Millennial Women @ Work

This August, I teamed up with Anuradha Das Mathur, Founding Dean of the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women, to survey and write about urban Indian millennial women at the workplace for the Mint, India’s pre-eminent financial newspaper.

Our goal was to discover and document how young women are adapting and reacting to the 21st-century workplace. Is work a choice or a necessity? Are workplaces designed to empower women to fulfill their potential and succeed or do they need to be reformed? What changes should take place to allow young women to contribute their fullest potential to their jobs? What is the future of the workplace going to look like? 

As we went about asking these questions, we came across a wide range of interesting answers and attitudes, and through this ten-part series, we hope to share some of our findings and insights with you.

In our first piece, we look at how for young women, work is no longer a ‘choice’ – as it has become a way of life. Read it here!

In our second installment, we once again use our survey results to document how young women’s attitudes towards work – and in this case, childcare – are changing. For women to succeed in the workplace and attain greater gender equity, employers must begin to offer gender-neutral paid *parental* leave instead of maternity leave.

In our third article, we look at some of the shifts taking place globally and explore how workplaces and the very definition of work in the 21st century are becoming better suited to reward conventionally ‘feminine’ traits. In this transforming environment, young women are beginning to find that they do not need to alter their behaviors to succeed at the workplace and that they no longer need to adopt ‘masculine’ attitudes to be taken seriously.