siliconindia | | July 20199By letting go undue pressure and by being together, we can create a world of gender equality where everyone will have the same opportunities for education, economic participation, decision-making, and freedom from violenceeducation, to enable economic inde-pendence, to combat violence against women, and to increase participation of women at the top levels of business, academia, and politics. The #MeToo movement, India's new Companies Act, and new legislation in California require at least one woman represen-tation on public company's board of directors; women's land rights and tenure security initiative by the UN are a few examples of recent con-tributions in this field to help with women's empowerment and gen-der equality. Business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook), Marc Benioff (Chairman & CEO, Salesforce), Jeff Smith (Co-Found-er & CEO, Smule), and Arianna Huffington (Founder & CEO, Thrive Global) are coming forward and tak-ing initiatives to sponsor women to reach the top positions ­ inspiring others to do the same. As a result, there are more women than ever graduating and entering the professional world with a dream to reach the top. We have come a long way and now we are proudly repre-senting a good number of the profes-sional workforce at entry-level and middle-level management. However, there is still a considerable gender gap in power positions in the politi-cal world, and we have been stuck at about 20 percent for women at the top professional c-suites level positions for at least a decade. That makes me think - Why is our representation at the top level not increasing? What is stopping us from reaching those positions of power? What or who is holding us back? Why are many of us leaving the job force not wanting to come back? We all have different perspectives and stories to share learnings from our struggles and those of others. What worked and didn't work for us in achieving the dream of holding power positions. After listening, observing, and watching wom-en leaders who reached the top, and based on my journey, I believe we need to make some changes in how we approach our role in-dividually and as a group, and how we can gain more confidence by releasing the undue pressure that we are creating for our-selves and other women. We need to free ourselves from these unreason-able expectations of being perfect and stress to finish the marathon of women's empowerment and encour-age and empower more women to reach positions of power. We Can't Have It All Our biological clock and career clock are often set in parallel time zones. Two different, time-consuming tasks that have the prime hours during the same time. How can we cope with the dual pressure of motherhood and a career path that both demand our prime hours? Many of us have battled with this dilemma in our personal ex-perience and have also heard many women leaders sharing their journey of managing these conflicting respon-sibilities. Yet, most of us are making the same mistake of responding to this by trying to act like a superwom-an who can do it all perfectly all the time. The sprint is doable, but the marathon can break even the toughest and most capable of women. After a point, we all start feeling exhausted, tired, and dissatisfied and some of us even end-up leaving the career path altogether or start making compro-mises with our career ambitions. Ap-plying this standard of perfection to Jyoti Khadgawat
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