11 March, 2023: Women should freely pursue their professional dreams without being worried about any possible negative effect on her family life, they should support other women and never be fooled into believing they are superheroes, a panel of lady doctors concurred at a programme at Woodlands Hospital.
The panel discussion titled “Does professional work have a negative impact on family life?” was organised at Woodlands on Monday to mark International Women’s Day on March 8, 2023. The doctors said family and work were both important and one has to prioritise and strike a “near perfect” balance between the two, rather than pitting the two fronts at loggerheads with each other.
The session moderated by Dr Rupali Basu, Managing Director & CEO, Woodlands Multispeciality Hospital Ltd, saw the participation of Dr Anjali Ghosh, Dr Indrani Guha, Dr Nishi Prakash and Dr Lahori Roy, from the ENT, Cardiothoracic & vascular surgery, Radiology and obstetrics & gynaecology departments of the hospital respectively.
Dr Basu set the tone of the discussion by saying that family and children are aspects of life women professionals have had to factor in from the very beginning. “A woman professional has the choice of hiring competent staff and training them to her liking to help run the home. The home should run on autopilot on a normal course so that she can devote enough time to her career especially in the formative years.” This way, the professional is also helping another women — the help — get on in life, she added.
Dr Guha had the panel in splits when she said that men had “become very cleaver” and consciously adorned women with adjectives like Devi Durga who has 10 hands to accomplish different tasks simultaneously. “It’s time for women to take off the superhero’s cape. We are just ordinary human beings doing our best and men should do their equal share too,” she said.
Dr Ghosh spoke of a positive change in the society from the 1960s and ‘70s when a woman’s profession was akin to a hobby for those around her. “But that generation has educated their children to respect the work that women do. Two thousand years of patriarchy takes time to go but we are getting there.”
Dr Roy and Dr Prakash stressed on the need to prioritise between work and home depending on the phase of one’s life and the family support available.
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