A perspective for all genders to reflect on as individuals
The blue light of the laptop screen illuminated Riya Sen’s face as she unmuted herself for the fourth Teams’ meeting of the day. From her apartment in Mumbai, she seamlessly presented quarterly product roadmap and its strategies to colleagues scattered across remote locations. As the meeting concluded, a notification from her son’s teacher appeared on her phone — an urgent request for a parent-teacher discussion about his upcoming science project.
Through the partially open kitchen door, she could hear her household help, Rekha, asking for the meal plan of the day. Riya had to plan for her son’s educational guidance, meal plan every single day, ensure that the kitchen items are filled in before they run out, and the mental load of orchestrating tomorrow’s logistics still rested squarely on her shoulders. Despite the support system she had carefully assembled, there remained a universe of invisible responsibilities that no amount of outsourcing could address.
For a moment, Riya paused, feeling that familiar wave, where executive decisions, maternal involvement, and mental coordination collided in a silent storm that her corporate dashboard of accomplishments would never reflect.
The Invisible Marathon
Stories like Riya’s represent the new normal for millions of women in the corporate sector who navigate the blurred boundaries of remote work while balancing traditional expectations. As International Women’s Day approaches, these narratives deserve recognition for what they truly embody — extraordinary resilience within evolving circumstances.
Consider Falguni Nayar, who left her position as Managing Director at Kotak Mahindra Capital Company to found Nykaa at age 50. “Many questioned why I would leave a prestigious banking career to enter e-commerce — a field dominated by younger entrepreneurs and predominantly male leadership,” Nayar has shared in interviews. Yet she transformed that skepticism into motivation, building a company valued at over $13 billion when it went public, making her one of India’s wealthiest self-made women entrepreneurs.
Or take Indra Nooyi, former PepsiCo CEO, who famously described receiving news of her promotion to CEO only to have her mother remind her to pick up milk on the way home — a perfect encapsulation of the dual expectations women navigates. “I’ve never had a day when I didn’t question whether I was short-changing my family or my company,” Nooyi has shared. Yet under her leadership, PepsiCo’s sales grew by 80%, while she simultaneously championed environmental sustainability and healthier product options.
The Mental Health Equation
What these public narratives often omit is the mental health toll exacted by constant code-switching between professional authority and societal expectations of nurturing femininity. Dr. Emily Anhalt, clinical psychologist and co-founder of Coa, a mental health gym, points to what she calls “emotional taxation” — the additional mental load women carry in professional settings.
“Women in corporate environments often experience higher rates of burnout not just from workload, but from the constant calculation required to appear confident but not aggressive, friendly but not too casual, ambitious but not threatening,” Dr. Anhalt explains. “This perpetual adjustment is cognitively exhausting.”
Research from the Indian Association of Clinical Psychologists confirms this reality, reporting that working women in India show 38% higher stress indicators than their male counterparts. For women in remote work arrangements, these numbers have increased post-pandemic, with 72% reporting difficulties in establishing work-life boundaries when home becomes office.
The problems are distinguished globally. The statistics bear this out. A McKinsey and LeanIn.org report found that 42% of women in corporate America have felt burned out, compared to 35% of men. For women of color, these numbers climb even higher, with 86% reporting heightened stress levels compared to pre-pandemic figures.
Vani Kola, founder of Kalaari Capital, has spoken openly about her mental health journey as a woman venture capitalist in India. “There were periods where I felt completely overwhelmed. What helped was acknowledging my limitations and creating systems that distributed responsibilities,” Kola shared at a recent women’s leadership summit. “In Indian culture, asking for help sometimes feels like admitting failure — but I’ve learned it’s actually a strategic strength.”
The emotion remains the same worldwide for most women. Ursula Burns, who made history as the first Black woman to serve as CEO of a Fortune 500 company (Xerox) had quoted in an interview, “I learned to be unapologetic about asking for help, both at work and at home.”
Pathways to Resilience
Vandana Luthra, founder of VLCC, demonstrates another approach to navigating these challenges. After facing resistance in establishing her wellness business, she not only created a successful company but intentionally developed workplace policies supporting women’s holistic wellbeing.
“I built VLCC with an understanding of the unique pressures Indian women face,” Luthra has stated. The company offers flexible schedules accommodating family obligations, mental health support, and leadership development specifically designed for women balancing multiple life roles. When asked about her management philosophy, Luthra emphasizes that respecting employees’ whole lives creates more sustainable productivity than demanding artificial separation between personal and professional identities.
For many Indian women, community has proven essential to mental wellness. Sairee Chahal, founder of SHEROES, created a women-only social platform during a time when women were seeking both professional connections and personal support. “Indian women were telling me they needed safe spaces to discuss everything from career advancement to managing in-laws’ expectations,” Chahal explains. “Creating digital communities where women could share both struggles and strategies became a form of collective resilience.”
What Society Must Offer
The question becomes: what systemic changes would better support Indian women in corporate roles? The answers come directly from women who’ve navigated these complexities –
- Structural Flexibility Without Penalty: When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg lost her husband suddenly, she gained new perspective on workplace policies. “I realized how many of our workplaces are set up for people with partners who manage life’s emergencies,” she later wrote, implementing stronger bereavement and family leave policies at the company
- Mental Health Infrastructure: Corporates can take a more personalized approach to mental health by creating a culture of empathetic leadership and accountability at the managerial level. Implement anonymous employee feedback systems where team members can rate their managers on empathy, work-life balance, and supportiveness. Combine it with data-driven insights like workload distribution, attrition rates, and team engagement levels, to avoid misuse of the feedback. This helps identify toxic leadership early. Include employee well-being metrics in performance appraisals of managers. If a team has high burnout, attrition, or excessive leave denials, it should trigger a leadership review. Employees should have direct, safe channels (e.g., an internal representative, HR, or a mental health advocate) to report unfair treatment, or denial of necessary time off.
- Community Care Models: Psychiatrist Dr. Achal Bhagat emphasizes that individual self-care isn’t sufficient: “We need community-based support systems that recognize the collectivist nature of our society while creating space for women’s individual aspirations.” This might look like elder care support, emergency childcare solutions, or professional networks that provide practical support beyond networking opportunities.
- Recalibrated Success Metrics: Arundhati Bhattacharya, former Chairperson of State Bank of India, has advocated for evaluating performance based on impact rather than hours logged or physical presence. “When we measure contribution instead of facetime, we create space for different life circumstances,” Bhattacharya explains — a philosophy particularly beneficial for women juggling household management alongside professional responsibilities, though the ideas are not limited to any gender.
A New Dawn in Digital Workspaces
As another International Women’s Day approaches, the landscape for women in corporate roles continues evolving across diverse family structures and work arrangements.
At 7:00 PM, Riya Sen finally shut her laptop. She thanked Rekha, her cook, before heading out, appreciative of the support that kept her professional life running, yet fully aware of the responsibilities that remained solely hers. Her son needed help with his science project. Her elderly parents had called twice about their upcoming doctor’s appointment. Even her own mental advice to carve out fifteen minutes a day for mindfulness had turned into yet another task on her ever-growing mental checklist.
The modern professional woman’s story isn’t singular — it spans single mothers navigating childcare between client calls, women commuting to offices while managing household coordination remotely, women entrepreneurs balancing investor meetings with family obligations, and countless others crafting unique solutions to universal challenges. Each crafts unique solutions to universal challenges, yet these struggles are often judged through the lens of their earnings. But whether they earn more or less, one truth remains — independence isn’t a privilege of gender or income, it’s a necessity for all to thrive freely.
What unites these diverse narratives isn’t the perfect delegation of tasks, but rather the sophisticated mental choreography required to hold it all together — regardless of whether one works from home or office, with household help or without, in a joint family or independently.
As she prepared for the next day, Riya reflected that her journey wasn’t about achieving perfect balance or flawless outsourcing of responsibilities. It was about building resilience within the reality that some aspects of life would always require her personal attention, discernment, and presence — no matter how many support systems she established.
Each time she advocated for more inclusive work policies, each time she modelled healthy boundaries for her son, each time she connected another woman with opportunities or shared honestly about her own struggles, she was quietly reshaping expectations for the generations that would follow.
The stories of women across the corporate landscape reveal that they aren’t succeeding despite these multidimensional challenges. They’re often succeeding because these challenges have forged in them extraordinary capacities for strategic thinking, efficient execution, and empathetic leadership, qualities increasingly valued in a complex global marketplace.
Cheers to the women who balance, break barriers, and build futures —
Happy International Women’s Day to all the incredible women who smile through challenges, rise after every fall, embrace every little wins, and keep moving forward with strength and grace! 💖😊
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