In a bid to improve diversity across all levels of the organisation and to reduce the number of women leaving the workforce, Zomato has made changes to its parental leave policies. For women across the 13 countries its present in, Zomato will be offering 26 weeks paid leave, or will follow the government mandated policy, whichever is more. In addition to that, Zomato will be offering exactly the same benefits to men as well.
“One core issue that leads to fewer women leaders in organisations, the community, and the nation is the lack of universal paid parental leave. Currently, it is hard for women to lead a healthy family life and focus on their careers, leading to a lot of women leaving their jobs or putting their careers on the back burner. This results in a pressing lack of diversity across all levels of the organisation, and needs to be solved proactively,” Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato said in a blogpost.
According to him, a lot of that imbalance at the top stems from an unequal leave policy for men and women when they welcome their children to this world.
This policy also applies to non-birthing parents, and in cases of surrogacy, adoption, and same-sex partners. In addition, new parents will also be given an endowment of $1000, per child, as they welcome their new baby. These policy changes are also applicable to employees who have had a child within the last six months.
“I believe that young parents should be able to make a choice of how to care for their children. And that a myopic view of primary care-giving not only alienates one half of our workforce, but also creates circumstances that lead to fewer female leaders within organisations, the community and the nation,” Deepinder said.
In 2017, India passed the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which increased maternity leave available to working women from 12 weeks to 26 weeks for the first two children. However, paternity leave is only two weeks.
Zomato, in its blog, also urged governments across the world to institutionalise paid parental leave, and said that will be the right thing to do for organisations as well as individuals.
“We will never have truly gender-neutral organisations unless we have gender-neutral communities and gender-neutral nations,” Deepinder said.