ABSTRACT ON AN ARTICLE CALLED ‘WOMEN FRIENDLY POLICY ‘by AMRITA NANDY JOSHI PUBLISHED IN THE TIMES OF INDIA DATED 23 Aug
06 (Mumbai Edition)
Workplaces with its challenging routines have kept the comforts of the macho sex in mind. Many a competent and qualified woman has had to take a break from a high-powered career to nurture and develop her young child. Often a capable and worthy female professional is forced to quit her promising fledgling career and opt for softer options that carry depleted pay packets. A late and hiccupped start at the workplace can do unrepairable damage to an otherwise exponential career graph.
A point to be considered as well is that the stay-at-home mother is often a helpless bystander as the power equations within a patriarchal set-up tilt in favor of the husband/father and she has little say in shaping the life of her infant even if she may be more capable of doing so.
The young working woman is forced to multitask in a stressful social environment, which is misled by tradition into believing that the feminine force lies behind the apron strings. The social fabric of our nation exerts unfair
pressure on the fairer sex. This pressure may be somewhat eased by a smooth working life of an employable female graduate as our country’s middle class comes to terms with the meterosexual male. The lack of adequate childcare
facilities is partly responsible for the fact that though the female workforce in our nation has increased over the past few years, marriage and fertility rates have sharply declined.
It is really up to the citizens of our nation with its growing educated community to recognize the need for gender- sensitive policies and the development of child/day care facilities. Quality crèches at the workplace are the need of the hour. Child care, if dealt with at the professional level, can give birth to a booming service industry.
Swapna Datta Khan
Junior Faculty,
ICFAI National College
Nasik, India