Overworked granny: The working woman's unpaid nanny

Behind every successful man is a woman, they say. I say, behind every successful Indian woman, there is an often exhausted grandmother.  ICICI CEO Chanda Kochhar, former ICICI MD Lalitha Gupte, corporate lawyer Zia Mody, UBS’s Manisha Girotra, HSBCs Naina Lal Kidwai, Axis Bank’s Shikha Sharma…. practically every high flying corporate mother has attributed her success to “family support”, which usually means a kindly and self-sacrificing grandmother. All well and good in the days when grandmothers had no jobs, or lives of their own, and therefore were happy to sacrifice what was left of their lives to bring up second families. Or in the days when grandparents lived in the same house, or at least the same city. Or in the days when loyal domestic help was available to help grandparents. But those days are gone. Many of us live in cities away from our parents. Many of us— including myself — have mothers who have lives of their own and are happy to do a little babysitting, but understandably, not keen on spending the next ten years doing it. Most of us limp along using sporadic and unreliable domestic help. There’s a lot of jingoistic guff talked about Indian family values. But what this usually means is shoving the burden of childrearing onto an exhausted grandmother who would like to say no, but can’t.  We tell ourselves that it keeps them young and fit, but who are we kidding? Most grannies love to look after their kids, but not 24/7 and not as substitute parents. “I am fed up,” said one granny I know, who has spent the last fifteen years looking after her achiever daughter’s children, even moving to another town to do so. “I am too old to spend hours doing homework with the kids. But if I go, my daughter will have to give up working. How can I do this to her, after all her years of hard study?” Another banker friend who works twelve-hour days with frequent travel feels crushing guilt about making her elderly mother-in-law look after her boisterous toddler. “But what else do I do? I spent years working for this; do I just quit and sit at home?” [caption id=“attachment_107912” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“There’s a lot of jingoistic guff talked about Indian family values. But what this usually means is shoving the burden of childrearing onto an exhausted grandmother who would like to say no, but can’t. AFP”]  [/caption] It’s easy of course to demonise the ‘selfish’ working woman. Yet, what choice do we have? Maids are unreliable; usually choosing to go missing on the day you have an important business meeting (after all, they usually have children of their own too).  Or they might just be mistreating your baby. Meanwhile, thanks to the fact that most Indian men still refuse to do their fair share of the housework and childcare, women have to run the house, coddle elderly relatives, help with homework, organise social commitments, and still get to office by 9.00 am on the dot. Now that family support systems are breaking down, the strain is showing.  Admitted Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma at a recent Business Today panel discussion on working women, “Today’s grandmother is more likely to say ‘Why should I look after your baby when I have already looked after you?’ The trend of women joining the workplace will see some strain until traditional support systems are replaced by alternative ones.” A recent study proves her point. Indian women are dropping out in worryingly large numbers in middle management, when family responsibilities tend to kick in. “ Gender Diversity Benchmark for Asia 2011” by Community Business surveyed 21 large multinational companies in six countries in Asia — China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore — to see how women are doing at junior, middle and upper levels. India has the biggest percentage of women dropping out of the workforce between the junior and middle levels. At the junior level, women form 29% of the workforce, but this sharply plummets to under 15% at the middle level, and then to under 10% of the workforce at the senior level. All of which begs the question: why do we still not have an alternative support system: quality daycare, flexible hours and work-at-home policies? Sure, there are some enlightened companies such as ICICI,  Wipro, and GE which have onsite daycare and family friendly policies.  But they are few and far between. Independent daycares are usually crowded, dirty and poorly managed, never mind the long waiting lists to actually get in. Could it because both families and corporates still see childcare as women’s work?  The prevalent attitude seems to be: You had it, you look after it, ignoring the fact that it takes two to make a baby. Or companies trot out that glib phrase “You can’t have it all.”  Interestingly, no one ever says this to a man. It’s assumed that a man can and should have it all — a happy family, a satisfying job, social support. But women who try to have both a family and a career are told they are just being greedy. Every man wants to have a working wife to pay those pesky EMIs, plus a loving mother for Tunnu and Munnu, but few men actually want to take time off for PTA meetings, so inevitably it falls to the woman, who is then branded “irresponsible” by employers. We are already seeing the consequences of husbands not sharing housework in Japan, where many working women prefer not to marry, or not to have children.  And increasingly, working couples are choosing not to have children in India as well. Why should companies care about supporting women? Because given the talent crunch and the way young employees job-hop, it makes sense to look after all your workers, not just women. No one’s asking for special privileges for women, just for all employees to be seen for what they are: not merely wage slaves, but also as parents and children, who have their own responsibilities. ICICI, for instance, does not give women special treatment, but it has allowed both deserving male and female employees sabbaticals, flexible hours and time off for parental responsibilities, as long as the work gets done. The result is that it now has a whole top tier of women executives who have repaid the company with absolute loyalty. It also has garnered invaluable press, not just as a woman-friendly company, but as a family-friendly one. What’s stopping other companies from doing the same? I don’t see Chanda Kochhar or Naina Lal Kidwai giving up their jobs to take care of their future grandkids, and really, why should they? Companies need to realise that if they don’t look after their women workers, the talent crunch is only going to get worse. And husbands need to realise that if they don’t pitch in, the next generation of working moms will either drop out, or like in Japan, opt out of motherhood and marriage altogether. Kavitha Rao is a freelance journalist and parent who detests parenting manuals. Her main parenting mantra: “This too shall pass.”