As evident from the discussion in the background section, the challenges for workers and professionals who are pregnant or parents of young and/or special needs children are both complex and multidimensional. Yet, for the purposes of simplifying the rationale for the tools in this toolkit, we found it helpful to group them into 5 categories that are distinct yet interwoven with each other. The interconnectedness of these different ‘challenge areas’ will be of consequence when trying to map them to the ‘solution areas’, discussed later in this text, and eventually to the tools themselves. The 5 ‘challenge areas’ are: Obsolescence of Skills, Emotional Stress, Childcare Needs, Lactation Needs and Medical Needs.
The relative significance of different challenges, and hence the ‘challenge areas’, will vary depending upon personal circumstances and in what stage of the parenthood process the employee is in. We have divided the child birthing/rearing process into 4 sequential stages in our conceptual framework, and defined that the process itself starts at pregnancy and ends when the child born from that pregnancy enters the education system, around 5 years old. It must be noted that the ‘challenge areas’ may not conform neatly to the described stages for everyone and in all contexts. Furthermore, the specific challenges covered under each area will also vary in relative importance for different stages.
Pregnancy, the first of our 4 stages, gives way to Maternity/Paternity Leave as the second stage after birth of the child. This is followed by the Post Maternity/Paternity Leave stage after the employee resumes working. The transition from the third to the final stage is not as sharply defined as the others, but is generally assumed to happen when the employee is back at work for a few months after their Maternity/Paternity leave.
We understand that many women struggle with issues of infertility before pregnancy and special needs children will continue requiring extraordinary levels of attention and care well beyond 5 years of age. Although we have not included these considerations in the toolkit, we advise WePOWER members to come up with their own policies regarding these circumstances and have included some relevant guidance materials in the resources section.
Emotional Stress
The birth of a child is a life changing and seminal event, and both a source of joy and anxiety for many people. Expecting parents are often worried about money, careers and the future of their children.[1] Emotional stress is so perversive that it cuts across all the four stages in our conceptual framework, although, as previously noted, the relative significance of specific challenges will change over time.
As a time of many changes, stress is a common feeling during the pregnancy stage. Expecting mothers are often dealing with the physical discomforts of pregnancy like morning sickness, fatigue, backache and constipation. Hormonal imbalances may lead to mood swings and make it more difficult to handle stress.[2] In addition, there may be anxieties about the health of the baby, childbirth, and managing time for both work and childcare after returning from maternity leave[3]. Evidence also suggests that many pregnant employees are unsure about how to clearly communicate their issues with managers.[4]
Many parents, especially mothers, will experience intense psychological stress after childbirth. This experience so common that it has a name, baby blues, and is estimated to affect 30 to 80% of all postpartum mothers[5]. More severe conditions like postpartum depression and postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder also affects significant proportions of women. Parents often find themselves worried about the baby’s health, the post-pregnancy body, finances and returning to the workplace.
Returning to work after maternity/paternity leave comes with its own set of challenges. Having been out of the flow for weeks or months and recently experienced a life changing event, employees will most likely return with new priorities and concerns. They may be suffering sleep deprivation, or might be feeling guilty about having to leave their newborn and may have to rebuild connections with their fellow team members. Returning employees can also experience discrimination from their peers and managers, which, regardless of the intention, may hinder their professional growth.[6]
It should be noted that men can also suffer significant emotional stress as they may be unwilling/afraid to admit any issues, or even to take leave, since that may be perceived as "unmanly". The issues of men should also be considered because just focusing on women continue to reinforce the notion that children are all their responsibility.
Even after readjustment at the workplace, many working parents will struggle with work/life balance. They often must blend work and life hours together to create a cycle that works for their profession and families. Working parents need to arrange for childcare, handle unexpected situations like injuries and sickness, manage finances and maintain productivity at work. Any one of these can easily be a source of emotional stress.
Obsolescence of Skills
The energy sector is changing rapidly across the world and in South Asia. Given the scale of this transformation, utility jobs and the competencies required to perform them are changing at a rapid pace—whether the positions are technical or non-technical. New management practices, digitalization, and automation have revolutionized even seemingly straightforward functions like accounting and payroll management.[7]
Utility employees are therefore under unprecedented pressure to continually reinvent themselves and acquire relevant skills. While this is hard enough to do when working full time, it is particularly difficult for employees who have been away on extended maternity/paternity leave. Employees returning after their maternity/paternity leave may find that their skills are no longer up-to-date, or the computer system they were familiar with has been upgraded. They will have missed out on any trainings conducted during their leave and may even find themselves reassigned to different teams if any reorganization work had happened during that time.[8]
Childcare Needs
One of the biggest challenges for all parents, working or otherwise, is managing the care of their children.[9] Children, particularly very young ones, need constant attention to ensure physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. They are a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week responsibility.
As a result of changing family structures in South Asia[10], many parents are now also unable to rely on the multigenerational ‘joint family’ for shouldering some of the childcare responsibilities. Moreover, even when living in a joint family, many members now have work and other responsibilities, thus requiring that parents find childcare outside the home. The problem of managing childcare is even greater for single parents. Cost and convenience are key considerations along with the quality of the care itself.
The inability to find or afford childcare services is one of the primary reasons for parents, and especially mothers, to leave the workforce and take on unpaid caregiving responsibilities, as noted in the background section[11]. Expanding mothers’ access to childcare is vital, as the share of mothers who are the sole or primary breadwinners in their homes is also on the rise. Lack of access to childcare that is affordable, convenient and high quality is making it difficult for many mothers to stay in the workforce. Furthermore, parents from disadvantaged and marginalized groups disproportionately face barriers to accessing childcare.[12] Therefore, providing access to childcare, regardless of whether the employee is a mother or a father, is important.
Lactation Needs
Several studies have strongly connected breastfeeding to immediate and long-term health benefits for both infants and mothers.[13] The World Health Organization and UNICEF recommend that children be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life. From the age of 6 months, it has been recommended that children should begin eating safe and adequate complementary foods while continuing to breastfeed for up to 2 years and beyond. Yet workplace barriers across the world contribute to low rates of breastfeeding. Few organizations in South Asia have policies ensuring that women have the time, space and freedom to express milk or breastfeed in the workplace. [14]
Lactating mothers must breastfeed their infants or express milk regularly to maintain an adequate supply of milk for effective breastfeeding. The lack of designated, private and sanitary facilities along with proper access to refrigeration have often come up as major barriers to continued breastfeeding after resumption of work. This has led to many instances of premature weaning or mothers dropping out of the workforce entirely. Additionally, there may also be issues of discrimination by managers and peers against mothers who wish to breastfeed in the workplace, with women who take time to pump being marked down on performance evaluations.
Medical Needs
Medical Needs is another cross cutting ‘challenge area’ that is relevant in all the 4 stages of our conceptual framework and refers to the medical care needs of both the parent and the child. Like the emotional stress challenge area, the relative significance of specific challenges within medical needs will also vary by the stage being considered.
In the pregnancy stage, regular visits to the healthcare provider are highly recommended to ensure the health of both the mother and the baby. Ideally, the visits should begin even before the pregnancy, and as early as a couple begins planning a child. Frequent prenatal visits can allow parents to follow the progress of the baby’s development, get expert advice on nutrition and self-care, ask questions and address concerns related to pregnancy, birth, or parenthood. They can also uncover rare disorders in mothers that can become severe during pregnancy and help parents anticipate the risks of having a baby with a hereditary disorder.
Postpartum, women and infants can both experience a wide range of problems, some more serious than others. Mothers may have to deal with infections, bleeding, pain, breast problems and depression, as highlighted in the emotional stress problem area. Babies and infants can also suffer from a myriad of common ailments. Continued visits to the healthcare provider are therefore an important part of postpartum recovery for the mother and the overall health of the infant.
For most children, mild illnesses and light injuries are part and parcel of growing up process. As such, even healthy parents and children will require access to medical services at some level in the fourth stage of our conceptual framework. But the needs of some families, for example, those with members that have chronic health problems or are raising a special needs child, will be much greater.
Although most women can continue working fulltime during pregnancy even up to the due date, some may need medical intervention, and many may need some kind of accommodation to ameliorate physical discomforts like nausea, fatigue, frequent urination, and body aches.5 The safety of the job during pregnancy also depends on what the job itself entails, the health status of the employee and any complications she may have with her pregnancy.
Blog » Challenges
Challenges
As evident from the discussion in the background section, the challenges for workers and professionals who are pregnant or parents of young and/or special needs children are both complex and multidimensional. Yet, for the purposes of simplifying the rationale for the tools in this toolkit, we found it helpful to group them into 5 categories that are distinct yet interwoven with each other. The interconnectedness of these different ‘challenge areas’ will be of consequence when trying to map them to the ‘solution areas’, discussed later in this text, and eventually to the tools themselves. The 5 ‘challenge areas’ are: Obsolescence of Skills, Emotional Stress, Childcare Needs, Lactation Needs and Medical Needs.
The relative significance of different challenges, and hence the ‘challenge areas’, will vary depending upon personal circumstances and in what stage of the parenthood process the employee is in. We have divided the child birthing/rearing process into 4 sequential stages in our conceptual framework, and defined that the process itself starts at pregnancy and ends when the child born from that pregnancy enters the education system, around 5 years old. It must be noted that the ‘challenge areas’ may not conform neatly to the described stages for everyone and in all contexts. Furthermore, the specific challenges covered under each area will also vary in relative importance for different stages.
Pregnancy, the first of our 4 stages, gives way to Maternity/Paternity Leave as the second stage after birth of the child. This is followed by the Post Maternity/Paternity Leave stage after the employee resumes working. The transition from the third to the final stage is not as sharply defined as the others, but is generally assumed to happen when the employee is back at work for a few months after their Maternity/Paternity leave.
We understand that many women struggle with issues of infertility before pregnancy and special needs children will continue requiring extraordinary levels of attention and care well beyond 5 years of age. Although we have not included these considerations in the toolkit, we advise WePOWER members to come up with their own policies regarding these circumstances and have included some relevant guidance materials in the resources section.
Emotional Stress
The birth of a child is a life changing and seminal event, and both a source of joy and anxiety for many people. Expecting parents are often worried about money, careers and the future of their children.[1] Emotional stress is so perversive that it cuts across all the four stages in our conceptual framework, although, as previously noted, the relative significance of specific challenges will change over time.
As a time of many changes, stress is a common feeling during the pregnancy stage. Expecting mothers are often dealing with the physical discomforts of pregnancy like morning sickness, fatigue, backache and constipation. Hormonal imbalances may lead to mood swings and make it more difficult to handle stress.[2] In addition, there may be anxieties about the health of the baby, childbirth, and managing time for both work and childcare after returning from maternity leave[3]. Evidence also suggests that many pregnant employees are unsure about how to clearly communicate their issues with managers.[4]
Many parents, especially mothers, will experience intense psychological stress after childbirth. This experience so common that it has a name, baby blues, and is estimated to affect 30 to 80% of all postpartum mothers[5]. More severe conditions like postpartum depression and postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder also affects significant proportions of women. Parents often find themselves worried about the baby’s health, the post-pregnancy body, finances and returning to the workplace.
Returning to work after maternity/paternity leave comes with its own set of challenges. Having been out of the flow for weeks or months and recently experienced a life changing event, employees will most likely return with new priorities and concerns. They may be suffering sleep deprivation, or might be feeling guilty about having to leave their newborn and may have to rebuild connections with their fellow team members. Returning employees can also experience discrimination from their peers and managers, which, regardless of the intention, may hinder their professional growth.[6]
It should be noted that men can also suffer significant emotional stress as they may be unwilling/afraid to admit any issues, or even to take leave, since that may be perceived as "unmanly". The issues of men should also be considered because just focusing on women continue to reinforce the notion that children are all their responsibility.
Even after readjustment at the workplace, many working parents will struggle with work/life balance. They often must blend work and life hours together to create a cycle that works for their profession and families. Working parents need to arrange for childcare, handle unexpected situations like injuries and sickness, manage finances and maintain productivity at work. Any one of these can easily be a source of emotional stress.
Obsolescence of Skills
The energy sector is changing rapidly across the world and in South Asia. Given the scale of this transformation, utility jobs and the competencies required to perform them are changing at a rapid pace—whether the positions are technical or non-technical. New management practices, digitalization, and automation have revolutionized even seemingly straightforward functions like accounting and payroll management.[7]
Utility employees are therefore under unprecedented pressure to continually reinvent themselves and acquire relevant skills. While this is hard enough to do when working full time, it is particularly difficult for employees who have been away on extended maternity/paternity leave. Employees returning after their maternity/paternity leave may find that their skills are no longer up-to-date, or the computer system they were familiar with has been upgraded. They will have missed out on any trainings conducted during their leave and may even find themselves reassigned to different teams if any reorganization work had happened during that time.[8]
Childcare Needs
One of the biggest challenges for all parents, working or otherwise, is managing the care of their children.[9] Children, particularly very young ones, need constant attention to ensure physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. They are a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week responsibility.
As a result of changing family structures in South Asia[10], many parents are now also unable to rely on the multigenerational ‘joint family’ for shouldering some of the childcare responsibilities. Moreover, even when living in a joint family, many members now have work and other responsibilities, thus requiring that parents find childcare outside the home. The problem of managing childcare is even greater for single parents. Cost and convenience are key considerations along with the quality of the care itself.
The inability to find or afford childcare services is one of the primary reasons for parents, and especially mothers, to leave the workforce and take on unpaid caregiving responsibilities, as noted in the background section[11]. Expanding mothers’ access to childcare is vital, as the share of mothers who are the sole or primary breadwinners in their homes is also on the rise. Lack of access to childcare that is affordable, convenient and high quality is making it difficult for many mothers to stay in the workforce. Furthermore, parents from disadvantaged and marginalized groups disproportionately face barriers to accessing childcare.[12] Therefore, providing access to childcare, regardless of whether the employee is a mother or a father, is important.
Lactation Needs
Several studies have strongly connected breastfeeding to immediate and long-term health benefits for both infants and mothers.[13] The World Health Organization and UNICEF recommend that children be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life. From the age of 6 months, it has been recommended that children should begin eating safe and adequate complementary foods while continuing to breastfeed for up to 2 years and beyond. Yet workplace barriers across the world contribute to low rates of breastfeeding. Few organizations in South Asia have policies ensuring that women have the time, space and freedom to express milk or breastfeed in the workplace. [14]
Lactating mothers must breastfeed their infants or express milk regularly to maintain an adequate supply of milk for effective breastfeeding. The lack of designated, private and sanitary facilities along with proper access to refrigeration have often come up as major barriers to continued breastfeeding after resumption of work. This has led to many instances of premature weaning or mothers dropping out of the workforce entirely. Additionally, there may also be issues of discrimination by managers and peers against mothers who wish to breastfeed in the workplace, with women who take time to pump being marked down on performance evaluations.
Medical Needs
Medical Needs is another cross cutting ‘challenge area’ that is relevant in all the 4 stages of our conceptual framework and refers to the medical care needs of both the parent and the child. Like the emotional stress challenge area, the relative significance of specific challenges within medical needs will also vary by the stage being considered.
In the pregnancy stage, regular visits to the healthcare provider are highly recommended to ensure the health of both the mother and the baby. Ideally, the visits should begin even before the pregnancy, and as early as a couple begins planning a child. Frequent prenatal visits can allow parents to follow the progress of the baby’s development, get expert advice on nutrition and self-care, ask questions and address concerns related to pregnancy, birth, or parenthood. They can also uncover rare disorders in mothers that can become severe during pregnancy and help parents anticipate the risks of having a baby with a hereditary disorder.
Postpartum, women and infants can both experience a wide range of problems, some more serious than others. Mothers may have to deal with infections, bleeding, pain, breast problems and depression, as highlighted in the emotional stress problem area. Babies and infants can also suffer from a myriad of common ailments. Continued visits to the healthcare provider are therefore an important part of postpartum recovery for the mother and the overall health of the infant.
For most children, mild illnesses and light injuries are part and parcel of growing up process. As such, even healthy parents and children will require access to medical services at some level in the fourth stage of our conceptual framework. But the needs of some families, for example, those with members that have chronic health problems or are raising a special needs child, will be much greater.
Although most women can continue working fulltime during pregnancy even up to the due date, some may need medical intervention, and many may need some kind of accommodation to ameliorate physical discomforts like nausea, fatigue, frequent urination, and body aches.5 The safety of the job during pregnancy also depends on what the job itself entails, the health status of the employee and any complications she may have with her pregnancy.
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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/parenting/parents-money-stress.html
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health/mood-swings-in-women
[3] https://www.tommys.org/pregnancy-information/giving-birth/labour-and-birth-faqs/it-normal-be-so-worried-about-giving-birth
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/article/how-to-tell-boss-youre-pregnant.html
[5] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/perinatal-depression/
[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hvmacarthur/2020/04/29/parental-discrimination-what-are-the-legal-implications-companies-should-be-considering-during-and-after-covid-19/?sh=688f1ad246e0
[7] https://www.crdfglobal.org/insights/examining-energy-sector-best-practices-us-and-japan
[8] https://hbr.org/2019/08/how-to-return-to-work-after-taking-parental-leave#:~:text=Returning%20to%20work%20after%20parental%20leave%20is%20a%20process.,from%20other%20parents%20at%20work.
[9] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2019/03/28/467488/child-care-crisis-keeping-women-workforce/
[10] https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/family/Publications/mtquah.pdf
[11] https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/women-left-behind-indias-falling-female-labor-participation/
[12] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2019.1689922
[13] https://blogs.worldbank.org/health/breastfeeding-smart-investment-reaching-sustainable-development-goals
[14] https://www.epw.in/engage/article/no-room-breastfeeding-mothers-india