How can women lead if work-life balance is an urban myth?

This is the month of the International Women's Day. This topic is thus pertinent.

Times have changed. From the time the husband earned, and the wife stayed at home to the time now when the husband earns and the wife earns too. But the wife still cooks and washes and runs the house. So, how does she balance her work with life at home?

Women have struggled to establish an identity & create a mark in the social and organizational platforms. But, the transition from computers to nappies is not an easy one. I have a fridge magnet which says: “There is no such thing as a non-working mother’. But try being a working mother – the kind that has another full-time job apart from the one at home. And while your male colleagues will always tell you that it is all about time/stress management, I can guarantee you at least 80% of them are saying it from their viewpoint of going home (quite late- they do have loads of office work to do, you see) and getting ready-made tea, meals, and nicely bathed, cute children jumping up to greet daddy.

For women with children, the combination of work and all the complexities of raising children entail a high-pressure lifestyle that exacts remarkable balancing skills. With the traditional role of breadwinner no longer confined to the father, we now have a scenario stuck on a cusp – where most fathers are not the sole breadwinners, but they are not doing much – or sometimes, any – of the housework, and most working women have assumed dual roles: pursuing a career and economic independence while continuing, for the most part, to bear the brunt of household work. Taking on leadership roles becomes even harder.

Yes there are exceptions, but that is it – they ARE exceptions that prove the rule. But if you are a woman holding a full-time job from home, God help you (cause no one else will) – the expectation from the family- and at work, is that you now have this wonderful privilege of a 38-hour day without any stress.

The problems are legion – finding affordable and good quality child care for smaller kids who have not yet gone to school, (and in India, this is a lot worse than in the West, unless you have a parental set-up to support you. But then when you do, the guilt of dumping your child on aged parents eats you up), the emotional and psychological toll of juggling two roles, the unrelenting pressure and strain of their working day averaging anywhere from fourteen to sixteen hours, the frustration of not having enough time off when children fall ill and guilt over the little time you can devote to your children while having even less time (or almost no time whatsoever) for yourself.

Many women used to treasure their personal space. Read a book when and if they wanted to, listen to music. But now, even if you are working from home, your child will pounce on you because his science project needs finishing, your partner will come home and expect to be attended to and you will need to get things ready for the next day.

When your child has a raging high fever, you, the women are the ones usually who stay up nights tending to him/her, getting medicines, checking temperature. Then going back to work the next day. If you whinge, you are told to strike the right balance, maybe even give up your job. And just so you know, most of this sort of advice comes from the female species. It does not strike anyone that the man could also give up his job. When that happens – and in rare cases it does – in most cases, you have truckloads of ego hassles to handle.

The immense strength and resilience women show in organizing and handling what are in effect two full-time jobs is remarkable. They get up early and go to bed late. They rush to feed and prepare their children for daycare or school and then get ready for work. They adjust their timing to beat the morning rush-hour- traffic. They often skip lunch to make up hours missed from work when they have to handle emergencies related to their children. Mothers – when work is done, they rush to pick up their kids if they are in day-care before the day-care center closes, or, as in many Indian scenarios, get the kids off the hands of the parents, hurriedly make dinner and then play or do homework with their kids. In some cases, the fathers spend 15 minutes of ‘quality’ time reading to the kids, when they are nearly asleep anyway. When the children are asleep, the mothers go on to do the housework. If their children are small or ill, they have the additional burden of sleepless nights to contend with.

A good part of their weekend is devoted to getting chores done and shopping for food, delivering the children to and from birthday parties because when was a mother ever entitled to weekends? Even my mother does a disapproving tch-tch when she hears me complain.

One of my earlier bosses had once asked me to learn to multi-task, a term that was then just becoming fashionable. I told him he did not begin to understand the first thing about multitasking. Multi-tasking is not skipping from one ppt, or presentation to reading an email to answering a phone call. Multi-tasking was answering his phone call with all the details he wanted, reading emails, having something cooking in the oven, while trying to see that my child was eating propped on his high chair and changing programs of Teletubbies or Tweenies so he remains entertained. My boss, bless him, had the sense to agree with me.

How many fathers do you know who take time off because their child has caught a virus? The only option left to the mother is to take time off work, which means it cuts into her annual leave. Which is not time off work at all, they just are sleepless nights spent looking after your child – you would not let anyone else do it, for sure, but that does not make it any less stressful. And then the fathers get trifle annoyed because the mothers don’t feel up to taking an activity-filled holiday. Can you blame her for wanting to just curl up in a corner, read a book, and pretend she is living a different life when she can? Holidays would also mean packing, cleaning, unpacking, cleaning – thrown in with conversations like ‘How could you forget to get three pairs of socks? Didn’t get any snacks to munch on?’

?And when the said father is ill, and has a fever, the mother is supposed to ensure he has the silent room to sleep out his fever. The mother though, regardless of the mercury shooting, has to think of what the child eats and whether the child eats. Often the paternal parental unit takes the easy and popular option of calling in for Pizza. For a day it is fine. But for longer than that, it is not. So the mother has to get up and go.

And I am not even getting into how it can adversely affect her career progression, Researchers have studied the effect of employment on the physical and mental health of mothers. A study conducted by the Duke University Medical Centre shows that “stress hormone levels in working mothers rise each morning and stay high until bedtime, putting them at higher risk than other working women for health problems such as heart attacks.” Increased stress levels, researchers say, are related to increased strain at home but add that the psychological strain extends over the entire day.?

Let’s first define what work-life balance is not. Work-life balance does not mean an equal balance. Trying to schedule an equal number of hours for each of your various work and personal activities is usually unrewarding and unrealistic. Life is and should be more fluid than that. Your best individual work-life balance will vary over time, often daily. The right balance for you today will probably be different for you tomorrow. There is no perfect, one-size-fits-all balance you should be striving for. The best work-life balance is different for each of us because we all have different priorities and lead different lives. However, at the core of an effective work-life balance definition are two key everyday concepts that are relevant to each of us. They are daily Achievements and Enjoyment, ideas almost deceptive in their simplicity. Work is a way for you to get a life, it is not life itself!

Today’s career women are continually challenged by the demands of full-time work. When the day is done at the office, they carry more of the responsibilities and commitments at home. The majority of women are working 55-60 hours per week (rendering the 70-hour workweek discussion redundant) and 53% are struggling to achieve work/life balance. Their lives are a juggling act that includes multiple responsibilities at work, heavy meeting schedules, and business trips, on top of managing the daily routine responsibilities of life and home.

Often, working women drop out of the workforce when they are doing well, simply because they want to stay at home with their children or care for aging parents. Or for both reasons. And then some women have children later in life because they want to work for personal satisfaction or money.

So, can a woman have it all? The working woman should refuse to take on too much. She should adopt a sense of priorities. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, – reality very often does not cooperate with dreams and aspirations- but if you work hard, amazing things can happen.

Many companies these days are devising various ways of supporting their women workforce. HR policies of our company have elements to work around problems the women workforce might face. There are courses and presentations available that can help our associates traverse the work-life journey well. They are always working to find newer and better ways to support women associates through initiatives and other means. Those are very commendable because women do hold half the sky.