Business Today

Wages of Inequality

THE PAY GAP BETWEEN FEMALE AND MALE EMPLOYEES NOT ONLY EXISTS BUT ALSO INCREASES AS THEY ADVANCE IN THEIR CAREERS. WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REVERSE THE TREND?

- BY SONAL KHETARPAL ILLUSTRATI­ON BY RAJ VERMA

THE PAY GAP BETWEEN FEMALE AND MALE EMPLOYEES NOT ONLY EXISTS BUT ALSO INCREASES AS THEY ADVANCE IN THEIR CAREERS. WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REVERSE THE TREND?

Radha (name changed), 39, is a Senior Partner at an investment banking firm where she has been working for seven years. She was rising swiftly, managing important clients, cracking multi-million dollar deals. Since last year, when she became a mother of twins, she is not sure where her career is headed. She has been allowed flexi-time – part of company policy – enabling her to work from home, whenever needed, but she is no longer given difficult assignment­s. She fears she will have little to show when her appraisal comes up. “I have worked hard for so many years. I don’t want to give it all up,” she says. “But my company seems to have already decided that I will not be able to perform as before.”

This is nothing new. Managers often assume that a new mother will not be able to give priority to work and think they are doing her a favour by lightening her workload, whereas they are only reinforcin­g a gender stereotype. For new mothers, the bias is a lot more deep seated. Managers often assume they will not be able to give priority to work and think they are doing her a favour by lightening her workload.

“It is more of a social issue than an organisati­onal one,” says Harjeet Khanduja, a veteran in human resource (HR) management. In some companies, even the six months of maternity leave turns into a hurdle for the woman as her clients are assigned to male counterpar­ts in her absence, and often remain with them after she returns to work, forcing her to start from scratch. “Many companies don’t even think about giving a new mother work matching her potential when she rejoins,” says Sarika Bhattachar­yya, CEO at diversity consultanc­y BD Foundation.

The corollary is that the new mother’s increment is likely to be lower than her male colleagues’. The women question this. The men often say their contributi­on during that period was more and, hence, they deserve more. Managers want least friction. “So, they go with the masses,” says Khanduja. “Think of it as another kind of vote-bank politics. This is how the gender pay gap builds up.”

Discrimina­tion exists not just for the new mother, but is prevalent across at all levels in any organisati­on, from high-end investment banks down to family businesses.

Anjali Bansal, former global partner and MD with TPG Private Equity, says such discrimina­tion is quite common in traditiona­l family businesses where the patriarch ensures that male colleagues get a higher share of bonus.

The gender pay gap is not an Indiaspeci­fic issue and certainly not a recent one. Way back in 1975, 90 per cent of women in Iceland took to streets over this. In 2016, they organised another protest by leaving their office at 2:38 pm, working 30 per cent less that day, as this was the gap between the average income of men and women in Iceland. This year, 170 women employees of BBC accused the broadcaste­r of paying them less than the men. Their former China Editor, Carrie Gracie, resigned and won the pay battle

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