As we sat for lunch, six women stuffed together on a table of four, the CFO and CEO walked in from their Friday prayers smiling at our uncontrollable laughter – the result of an unfiltered conversation that shouldn’t be repeated. They joined our table while we finished up the customary corporate staple Friday Biryani and our raw discussion.

Walking back to our spaces, my CFO smilingly commented, ‘the women here are different… they are… themselves’. I nodded knowingly, ‘Yes, because they feel safe’.

While I had responded without thought, my reply hurled me into a throwback spiral of my own professional journey. The challenges I had faced at several points made it a herculean task to celebrate, enjoy, and balance my personal milestones along with my professional ones often forcing me to hide my personal struggles to appear more ‘professional’.

What is safety in the corporate context after all? And why is it important? Strictly speaking, ‘Psychological safety is the absence of interpersonal fear. Feeling psychologically safe allows people to perform their best at home, school, and work1. While the term was coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson in 1999 as a building block of high-performance teams, it has since been acknowledged as a basic human need to survive, contribute to a community, and achieve self-actualization. I would go out on a limb however to say that psychological safety isn’t engendered by just a space where people feel encouraged to share creative ideas without fear of personal judgment, rather where they feel safe to display and celebrate all their identities.

I often come across posts on LinkedIn, decrying fellow LinkedIn members’ personal posts – ‘This is a professional platform!’ they claim, ‘There is no place for personal posts on a professional platform!’. But when did we cut our lives so cleanly into ‘personal’ and ‘professional’? Do our personal lives not infringe upon our professional spaces? Do our professional experiences and exposures not spill into our personal lives? Why then do we demarcate? Perhaps this is a patriarchal construct – conscious or unconscious. Just as women are habitually relegated to the roles of homemakers, nurturers, and other fancy words that mean the same; stay-at-home, unnoticed labour. Men similarly are the bread ‘winners’; their jobs are serious. They are not to be disturbed by trivial things like school pick-and-drop, children’s illnesses and what to cook for dinner; making it so much easier to live within these clean lines of ‘personal’ and ‘professional’. It is women then who worry about ‘balance’ and are thus often forced, by societal expectations and/or their own resulting ‘mom-guilt’, to ‘take a break’.

A break from what I ask. A break from financial independence, professional growth and let’s be honest, often, a break from nurturing themselves.

IT IS WOMEN THEN WHO WORRY ABOUT ‘BALANCE’ AND ARE THUS OFTEN FORCED, BY SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS AND/OR THEIR OWN RESULTING ‘MOM-GUILT’, TO ‘TAKE A BREAK’.

After all life is not an either-or, it is rather a Venn diagram of sorts where our professional spheres intersect with our personal ones – the happy spot where we can be everything we are, in all our roles and capacities, where we can celebrate all our identities to the fullest. I was hell-bent then when I returned from my 4-year break, to forge equitable eco-systems at work, where men and women don’t need to demarcate but to integrate and truly live their journeys.

They say we are a sum of our experiences and as a 30 something with three kids under 10, all I craved was flexibility when I re-entered the corporate workspace in a startup of highly-driven, workaholic, 20 somethings. The first order of business then was to make the corporate workspace more accessible for women by introducing the flexible work policy. One of the first initiatives I always take at the workspace are perhaps the most basic ones – from separate areas for women to pray and rest, to sanitary napkin dispensers, and heating pads for that time of the month.

While diversity is inviting someone to the party, and inclusion is inviting them to dance, equity is teaching them the steps first. Inevitably then, to truly make women feel welcomed and valued at the workplace, we need to meet them half-way or more. The key is opening conversations to include traditionally taboo topics that ‘coincidentally’ relegate women into silent struggles. Case in point: the introduction of the Period Leave. In November 2021, Swyft Logistics, a small local start-up, became the first Company in Pakistan to formally introduce 12 preapproved period leaves2. Our main task here was to challenge the taboo without ruffling feathers, to disrupt the narrative without disrespecting cultural sensitivities. We aimed to win the buy-in of not just the management, rather of the women we strove to facilitate without embarrassing, and as a result isolating them, by creating pre-approved leaves that needed to be logged in rather than requested.

AS WE STRIVE TO IMPROVE WORKING CONDITIONS TO ACCOMMODATE THE REALITIES OF WOMEN’S LIVES, THE POSITIVE IMPACT HAS BEEN NOT ONLY ON WOMEN BUT ALSO ON MEN.

But we didn’t stop there. We sought to facilitate women across corporate Pakistan by inviting HR and Corporate Heads of companies across the country to panel discussions advocating the initiative. The idea was to discuss the barriers to and advantages surrounding period leave policies. By January 2022, 14 companies in Pakistan across sectors, local and multinationals had introduced a period leave policy . Change travels fast!

The challenge doesn’t end here – while corporate environments continue to champion and bring in DEI and family friendly policies, there is a lot more work to be done on the integration of women returning from career breaks, ensuring they remain in the workforce, and breaking the glass ceiling by supporting them with reskilling and upskilling, and building resilience.

As we strive to improve working conditions to accommodate the realities of women’s lives, the positive impact has been not only on women but also on men.

The truth is what benefits one set of people will inevitably benefit another. After all, the fight for maternity leave, paved the way for paternity leave, and championing work-life balance allows fathers to spend quality time with their families too, Indeed, the fight for diversity creates inclusive safe spaces for all regardless of their social backgrounds, ethnicities and religions, leaving all of us better off.

Mariyah Arif is HR Head Louis Dreyfus Company. With a career spanning over 20 years across industries, she is a passionate learning, growth, value-culture and inclusion advocate.

1. mckinsey.co, 2023, ‘What is psychological safety?’, What is psychological safety? | McKinsey 
2. Startup Pakistan, 2021, Swyft Logistics becomes the first Pakistani company to introduce paid period leaves calling it Monthlies – Startup Pakistan