Erasing the Gender Divide

In the last 7 years working in the trenches literally, in search of a solution to the problem of leaking pipeline of women talent, through Mums At Work™; I learnt, grew and evolved as a human being working with women across all phases, ages and professional existence - homemakers; women on sabbatical; corporate professionals - entry, mid-level and senior leaders; entrepreneurs - aspiring and seasoned; young, mid-life & grandmothers; single, married with kids, married with no kids, separated, divorced. Here are some of my key learnings:

1. The root issue for the leaking pipe-line is performance, productivity and effectiveness. Let me expand on that a bit. Men have x responsibility, Women have 2x because they have both work and domestic responsibilities. After women have kids, available time at office reduces to y/2 because they need to take on the nurturing role and overall work increases to 3x. To deal with growing responsibilities at work, men can extend themselves from y to 2y hours but women now have only y/2 hours. And, that's why women leak out - 3x work to be done now in y hours. 

There are couple of ways for a woman to solve this problem:
a. Become a Fighter - Fight with the world at the injustice of 3x and fight her way up. Be the man and show the world.
b. Become a Victim - Give up and walk out, feeling helpless for the rest of her life.
c. Become a Peaceful Warrior - Learn, grow and evolve to the next level of what it means to be a human being and exponentially increase performance, productivity, effectiveness, innovation and creativity to effortlessly manage 3x in y hours or even less. This requires Leadership Depth. This requires a new way of Being within a new model of Leadership; inside of which all the four bodies of the Being (Physical, Intellectual / Mental, Emotional, Spiritual) are nourished, strengthened and transformed.

The job of the CEOs who are committed to increasing Gender Diversity is to solve this problem not as a woman issue but as a performance issue; and support their people, not just women, to become Peaceful Warriors; which will transform the organization from Good to Great. That means the CEO needs to herself / himself take on being a Peaceful Warrior.

Click here to read - How to be a Peaceful Warrior (Gear 5 Leader™) to lead your Organization from Good to Great

2. Corporates rise to the occasion by creating Women Interest groups, hosting workshops, trying to set-up mentoring programs in the old Leadership Model which only trains women to become Fighters. All this and more like this actually camouflages the real issue and pushes it away under the carpet. There is no sustainable long-term impact. Yes, the Leadership Team, though, comes away with the satisfaction of having done something. These kind of initiatives is like thinking ironing the shirt will solve the problem though the person is suffering from severe migraine. We need to go much deeper but where is the time to even think about it, when all the Leaders are busy being busy, rushing from moment to moment and driving everyone to be busy being busy. You need Stillness in all your four bodies for this kind of transformative work.

3. The biggest paradigm shift that is needed is to have the belief that you can Have It All - deeply fulfilling successful career, joyful relationships, happy responsible kids with their Genius joyfully expressed and lots of nourishing me-time; while making a huge difference to the world. Infact, not only you can have it all, but that it is the very purpose of your life. In the corporate world, where everyone is busy cutting stones instead of building cathedrals, coming to work only for their lifestyle; we have unsung songs, wistful dreams and outer motivation instead of joyous inner inspiration.

Because a woman needs to make a choice in the world where you cannot have it all; she first drops Nourishing Me-time; then she drops Deeply Fulfilling Successful Career; then Joyful Relationships and then nothing is left of her to raise extra-ordinary human beings. Either all four balls will be up in the air or none. You drop one and all will come crashing down one by one over a period of your entire life-time. 

Therefore, for Gender Diversity, senior Leaders beginning with the CEO have to have the belief that they can have it all and make it happen in their own lives to create the space for everyone in their organizations to make having it all a way of life. Do that and you will never have any woman leaving; and creativity and innovation in both men and women will explode to create breakthrough profitability because you will have happy people working, not stressed out zombies.

There is a huge amount of stress in the corporate environment. The way to solve this is not to become stronger to deal with the stress but to remove the stress altogether because under stress, the mind is ineffective. Imagine how much human potential is wasted in the corporates, more so at the senior most levels because they are all working with a limited mind efficiency, considering the amount of stress they are dealing with, day in, day out.

Therefore, though my commitment remains to transform what it means to be a woman; over the last 7 years, I realized the journey has to begin with transforming what it means to be a Leader; what it means to be an organization, a corporate and at the heart of it, what it means to be a human being. 

Love,
​Jyoti.