This article was originally for Winspiration 2011 conducted by The Indian Women's Leadership Council
The basic design was to have two equal beings, complementing each other with enough similarities such that they find sufficient common ground and with enough differences such that they fuel the most important necessity of life- Change. Here, I was recalling the design of humans. The two beings being: Women and Men. But somewhere in the process, things dint really go as per the design with one being starting to exploit over the other. Sadly even after all these years of humanity, we still don’t exactly conform to the original design. In fact it would be wise to say that civilization as such can be measured as a degree of conformance to this design.
With this, I bring this article to the 21st century, to the ‘today’, to the ‘right now’. This article does not intend to do root- cause analysis for this non-conformance, if I try to do that, I might have to go back to the ‘long long ago’, so long ago to a time when physical strength and endurance were pre- requisites in the race to being the fittest and ultimately the employable of the two sexes. {Good for us now, we have technologies, machines, robots and other enablers which have tremendously increased the productivity of an average human and perhaps there are not many jobs out there that a man can do and a woman cannot}. Neither is this article intended to establish the beauty of a more equal workplace, but rather this article tries to propose plans to even out the crests and troughs of outdated societal norms and the need to nurture a professional ecosystem that would contribute to women becoming the new- age front- runners and achievers. I channel this article into three segments: Understanding the role of the ecosystem in shaping its women and their lives, coming in terms with the dynamics of the present day work environment and scooping out path- breaking initiatives to make way for a smarter workplace ecosystem in the future.
