. I could not think of a single retort. The conversation felt off but I did not know what to do with what I had just experienced so I brushed it aside. First instance of normalizing workplace harassment.
2008, a join a big reputed MNC. First time out of home and Mumbai. High on life and freedom and totally spellbound to see this world that was truly alien to me. An office township with at least 10 buildings, each about 2 kms away from each other. At the end of the day, you are just a number that you carry around your neck but the space gave me a sense of false importance. My team was a team of young boys in their twenties. No surprises there. There were three layers of hierarchy above me, each occupied by men with competing egos.
My first day, I enter a small room and as introductions were being made, one of them turns around and asks me, “Do you have a boyfriend?” . No “Hi”, no “welcome to the team”. First question was to enquire about my relationship status just to determine if it was okay for them to hit on me. I was then put through a series of embarrassing tasks in the name of ragging and initiation into the group. Normalization, strike two.
Workplace cyber stalking, cringe worthy managers who described my body parts in detail over office intranet chats, then those who proposed extra marital affairs. My clothes gave that impression that I would be okay with it, I wore skirts and other modern clothes to office. I just continued to go downhill and I lost count of how many strikes of normalization I had gone through in the first fews years of my working life.
Overtime, this objectification and apparent sexual predatory behaviour gave way to micro exclusions.
“You are too aggressive as a sales person”, the numbers of times this has been thrown on my face. Yet, when I was talking to an ex manager recently and voicing out how it would be great to have a women leader for sales, his response caught me off guard. “You need a certain resilience and aggression for sales and Indian women aren’t conditioned to deal with that. The society and the system has to change for women to thrive in this ecosystem and grow in their careers” So what’s the deal here? If women are aggressive you get called out but that’s exactly what you will look for in an ideal male leader. Great that we can talk about systemic change and consider ourselves out of the system. Not my circus, not my monkey.
In the name of care, I have been labelled incompetent. My pregnancy a perfect excuse to lay off stress and hire someone else to support me during this critical period. On the face of it seems like a great employee first culture. Is it really?
So yes, in a way it did get easier. I have accepted and in some ways continue to accept all this as a part of my workplace environment. I feel guilty about being a silent party to this. I feel uncomfortable when women ask me how to navigate this? What should I tell them? Accept it and move on. If you want to climb this ladder, the only way is through it and carry a garbage bag along.
Going back to the conversation with R post the leadership offsite, she said something remarkably simple to me, “I also wanted to hang around and stay up in the night with the group, probably smoke up a few more joints. But then I thought, I’m a woman, what will they think?”
In a networking event recently, a young girl gathered the courage to ask a very famous woman corporate leader, “Ma’am you are such an inspiration to many young girls like us. How do you think your style of leadership as a woman is different from the men around you and how do we learn to grow more like you?”
“Leadership is a skill” she said “gender has nothing to do with leadership. Focus on your career and work hard and don’t worry about being a woman leader”. That young girl sat down, totally deflated by this response. In that one statement, this person has ignored the realities of lakhs of women who struggle to balance life and work, who do not come from the same place of privilege that she potentially came from, those who do not have a strong support system to push through.
Another CHRO of a big company told me in a 1:1 with her “Once you have a seat at the table, it is your responsibility to have the voice. Don’t let it go waste.” Great advice, finding that voice takes years, the right mentorship, access to a great network of people and the right opportunities. It’s hard finding a voice when you have been silenced for so long. Another colleague of mine told me, “Do I have to say the same thing twice or thrice to be heard?” I sensed an almost resigned tone in the way she was talking to me.
Mostly, I worry more and more about such women leaders. Once you reach the top, whatever one perceives it to be, why be dismissive of those in their journey and their struggle? Why not acknowledge the hardships they have endured to get there and share it with others? Why such glorification of alpha male leadership traits? Why the only way to survive is to embrace and become one among the crowd?
What a powerful reflection on the exhausting dance women do at work - from dodging harassment in those early years to facing those subtle "death by a thousand cuts" exclusions later on. Really struck by how that conversation with R sparked this whole examination. It's wild how we can normalize so much over time, right?
The part about that senior woman leader dismissing gender in leadership felt especially real. Sometimes those who make it to the top seem to forget the obstacle course they ran to get there, or maybe they're just trying to distance themselves from it.
Thanks for writing this - it's the kind of honest account that helps puncture that "everything's fine now" narrative about women in the workplace. Twenty years of experience speaking through clear eyes. <3
Ever relevant but urgently so as I baulked reading Nirmala Sitaraman's " jargon like patriarchy" comment. A very clear no holds barred piece. Thank you for writing it.