Being a woman is not easy. Especially if you’re one of the workaholics, married and with babies. Companies tend to not offer equivalent wages, holidays or even adequate amount of maternal leaves when asked for. It’s much worse for the ones who’re often taking business trips. And let’s not even get into the workplace gender politics. Now, nobody wants to lose out on a large chunk of women employees, do they?
So, here is some good news coming from the IBM folks. While the idea is more relevant in America, we hope India too sees the face of similar policies and practices.
IBM’s latest initiative towards its nursing mother employees is to launch a service which ships breast milk home to the babies while their mothers are on business trips.
Given how most airports don’t have breast pumps and are full of security check problems, ” where Transportation Security Administration agents have been known to confiscate breast milk”, this one feels like a breakthrough suggestion.
In IBM, women currently make up 29 % of its total workforce and 25 % of management worldwide.
Quoting Barbara Brickmeier, vice president of benefits at IBM, “As long as there is one mother who finds this beneficial, I don’t have any threshold of usage of whether we continue the program or not.”
The service is supposed to go live in September 2015. Let’s hope the tech giant’s latest policy is the first of many more to come, effective worldwide.
