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Women today are often caught in the dilemma of having a family or a career. Though we fancy and idolize strong women characters portrayed in movies who can have it all, not everyone has the privilege to successfully run a family and be a boss lady at work. We look up to actors like Kareena Kapoor Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan who still continue to work after having a family, but we fail to realize that sometimes it is more of a privilege than a choice.
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Bollywood actors can easily manage both since they can get a nanny or hire a house help to take care of the baby and their home while they are off to work. But not everyone can afford it or has the progressive social conditioning that gives them this liberty in our society. Oftentimes women feel guilty for leaving their babies at home and going to work. And hence they choose to give up their careers. Biology is often cited as the reason in these cases since mothers are the natural caretakers. After all, women are the ones who carry the baby in their womb for nine months. Women had to take care of their health to ensure that the baby gets proper nutrition and they develop into healthy kids. And after birth, we are responsible for ensuring that the baby gets breastfed and grows up to be healthy individuals. So, we are the official nurturers and hence should stay back home long after the breastfeeding phase. A large number of women who managed to continue working after having a child have however given up on their careers later in life to help their kids with their studies when they reach high school. Have you ever thought why dads didn’t give up on their careers instead?
The answer might be more complicated than you think. Thanks to the pay disparity that is still very much prevalent in our society, women are usually the ones to make this sacrifice since men earn more. And hence it would be considered foolish for a man to give up on a high paying job. This social structure makes it hard for women to continue working when they are faced with constant obstacles throughout their career and they ultimately end up losing out to men in the workforce. Patriarchy is still very prevalent in our society, and it makes that much harder for women to break out of this cycle.
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Unlike celebrated actors in our society who earn a great deal of money with every movie, an average woman takes two steps back in her career the moment she is pregnant. Even if she is granted maternity leave, she will lose out on several opportunities in her workspace now that she is a mother. Maternity leave which is supposedly granted to give them a break to care for their child would be the one thing that ultimately stalls their career graph. Women get sidelined and the gender pay gap gets considerably widened the moment they announce their pregnancy. One may think is it truly possible to stop this from happening?
Perhaps if men and women are given a fair playing field, maybe women wouldn’t end up taking the brunt of it all. If men are given paternity leave, then it would probably help women bounce back easier if men share the parenting responsibilities equally during this time. Maybe it isn’t just paternity leave. Women are expected to cook, clean, wash and bathe their kids after coming back from work while men simply laze around on the couch waiting for dinner to be served. It’s high time that men start sharing the load to break the chain of patriarchy so that women would no longer feel obligated to sacrifice their career and be a stay at home parent.
