Vivid imagery aside, it may not be the best analogy to dole out when rich kids in Porsches – very few not-so-rich kids drive Porsches – are running over people on the streets of Mumbai. But that’s the least of Sharma’s snags with similes.
The reason why the Paytm boss’ comment caught my eye was not because he said flouting regulatory rules was an ‘accident’, implying it was out of his control. Like most of you, it was his ‘daughter’ reference.
Why is your company like your daughter who’s ‘mature and fully profitable’? And then you throw an ‘entrance test’ reference in? ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ just got a new twist.
Sharma is hardly the first person to make a strange woman-related analogy for the workplace. He is very, very unlikely to be the last. Male employees and business leaders seem to say the darndest things. I have spent nearly two decades working across companies, agencies, and MNCs with men in the boardroom and sitting right outside it. But I’ve never heard strange women-related metaphors or similes bandied around so much during meetings in MNCs as they are in our desi boardrooms and offices.
I remember once thinking I really needed to get my hearing checked when a senior team leader told his team – which included women members – that one of the projects that had finally turned out to be a halfway success – was like delivering a newborn baby ‘after several stillborn deliveries’. This was either casual misogyny, or extreme gynaecology. I suspect it was both.On another occasion, another man on an international concall matter-of-factly said that he was looking forward to a female colleague going on a secondment to America the same way a father does when sending off his newlywed daughter to her husband’s home. The US team members on the concall looked more than a little bemused after hearing ‘husband’s home’ but were too scared to say anything lest it offends Indian corporate ‘cultural sensibilities’. Incidentally – and only just — the woman in question was single.Another man routinely referred to new acquisitions and new business wins for the company as being like ‘a brother finally getting a husband for his unwed sister’. This was in a room scattered with unwed women who didn’t think that getting married was the ultimate goal in their lives – not to mention, that their male siblings had to do his bit to ‘correct the situation’.
By the time you’ve swum through the corporate jargon of being asked to ‘touch base’, ‘revert soon’, ‘deep dive’, ‘circle back’, ‘be more impactful’, ‘go above and beyond’ and ‘piggyback off what X said by EoD’, the lack of nuance and savoir faire, mixed with dollops of male Messiah complex, slides off your back. Honestly, most of us are just happy that a newbie female colleague, who’s taken the fall for a team debacle, isn’t told that sometimes ‘you need to burn yourself on the pyre of the company’, or some such.
None of these comments are ever meant with malice, or to put down women. All these companies have strong gender diversity programmes and women leaders. The men think of themselves as card-carrying ‘progressives’. After all, they chose to mention ‘daughters’ and ‘mothers’, not sons and fathers. So, there – another stick in the eye of Patriarchy Pvt Ltd!