What Women Want!

They talk of diversity and inclusion, but Indian companies are far from fully walking the walk.Sneha Mahale tracks the trend and looks at the acceptance the idea has received

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Tanisha Karnik*, who works in a pharmaceutical MNC, was one of her company’s top-performing employees for three consecutive years. She worked on plum projects and was ranked highly in her annual appraisals. That was till she got pregnant, two years after she tied the knot. She says, “When I returned from my maternity leave, I felt like something had shifted in terms of attitude in the office. I brushed it off initially.” Then, at her next annual appraisal, Karnik was asked if she planned on having another child. She was taken aback by the question, but decided not to react. She remained non-committal. She says, “That year, my junior got promoted over me and I was asked to report to him. Soon, the assignments I was working on were reassigned. When I brought it up with my superiors, I was told that my priorities were different now, and they needed someone who was fully devoted to the job. This, even though I still put in the usual hours and had managed to find some work-life balance. And I was relegated to handling the coordinating that happens within teams.” Karnik quit a few months later.

What Karnik has experienced has probably happened to you too, in one form or another, at some workplace. No matter how hard you’ve tried, you’ve felt more like an invisible spectator than part of a team. And that nagging feeling of not belonging refuses to go away till the day you quit.