Happy Mother's Day. Today I want to share a little personal anecdote. I wanted to do it for long, but I stopped myself because I was lazy, it was weird, and the conclusion I wanted to present was not statistically verified.
A few years back, I was at my college reunion. It was a decade and a half for me since I left college, and some of the attendees were out of college for a little more than two decades. Some had kids going to college already.
It was well past midnight, after the third bottle of beer we were contemplating big questions of life. Nostalgia and alcohol made us a philosopher. Just like college days.
One person said "I feel so inadequate. I don't know what to tell my kids. Everything I knew about life is proven wrong. Money, health, work, married life, there is no pattern to make anything work reliably. I don't know why some people turned out the way they turned out."
He was right. Variation in our batch is unbelievable. On academic front: Our class topper committed suicide. Most of the top rankers are in dead-end govt jobs with inflation-adjusted salaries and zero enthusiasm.
Most introverts who never ventured beyond hostel are at leadership positions running IDCs. The guy who was most progressive and who had a steady girlfriend for the entire college life is going through a divorce. There seems to be no correlation with anything.
Everyone had their theories to explain the variance. "It was the ability to speak English fluently" , " It was the fact that they did masters degree after college. ". "It was the fact that they married intercast." " It was because their parents were rich."
" It was because they had GF in college." "They had an international experience early in life," "They had a role model, someone in the immediate family to look up to, an IAS cousin, Big brother in the US, etc.".
All of these cases were true, but there was an exception to each one of them.
So like it often happens when a dozen SW professionals are drunk and stuck with a debate. We fired up our laptop and opened an excel file. We decided to do a principal variable analysis and figure out the secret.
We tabulated records for 60 people. It constituted everything in their background when they were in college and how they "performed" after college.
We filtered these records for people who have done well professionally, Financially, happily Married, well-traveled, happy person to be around and progressive mindset. Etc.
The list was of 8 people. ( I was not there in case you are wondering. )
Everyone was surprised by the data set before us, for there was little common in those 8 people. None of us have thought of them as a cluster in our wildest imagination. They were rich and poor, People from Big cities and villages. There was ONLY ONE thing common in all of them
Can you guess what that one thing which could have been the most reliable indicator of success 20 years back was?
Each one of the eight people had a working mom. I repeat: working women raised each one of these folks. Co-relation was no fluke, for we did reverse lookup too, ten people in the base dataset had a working mom. So 8 out of 10 made it.
Once we had results. It was easy to construct theories to explain the results. If there is a working mom in the family, kids learn division of labor, gender equality, and self-care early on. Working parents teach the growth mindset. So on a so forth.
I am sure that those eight people ( 2 of them were there in person) credited everything from god to luck to family to hard work for their success, but they never attributed their success specifically to this factor.
I believe this is one of the many instances where society fails to give women their due credit. The contribution of women in society is never properly understood, acknowledged, and appreciated.
I am sure if we do more such data analysis, there will be more insights.
Until the time we, as a society, learn to appreciate unsung (S)heroes. I salute them. Happy Mother's Day. Thank you for making the world a better place.
Until the time we, as a society, learn to appreciate unsung (S)heroes. I salute them. Happy Mother's Day. Thank you for making the world a better place.
