One of the core childhood memories of my life is my mother leaving home for work, at 5.30 am every day.

She found a teaching job in a high school when I was four and my sister was two. Classes began at 10 am. She had to catch a train at 6 am to reach on time for the first class, which meant she left home by 5.30 am to walk to the nearest railway station, mostly because she could not afford a rickshaw.

She commuted for three hours, up and down, every day. 

Here is what I remember – every single day, my sister and I would cry in unison at the top of our voices from 5 am until she left the house, because we did not want her to leave us at home.

This is the painful reality of many working women. Every day, they experience separation from their children, spending many hours in a stressful commute to work, getting hardly any time to spend with the most important people in their lives in their developmental phase, because economic realities are harsh.

And that is why I love remote work.

I am proud that many of my colleagues who lead various teams in LawSikho and SkillArbitrage are women with young children, but don’t have to go through what my family and I experienced in the early 1990s. 

For me, it feels like a personal victory when yet another woman conquers the world of remote work.