Tomorrow, I leave for Bangalore to participate at the Advancement of women global conference in India. I started to work on programming this conference in Nov,2008. It was just an idea at that time. To realize what would be relevant to women in India, I started to have conversations with women from all industries and from different stages of their careers.

Since I am from India, I believed that cultural barriers would be the biggest barrier to women’s success. To my surprise, this was NOT the case. (this was a pleasant surprise). What showed up was that working women in India felt inhibited because of lack of infrastructure.

Primarily, they felt limited by the lack of ‘Day Cares’ where they can leave their young children.
Secondly, they wanted to cut down on their commute time and wished for better roads.
Finally, they wished that the companies would give them flexibility to work from home. Some of them felt that many of their managers were not open to this idea.

While talking to Carol Evans, who is CEO and Founder of Working Mother Media, I mentioned to her my findings. She was kind to share that this was the exact situation in the US thirty years ago when she founded Working Mother Media here. This showed up as an opportunity to lead the change in India.

It was clear to me that some changes in public policy were needed. E.g. Make the labor laws and infrastructure more supportive of working women e.g. providing more subsidies to day care centers or some, tax credit to incentives for companies with onsite day care centers.

I am excited about putting this event together and looking forward to leaving for India for the conference tomorrow.

Here is the copy of the report : Topic Analysis for conference in India