When I decided to quit my full-time job with this newspaper and go freelance so that I could spend more time with my then school-going daughters, my father-in-law was appalled. But he didn’t want to directly question my decision and, so, told a friend that he would make sure my children were well looked after at home.
I knew that but quit anyway. When I wrote a 12-part series on women’s declining workforce participation that went on to win a national award, Baba, which is what we called Murlidhar Bhandare, couldn’t have been prouder — though he continued to believe that I could, and should, have dodged the “motherhood penalty”, one of the barriers to workforce participation that I had written about.
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