What's the real story here?

I feel like I live in a world where nuance is dead. Everyone seems to busy taking positions on everything – including me – that sometimes we forget all about reasoned debate, or about actually arming ourselves with all the facts. Take for instance the recent decision by apple and facebook to pay for female employees who choose to freeze their eggs. Predictably, everyone including me reacted with disbelief and mutters about how companies thought the best way to get employee loyalty was to pay for them to put off critical life moments.

However when I thought about it a little more, I realized that I don’t know whether this is over and above fair or generous parental/ maternity-paternity leave policies. Possibly it is, in which case this is an additional move targeted at helping employees find the way that works best for them. Not everyone wants to have a baby in their 20s and 30s, and if some people want to freeze their eggs and wait for the right timing, and the company is willing to pay for it, great!

My sister’s firm in the US, for example, has a health insurance policy that pays for employees who want a sex change operation. Now does this policy mean that the company is encouraging everyone to change from he to she or vice versa? Of course not. But if an employee so wishes, the company is willing to help him or her out. Which is a great HR policy.


My issue with apple and facebook’s new policy would be if this were in lieu of good parental leave policies, in which case these companies are clearly taking a misguided shot at what they think will best motivate talented women to stay on. As of now I don’t know – maybe in the interests of good PR, these companies should make that public knowledge?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Violence against women awareness month

Image
As part of this initiative, I want to speak about the story of someone I used to be close to. I grew up with her, thought she was the coolest ever. She was always wonderful to my sister and I and we loved to hang out together every summer. When she got married, I was 18 and I thought she was one of the most beautiful brides I had ever seen. She went off to the US of A with her Prince Charming, the kannadiga version of the fairy tale, off to her fairy tale life, or so I thought. Her mother-in-law had some problems with the fairy tale, it turned out. Having lost her husband at a young age, she bitterly resented her daughter-in-law's 'happy married life'. Every time she went out to visit them, she managed to inject a dose of venom into their married life. The one time I visited while the mother-in-law was also staying with them I saw some amazingly bitter fights between the MIl and DIL, instigated by the MIL over imagined slights and'misdemeanors' by the DIL who was to...
Read more

Winter in Delhi

One of the reasons that I love living in Delhi - all right, NCR - despite all its many shortcomings and hassles is the glorious change of seasons. I am a person who likes and revels in change - if things stay the same for too long, I get restless. I'd hate to live in a place where the weather is the same, so you don't know if you're in March or May. Delhi with its four definite seasons and a different mood for every month just suits me. In the winter, Delhi is a different city to the dun-coloured, dust-ridden one it is in the summer. You wake up to an intensely cold morning, and despite having gotten a good nine hours of sleep, it feels like you just went to bed. You burrow into your many layers of thick razais some more, wanting to snatch yet another twenty winks. It's gray outside and so foggy you can barely see the ship building which in summer is like the lighthouse marker to your home. You can see the fluffy angora fog sitting on its haunches on your terrace as you...
Read more

Is marriage still an institution?

Image
Over the last few years, even back here in India which one would consider more conservative than the West in the area of marriage, one hears so many stories about marriages breaking up, people having affairs, people leaving their spouses after 12 or 20 years of marriage...Everyone I know knows at least 5 marriages in trouble, and it's something that's distressing and scary for all of us married people. Most of us think we're in happy marriages and yet you never know what's around the corner. A friend of mine made a highly percipient remark some time back. She said, "I always thought my marriage was special. But suddenly I have realised that it isn't, that it is the same as any other marriage." It's true. Most of us who consider ourselves happily married think that we have something special, that we know a secret other couples don't know. And it's a highly dangerous misconception to labour under. I was thinking back about the time when marriage ...
Read more