A nauseating work culture is a reality that most Indian employees are accustomed to. We don’t need someone to prove it to us. We have heard stories about it and even experienced it first-hand. There are managers in every industry expecting their team to devote their existence to a company. For women, everything naturally becomes worse.
Yesterday, the news of an ambitious 26-year-old CA’s passing and her grieving mother’s letter to the EY India chairman shook the best of us. In the letter, her mother detailed how the overwhelming work pressure began impacting her daughter’s health soon after she joined the company. In four months, she passed away; and nobody from her workplace attended her funeral.
“She worked late into the night, even on weekends, with no opportunity to catch her breath. Her assistant manager once called her at night with a task that needed to be completed by the next morning, leaving her with barely any time to rest or recover”, wrote the mother.
You hear about the incident, read the mother’s letter, and imagine the agony of the parents seeing their daughter “collapse” on the bed after work, sometimes without changing her clothes, only to be bombarded with texts assigning her additional tasks. However, in some ways, you also understand what the daughter must have been going through; in some ways, you relate to her experience because it’s not unheard of.
We have been in spaces where we were unable to say “no”. Perhaps because we wanted to prove our value, or we didn’t know how to draw boundaries, or maybe because the work culture in our country is so bad that we’ve normalised suffering. In fact, we praise people who voluntarily suffer and declare them true hard workers. But when did hard work equate to suffering? When did being committed to work become losing out on living a life?
Most workspaces have been designed to cater to a man because society only ever imagined a man working. But biological men’s and women’s bodies operate differently. We know of it. There are studies that prove it. However, this difference is rarely ever acknowledged in corporate spaces. Because if it was recognised, then we wouldn’t be hearing stories where employers were pissed at a woman for taking a leave after her miscarriage.
In a recent post on Instagram, Faye D’Souza provided a space for people to share their experiences of a toxic work environment. The comment section soon turned into a horror story. Somebody’s harassment complaint wasn’t recognised, somebody else was screamed at for taking a leave, and so many others were asked to work all day, every day. Then there’s also gaslighting, sexism, lack of empathy and exploitation of employees at an organisational level. These experiences are far too common.
Also, companies are not separate from society. They exist in a society and ours is fairly patriarchal. So, workspaces are not absolved of patriarchy either. When women go for interviews, many are asked questions beyond their skill set. Interviewers want to know if they are married and that becomes a decisive factor for their application. If they’re hired, there are subtle differences in treatment between female and male colleagues. Then, most companies fail to recognise the pain that menstruation entails. So, women have to fight to be taken seriously and simultaneously push their bodies beyond limits.
The young CA professional was a hardworking woman who was pushed to extremes. In four months, she was working late into the night, on weekends, and was being expected to meet practically impossible deadlines. She was anxious, her concerns were dismissed, and she had no space to catch her breath. But she didn’t quit her job, even when her parents suggested so. You see, she wanted the exposure, she wanted to learn. This often happens in corporations where their answer for a zealous employee is to burden them with more work.
You know, a lot of us say and propagate that one must not stay in a hostile work environment but then good work environments in India are so rarely heard of. It’s actually considered a “blessing” if you find a kind team and an empathetic manager. It doesn’t make any sense but that’s the tragic reality we live in, so many of us have even normalised it. But somebody has passed and it’s probably because of the suffocating work pressure. It’s not an isolated incident either. Work is not life, so work cannot take life. We cannot let this pass. The working culture in India has to change.