Archive by Author

Happy Valentine’s Day from Goa

14 Feb

Namaste from Goa,  where I am back in residence at my usual guest house and writing this on the balcony of my room – this is my view – whilst making plans for how I’ll spend the next three weeks.

I arrived here on Saturday evening,  just in time to join the Educators’ Trust India team at a fund raising event at a local restaurant.  Some of the volunteers had taught the children a dance routine,  so they came into the restaurant and performed,  whilst we passed around the hat, sold raffle tickets and ran an auction,  with prizes such as a trip to the local monkey sanctuary or dinner for two at the restaurant.  In a moment of madness,  I bid for the chance to push Ian,  the on-site project manager into the swimming pool … he’s a big guy and it was extremely satisfying to shove him in for the price of c. £70 …

All in all,  we raised nearly £350,  which is enough to buy one of the key items on the charity’s wish list: a mobile water filter,  which they can take around to the various rural slums and use to provide fresh, clean water for the children and their families.  Drinking filthy water from polluted ponds and streams has had some truly horrific health consequences (a little girl I visited in the Panjim hospital last November has, I learned yesterday,  died of kidney failure due to bad water), so it’s great that the tourists’ generosity has led to the acquisition of something so tangible.

Later today, I’m going over to the Leading Light school in order to do some work on the website and to hand over my huge bag of gifts and donations from the UK.  Here’s some of what I brought – all in all, I arrived with 46 kgs of luggage,  of which about half  is for the charity. Again,  I’m grateful for the generosity of my friends and family back home: my mother has set up a monthly standing order for the charity and also gave me some money to buy the #1 item on the “we need it NOW” wish list – head lice lotion.  Another friend donated her Boots Advantage card points,  which I used to buy lots of bottles of hand sanitiser and Liz did loads of printing for me – small gestures but very much appreciated and they will make a world of difference to the children.  

While I’m here,  I want to interview some Goan women for Mother India and to spend some time at the Mother and Baby home and at the HIV clinic – my friends Jim and Moe have arranged for me to interview Sister Jessie,  the nun who runs it.

My taxi driver Satish has kindly invited me to his sister’s wedding next weekend,  so my dance card is filling up – and I will also make a flying visit to Palolem in south Goa (stick “Palolem beach Goa” into Google images and you’ll see why)  in order to catch up with my backpacking friend Natasha.

More next time,  when I can get online again …

By their advertising shall you know them –

11 Feb

- and this image is on billboards all over Mumbai at the moment. I was struck by the whiteness of the model’s skin (and of that of the baby) until I noticed that all models on all billboards are similarly pale – it’s obviously the desirable trend in the current Indian media.  The Indian cricket captain is presumably trousering a fat fee from Pepsi to pose with a stream of brown liquid pouring down his throat and even he looks paler than he does on TV. PhotoShop is our friend!

My interviews for Mother India have gone really well so far – there’s a small update about them over at the book site if you’re interested. And tomorrow I head to Goa to do some more interviews, scope out the book’s opening chapters and see my friends at Educators’ Trust India. They’re having a fund raiser at a local restaurant in the evening, featuring some of the children performing and dancing, which should be fun.

Guest post: Three Big Questions: Expose gender stereotypes in your business

11 Feb

This is a guest post from Christina Ioannidis, an international speaker, consultant and seasoned entrepreneur.  Christina is the author of the recently published “Your Loss: How to Win Back Your Female Talent”.  She is a thought leader on the subjects of gender-savvy leadership and talent management, employee and customer engagement, effective product development and marketing, as well as innovation and intrapreneurship.

When writing Your Loss: How To Win Back your Female Talent, we asked professional women to share their thoughts on gender stereotypes and how to retain women in business. Here are the three Big Questions we heard.

1) Do you hear ‘Is management really a woman’s thing’?

36% of the skilled, professional women we questioned in Your Loss left the corporate environment because they did not feel fulfilled in their role. Statistics of women in business make this the biggest single push factor. Are you addressing gender stereotypes within your management team and on your board of directors? Women’s management style may not be your norm, but it could just be your saving grace. Read more about nurturing female management styles in my blog post.

2) Is flexible working or working from home considered “skiving”?

The traditional gender stereotype is that women leave the corporate environment for more flexibility to juggle work with a hectic home life. The big question is how to retain women by making remote working acceptable in your corporate culture ? First, make sure everyone is fully aware that this is a real option. Then, update your communication systems and support line managers in running their teams remotely. Finally, don’t forget to evaluate how it’s going, tweak it a bit and reward good performance. Read my blog on flexible working for more extensive hint and tips.

3) Would you promote her if you heard she wanted another child?

It’s oh-so-familiar: the stereotypical professional women in her thirties who is passed over for promotion (because the male management think things will fall apart once she goes on maternity leave). Do not underestimate the benefits of having a satisfied, loyal, long-term employee who appreciates having a great job whilst still being able to pick her kids up from school.

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Read more about “Your Loss” on the Recommended Reading tab, above.

My bags are packed …

8 Feb

… I’m ready to go. I head back to Mumbai this evening and will spend a few days there,  prior to returning to Goa to write and to work with the great people at Educators’ Trust India.  I’m “officially” allowed back into India as of tomorrow (visa restrictions! Are we being punished for the days of the Raj?) and I can’t wait to be back and have my first “lime soda plain” drink.

I’m often asked – “why India?” and it’s a great question.  Here’s what I love about India:

… the people, the vibrancy, the history, the culture, the blend of old and new, the colonial and the rural, the scenery, the food.

I find difficult … the poverty, the contrast between the wealth and the poverty, certain elements of Indian behaviour (for example, they hate breaking bad news so will often lie instead …), the fact that I am dish of the day for the mosquito population, the intermittent internet access, the fact that my BlackBerry never ever works in Bangalore – the so-called Silicon Hub of India … etc.

This trip is going to be different, though.  This time, I’m working on a book – not my Great Goan Novel, but a new idea;  one about which I’m really excited.  When I was first made redundant at the end of 2009,  a lot of people asked me if I was going to write a book,  or suggested that I should.  I was offered the chance to ghost-write for a contact,  and to collaborate with someone else on their book – but,  in both cases,  I felt quite strongly that,  if I was going to work that hard on a book,  I wanted my name in a nice big font on the cover.  I also felt that one needs to have a Big Idea in order to write a book and,  at that point,  I just didn’t have my Big Idea.

But,  now I do.  The Big Idea has landed. I’m writing a book about women in India,  twenty-first century women in their many guises and the current working title is Mother India. I’ve set up a new blog site which I’ll be updating with details of the project and of the women I meet and interview,  so feel free to take a look and/or sign up for regular updates.   If you’re a film buff,  the title of Mother India may sound faintly familiar – and I reference what and why this is over at the book site itself.

I’ve already organised my first three interviews for later this week in Mumbai and have been really encouraged by the positivity with which my requests for interviews have been revceived,  and how welcoming everyone has been towards my Big Idea;  one woman commented that:

“I’m also thanking you on behalf of all Indian women for taking up a topic such as this, which is not known or understood in totality to the western world. Your project sounds wonderful and I’d be more than happy to help in any way.”

So – goodbye London, namaste Mumbai.

Men? In decline? Really?

7 Feb

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s latest blog piece is entitled “Be My Valentine” (I like what she did, there) and in it she urges the media – “enough, already” – to stop with the raft of stories equating the so called “rise” of women with the equally untrue “decline” in male fortunes.

I’m currently undertaking some research ahead of next month’s centenary of International Women’s Day and am compiling lists of amazing, game changing,  glass ceiling smashing women from around the world – please feel free to share your nominations with me, below. From Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher, Daphne Jackson, Benazir Bhutto, through to Barbara Castle and Julia Gillard – the world is very definitely a different place now to when IWD was first conceived a century ago.  But has the success that women have undoubtedly achieved really come at the expense of men?  I don’t think so and nor does Avivah:

“It is imperative that this constant pairing of ‘rising women’ and ‘falling men’ stop. Women have absolutely nothing to gain from fearful men. Neither at home, nor at work. And the reality, in my experience, is quite different.

It is true that the tectonic shift in the roles and status of women have profoundly affected couples, companies and countries. We are, I often think, at the end of a century where women have lobbied, questioned and redrawn themselves in a million myriad ways. We are at the very beginning of a century where men have begun to think and write about the impact and implications of those changes on themselves.”

Here’s the last word from Tanya Gold; as she pointed out in Grazia last week, in response to a (male) assertion that feminists are bigots who discriminate against men and who “choose” to earn less, allowing careers, finances and ambitions to fall by the wayside:

“… We want to be paid less! We want rubbish jobs! We want to be denied a voice! Watch us oppress men with our lower wages!”

I hear you, sister.

 

 

Searching for the pot of gold at the foot of the Goan rainbow

21 Jan

I haven’t written for theglasshammer for a while,  so was really delighted to be asked to contribute a piece about my time in India with charity Educators’ Trust India to their “Intrepid Woman”  series – albeit I do feel as if I’m there under false pretences on the “intrepid” stakes.

The article starts:

Goa: the smallest and the richest state in India; a former Portuguese colony, a place of beautiful golden beaches, swaying palm trees and over a million domestic and foreign tourists per year. The wealth brought by the tourists also brings an influx of economic migrants. In search of work and money, they travel to this tiny state in western India from other areas – hundreds and in some cases thousands of miles away.

I first visited Goa in 1999, have been back many times since then and have seen the volume of both tourists and of workers from other parts of India soar in the intervening years. Unsurprisingly, the Goan infrastructure is now creaking under this flood of people; from a tourist’s point of view, power cuts and water shortages are increasingly common but can be dismissed as being “part of the Indian experience.” However, what many tourists never see are the living environments of many of the migrant workers – and, more particularly, how this impacts the health and education of their children.

- and can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

This week,  I’ve been writing copy for some of the other pages on the ETI website and I had a Skype call with the team in Goa in order to get some ideas for content and to check some details and facts.  Here’s what they told me when I asked what they’d buy with certain specific cash sums:

£5                                Buys 5 pairs of flip flops to protect children’s feet from injuries and blood poisoning

£10                              Provides rice, milk and eggs for a dozen pregnant and breast feeding women

£15                              50p per day pays for a month’s medical supplies such as antibiotics, plasters, dressings, headlice treatment, cough medicine, anti-malarial tablets etc

£20                              Funds materials such as a week’s worth of petrol to drive between their projects and visit the mobile schools, take sick children to hospital and so on

£25                              Pays for one week’s rent at one of the two permanent schools

£50                              Buys a DVD player and educational DVDs

£100                            Pays for one teacher’s salary for a month.

As I say in the article,  these figures certainly put my daily latte habit (c. £50 a month!) into perspective …

Memo to employers who want to create and retain happy and engaged staff –

17 Jan

- and who talk about their work-life balance ethos, support for employee engagement and so on.

 If you are serious about (a) treating your staff as adults; (b) making it easier for them to have a work-life balance and,  indeed,  a life away from the office and (c)  you really,  truly want to engage with them and make them feel that they’re supportive of the wider organisation:

 - then consider loosening the shackles on your IT policy. 

You know,  the policy which blocks approximately two thirds of the internet, making it impossible for anyone to do anything on the net in their own time,  such as at – radical thought – lunchtime.

Most lists of handy hints and tips on how to be more organised,  as either a working parent or just as a wage slave,  with or without children,  will these days suggest that you go on-line and do stuff. 

Pay your bills,  on-line.  Order your groceries,  on-line.  Book a hair appointment – on-line. 

Great: if you can GET on-line.

Of course,  I’m not suggesting that we’re on the payroll in order to spend the day surfing around chat rooms,  porn sites and other nefarious sections of the Net.

Or even on Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or Linked-in.

No.

But equally,  there are sections of the working day (first thing in the morning,  ahead of the arrival of your colleagues,  or at lunchtime) when I think it would be valid to be able to do the odd personal thing at your computer,  given you’re sat there anyhow.  The fact that sites such as those for grocery deliveries, banking and the like are banned says to me that someone, somewhere has done a survey and made a conscious decision to block them,  along with the webmail sites,  the porn and so on.

 This to me is old-school, twentieth century,  thinking.  Firstly, it’s failing to acknowledge that,  these days,  a lot of people do live a lot of their lives on-line – and if they’re away from home, working for you,  for c. 60 hours per week if you include travelling time,  then it’s pretty difficult to do those things Monday to Friday.

Secondly, it’s not treating your staff  (especially the Gen Y crowd, who’ve never known a life without instant on-line access) as if they are the smart, skilled adults that you must have thought they were when you hired them. Instead, it’s treating them as if they’re cunning, work-shy net surfers who’d be on-line 24/7 if they only had the technical environment to make that possible.

 What you end up with too,  is possibly counter-productive.  You may think that you’re stopping the work-shy cubicle rats at your version of Veridian Dynamics from spending hours on Facebook,  but all you’re doing is creating a culture where people have their smart phones on “silent”,  do what they can on-line via apps but under their desks and where an illicitly plugged in BlackBerry, Nokia or iPhone charger is worth its weight in gold.

 Does that really spell “talent management” or “employee engagement” to you?

In the mail this weekend …

15 Jan

(c) ShotDeadintheHead

Mad Men time (or related ephemera) again … an offer to buy one of these mugs has just popped into my in-box ( available as a t-shirt too – why, hello, Peggy).

You can also get Mr Sterling, Mr Campbell (why, though?), Mr Draper,  Little Miss Betty and Little Miss Peggy immortalised in earthenware and 100% cotton.

And I received a copy of this book – Women’s Roles in Twentieth Century America – through the actual post today – together with an invitation to go along to the launch of the new Sky TV channel,  Sky Atlantic and attend a cinema based screening of their 1920s set flagship series Boardwalk Empire.

I was very excited,  as I don’t usually get to hang out at such meeja events, but, due to the PR connectivity of the TV channel and the book,  I’m somehow on the guest list as a blogger.  Fame at last.  However,  upon closer examination of the invitation (“we’d love to take you for a drink first before Prohibition kicks in …”) – I see that the meeting point is at that oh-so-glamorous venue,  Yates Wine Bar.

British readers will sense my hesitation immediately;  American readers: it’s somewhat the equivalent of holding an event in a Denny’s,  ie,  dialled down a fair way on the Glam-o-Meter.

(Unless of course that’s the point and it’s been converted into a speakeasy,  where they’re serving gin in teacups and the like).

Still,  at least I won’t have to dress up … I hope. No mention made of fancy dress required.

Watch this space … will report back –  if I can get there in time from my interim job on the other side of London.

Desperate housewives?

14 Jan

I love (actually, maybe “love” is too strong – OK, I’m “interested in”) the way that Mad Men’s Betty Draper is now being used by picture editors as visual shorthand to illustrate articles referring to, variously, housewives, stay at home mums and ladies who lunch.

(Similarly, photos of Joan now inevitably accompany an article about “curvy figures”.)

Dr. Catherine Hakim’s recently published report – Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking Behind Calls for Further Equality – which concludes that mainstream feminist thinking is defective and that the UK government should stop trying to promote it (there’s an accurate, if somewhat right wing summary of her arguments here in this Daily Telegraph article) and that women tend to marry for money rather than love – has caused a rash of newspaper reports, published from London to Sydney and (probably) all points between – and the two highlighted here both feature lovely photos of the former Mrs Draper, as does a recent article along similar lines in Grazia.

Tanya Gold’s piece in the Guardian:  

“Inequality between the sexes is not a big deal any more, a new study tells us. That is only true if you are happy for women to have less than men …”

- does at least make some fleeting Mad Men reference to the assumptions in the report, commenting that perhaps Dr Hakim’s work is:

“ … based on a weird, Mad Men themed dream she had on Boxing Day …”

Female writers across the world have decided that actually, it’s OK to want to marry for money, to not have your own career or income and to stay at home, surrounded by items from Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgwater (ironically, two women who manage to be married and have their own eponymous businesses). And of course, yes, it is fine, I suppose. But this lifestyle framework is surely only OK if there’s someone to fund it – and what happens if that someone isn’t there anymore – either through death, divorce, a change in their own or their employer’s financial circumstances?

(This rather gloomy article from 2008 suggests a potential increase in divorce due to the credit crunch, with:

“… about 80 percent of those surveyed believe that the turmoil — and lower bonus payments — will prompt more women to seek a divorce before their husbands’ wealth evaporates further.” )

Obviously, nobody goes into marriage or life as a stay at home mum thinking “one day we’ll split up or he’ll lose all his money in some huge, unprecedented global melt down and then what will happen to me?”.

But as this cautionary tale, Regrets of a stay-at- home Mom, recently published on salon.com shows, it can happen:

“Fourteen years ago, I “opted out” to focus on my family. Now I’m broke.”

(For more on the wildly radical idea that “a man is not a financial plan”, check out The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up too Much?  by Leslie Bennets on the Recommended reading tab above).

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In other news … the flyer I designed for Educators’ Trust India has now been printed up and is ready for use – if you’d like to see what they’re giving out to tourists in Goa in order to raise awareness of the issues of child poverty and of the need for literacy programmes, you can take a look and download a copy from my freelance writing site, Collaborative Lines.

Children, women, flip-flops and money

7 Jan

Happy New Year!

A friend just sent me a link to this site, wordle.net, which will generate your own word cloud for you,  based on your  choice of text (which you paste into their cloud generator window) or a URL.

Here’s what we get when I popped in www.thegenderblog.com – click on the image below for a closer look!

Wordle: A month in Goa, India

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