Salute Every Working Woman, Anand Mahindra Says on Twitter

Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra Group.

(Photo: Reuters)

Billionaire Anand Mahindra, who chairs the Mahindra & Mahindra conglomerate acknowledged the struggles faced by working women.

Women are often paid less than their male counterparts and on top of it, many of them additionally take care of household chores. It is telling that PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi had recalled in a Business Insider interview that despite presiding over the board of directors at one of the biggest beverage companies in the world, she still had to buy milk for her family.

The expectation to manage home affairs and work has long been considered by feminists to be a bane, who call it a patriarchal capitalist conspiracy to build businesses/nation’s economy over unpaid labour. 

In January 2019 this year, a report by Oxfam acknowledged that the unpaid work done by women all over the world is worth $10 trillion a year, about 43 times the annual turnover of Apple.

In India, unpaid labour done by women in managing their homes and children is worth 3.1 percent of the country's GDP, the report said.

You might think that nowadays, men help at home too. But sample this: while women spend 312 minutes per day in urban areas doing unpaid work, men spend only 29 minutes! QED, that if women too got the liberty to expend equal energy at work, and didn’t have to juggle between the duties of both home and office, more number of them could also become billionaires.