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Pitfalls and Trip Wires

When Subha Barry was the head of global diversity for Merrill Lynch, she noticed a curious phenomenon among career women in India. “You'd have women with the highest of qualifications, the most incredible talents, and yet, while in appearance and intellect and abilities at work they can hold their own with the best of Western women, you would find them doing surprising things, like saying, ‘I had a baby. I need to stop working and go home.’” Barry adds, I'm not talking one or two. I'm talking droves.”

Child care itself wasn't the primary issue. Although one of the most common career killers for women in the United States and Western Europe, it is a less serious problem for their counterparts in emerging markets. Instead, says Barry, who is herself Indian, it was being used as an excuse that masked the symptoms of a much more pernicious issue: family and social pressures pile on to women when they marry and ratchet up after they have children, and become almost crushing as their parents and in-laws age.

These family-rooted “pulls,” together with cultural and social “pushes,” can sabotage a woman's career aspirations, derailing her ambition and causing her to languish in a dead-end job or leave the workforce entirely. Subtle but intense, these pressures are so deeply and broadly woven into each culture's everyday fabric as to be almost invisible to an outsider. Yet unless multinational corporations understand these forces, they will never recognize the real reasons behind a high-performing woman's decision to drop out—or be able to craft solutions to keep her.