Sairee Chahal - The Work Life Podcast

In order to further enhance the significance of these mind-blowing numbers, it is important to note, that only about 24% of women are in India’s workforce of which a mere 5% are at senior levels and 48% drop out of workplaces, most often due to starting a family or a caring role. 
 

Serial entrepreneur Sairee founded Sheroes (originally Fleximoms) from a very personal mission and strong conviction - that there wasn't an online space catering to women's ambitions, aspirations and needs - beyond whatever is pink in nature ... jewellery and clothes. It is not easy for women to put themselves out there on a lot of frontiers: in education, in work, leadership roles, access to finance, access to resources, she know about them all. Translating her own personal experience as an entrepreneur, professional woman and mom, she understands perfectly the self-doubt, limited resources and even scarcer help available for professional women in India - all the needs the Sheroes community members hope to receive from the site. 
 

And beyond providing mentorship, resources and also opportunities for flexible work to the women, Sairee understands that greater progress has to happen via a more systemic re-design of work and life in India. Life is not the same as it used to be, as she points out: 
 

Careers are not a ladder - they are a maze. 
 

Sheroes is a community by women, for women. It offers an eco-system of support to create a variety of options for Indian women - who are the majority of University graduates - for helping and getting advice, connecting with like-minded professionals experiencing very similar challenges and opportunities to finding flexible job opportunities, which they can do remotely. 
 

I couldn't agree more with Sairee: there hasn't been a better time to embrace diversity, break all kinds of stigmas around working mothers and professional women, and that technology is a fantastic enabler to speed up progress on this front. 
 

Work-Life integration is mission critical to tapping into all that potential of he highly skilled, highly motivated and talented women in India, who due to lack of available flexible work options drop out of the workforce or cannot find suitable roles to their experience. 
 

You can follow Sairee on Twitter, as well as watch her incredibly inspiring TedX talk here. 

This article was origianlly published on the worklife hub.