Can organisations consider transferring a part of the salary of their employees to their partners, family members, or anyone at home, who makes it possible for the employees to put in his or her hard work?
The world has run long enough with the assumption that an employer pays its employees their salary, and it's the responsibility of the employee to share the benefits with his/her family members. Clearly, had this been a sufficient mechanism for all benefits to trickle down equitably, the whole gender discrimination issue wouldn't have arisen. The fact is that the person who has a direct access to the finances has an upper hand in the outside world in various ways. This advantage plays out very distinctly over a long period.
Personally, having been a family man for a decade and a half, it's quite clear to me that neither of us -- my wife and I -- would have been able to flourish in our professional craft without the other stepping up to help at every step. Unfortunately, this invaluable help gets a fairly sad compensation as a mention in the thesis acknowledgement or as a 'thank you' in an award ceremony, however sincerely and emotionally spelt. We need to make the compensation more explicit.
There could be objections to the above idea that a spouse's devotion or a parent's love are invaluable and thinking of compensating them in financial terms is like devaluing them. I get that, and I don't want to be dismissive about it outright. However, undeniably, the current system has led to a long-term drift and needs some correction.
Also, this idea wouldn't directly correct many other issues, for example, the fact that some people will never get an opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities in certain fields of endeavour due to this arrangement of division of labour. But, if we as a society take the task of estimating the financial value of handling a home and family, the issue of one feeling unrewarded and unacknowledged for his/her effort would be reduced to some extent, hopefully. It is likely that, in turn, everyone -- regardless of gender -- would feel motivated to contribute to domestic duties in the same way as to professional ones.
There's a trend to turn our workplaces into gender equitable spaces. This is a very good thing and should continue and strengthen by all means. But a dual force should also be created wherein men feel more encouraged to participate in managing home and family. It's definitely done in some of the developed economies, and it works. For example, some of the European countries like Sweden give paternity leave equal to the maternity leave, and that too a lot of it. This shows that the society there acknowledges the importance of nursing and raising a child, invests on it as a society and encourages men and women to participate equally in it.
A couple of points to tie up a few loose ends. Firstly, though I am thinking and writing about this subject around Women's Day, the matter is not about upliftment of women, or gender fairness. It's about fairness in general, which is gender/caste/race/class neutral virtue. This includes the interests of parents, caretakers and others who stand guard at home while a person goes out into the professional battlefield to earn bread and accolades. In the same vein, this thought has nothing to do with feminism, which is a sexist term in my opinion. Thinking like an ethical human being is an age-old idea, though put to use to a miserably insufficient extent. If feminism has done anything to help anyone do that, there're also evidence that it has brought up a generation of women (and men) who have misplaced notions of being knowledgeable about this issue and use it only to further strengthen their own privileges.
If our society considers itself a developed one, it should develop mechanisms of estimating the (economic) value of all contributions to the society; and, if possible, create channels through which credits and rewards flow to the people and places where they are due. I know, this may be a bit out of the way the world works. But to get important results, we should consider making fundamental/radical changes.
