How big is the role of luck in career success?

From The Economist




Luck plays a big and often unacknowledged part in career success, starting in the womb. Warren Buffett has talked of winning the “ovarian lottery” by being born in America when he was, and being wired in a way that pays off in a market economy. Good looks are associated with higher pay and a greater chance of being called to interview in hiring processes. Your experience of discrimination will reflect your circumstances of birth.

The early way-stations in a career are often marked by chance: a particularly encouraging boss, say, or an assignment that leads you off in an unexpected but defining direction. Luck can affect the pathways of the most rational-minded professions. A paper published in 2022 by Qi Ge of Vassar College and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College found that economists with harder-to-pronounce names, including within ethnic groups, were less likely to be placed into academic jobs or get tenure-track positions.

Names can work against economists in other ways. Another study, by Liran Einav of Stanford University and Leeat Yariv, now of Princeton University, found that faculty with earlier surname initials were more likely to receive tenure at top departments, an effect they put down to the fact that authors of economics papers tend to be listed alphabetically.

Performing well can be due to luck, not talent. In financial markets, asset managers who shine in one period often lose their lustre in the next. The rise of passive investing reflects the fact that few stockpickers are able persistently to outperform the overall market. The history of the oil industry is shot through with stories of unexpected discoveries. A recent paper by Alexei Milkov and William Navidi of the Colorado School of Mines found that 90% of industry practitioners believe that luck affects the outcome of exploration projects. The authors’ analysis of 50 years of drilling on the Norwegian Continental Shelf concluded that the differences in success rates between individual firms were random.

There is a long-running debate about whether luck affects executives’ pay. A recent paper by Martina Andreani and Lakshmanan Shivakumar of London Business School and Atif Ellahie of the University of Utah suggests that it does. The academics looked at the impact of a big corporate-tax cut in America in 2017, an event which resulted in large one-off tax gains and losses for firms that were based on past transactions and that could not be attributed to managers’ skills. They found that larger windfall gains led to higher pay for ceos of less scrutinised firms; tax losses did not seem to affect their earnings. Lucky things.

Just as some people blindly believe that merit determines success, so it is possible to get too hung up on the role of chance. ceos may well be rewarded for luck but slogging to the top of companies involves talent and hard work. Although some have argued that entrepreneurs are simply people fortunate enough to have a large appetite for risk, skill does matter. A paper from 2006 by Paul Gompers of Harvard University and his co-authors showed that founders of one successful company have a higher chance of succeeding in their next venture than entrepreneurs who previously failed. Better technology and greater expertise reduce the role of chance; the average success rates in oil exploration, for example, have gone up over time.

But if luck does play a more important role in outcomes than is often acknowledged, what does that mean? For individuals, it suggests you should increase the chances that chance will work in your favour. Partners at y Combinator, a startup accelerator, encourage founders to apply to their programmes by talking about increasing the “surface area of luck”: putting yourself in situations where you may be rejected is a way of giving luck more opportunity to strike.

An awareness of the role that luck plays ought to affect the behaviour of managers, too. Portfolio thinking reduces the role of luck: Messrs Milkov and Navidi make the point that the probability of striking it lucky in oil exploration goes up if firms complete numerous independent wells. If luck can mean a bad decision has a good result, or vice versa, managers should learn to assess the success of an initiative on the basis of process as well as outcome.

And if the difference between skill and luck becomes discernible over time, then reward people on consistency of performance, not one-off highs. Mr Buffett might have had a slice of luck at the outset, but a lifetime of investing success suggests he has maximised it.

Shapeshifter Liz Truss on a roll as version 3.0 hits Tory sweet spot

It’s exhausting, keeping up with her journey. It’s almost as if she doesn’t believe in anything at all writes John Crace in The Guardian

 



Listen to Liz Truss for long enough and she’ll tell you she’s been on a journey. The inexorable rise of a girl who went from a rough Leeds comprehensive to frontrunner for the next Conservative prime minister. Via a brief spell in the Lib Dems. We all make mistakes.

Examine the journey more carefully, though, and it begins to look even more remarkable. The human flotsam who just happens to be carried downstream to the doors of No 10. A journey without any ideas or purpose other than to adapt to her surroundings and rise to the top. The failures have been spectacular, yet also spectacularly successful. Each time, she emerges into a more powerful iteration. Samuel Beckett could only stand back and applaud. She is literally living his dream.

Take Version 1.0 of Radon Liz. She’s a gas, but she’s inert. This was back in the early days of David Cameron’s leadership. No one was more socially liberal than Truss. No one ever hugged a husky tighter. Or embraced austerity harder. As and when required.

This Liz was also an ardent remainer. I can remember meeting her in the spin room of a televised debate during the referendum campaign. She bent my ear at length about how Vote Leave was based on lies and that remain was going to win at a canter. No sweat. No bother. That was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that the UK was going to leave the EU. Her reward for failure was promotion.

Radon Liz 2.0 turned out to be a passionate leaver. Far more so than many people who had supported Brexit all along. It wasn’t that she now reckoned what was done was done, there was no going back and we just had to make the best of it. It was that remaining in the EU was wrong. A thought crime. A mortal sin. This was the Truss who draped herself in the union jack for photographs at every available opportunity. Who was never happier than when cosplaying Margaret Thatcher in a tank. While the economy also tanked. This version was also rewarded with ever more governmental baubles.

The newest version, Liz 3.0, is almost incomprehensible. She has slid so far through the looking-glass to the Tory right that in some parallel universes she appears to have adopted Marxist economics. Dialectics has never been so confusing. She both reveres Boris Johnson’s memory, saying she wouldn’t have changed a thing, yet trashes the record of the government. Her prescription for getting the economy back on track is to reverse the national insurance hikes and to cut personal and corporation tax. How she would do this, she hasn’t said. Right now it’s enough just to talk in riddles.

It is exhausting, though. To keep up with Radon Liz’s journey, you have to be able to run fast. She is the anti-ideologue. The anti-conviction politician. Not so much a set of ideas looking for their natural home as vaulting ambition in search of some ideas. Any ideas. If you don’t like hers, she’s got some others.

Because here’s the thing. Truss is a tabula rasa – a dodgy 1980s computer with a screen that is permanently buffering. Someone capable of reinventing herself almost at will. And it just so happens that every time she needs some new ideas, she comes up with a set that exactly mirrors those that are needed to enable her to rise still higher in the Tory party. It’s one hell of a coincidence. Imagine one person having that much luck. It’s almost as if she doesn’t believe in anything at all. The ultimate shapeshifter. “Tonight, Matthew, I will be whatever you want me to be.”

For reasons not entirely clear to anyone, Truss has struck paydirt with version 3.0. It’s all but a certainty that her journey is now complete. No one is yet calling the next seven weeks a pointless extended coronation, but we’re not far off that point. Radon Liz’s latest incarnation has hit the Tory members’ sweet spot. Partly by not being Rish! – there are plenty who will never forgive him for betraying the Convict – but mainly by telling them what they want to hear.

Were she a bit brighter, she too would be amazed that so many people could forget that Rish! didn’t increase public borrowing and increase taxes because he’s a socialist. He did so because the country was falling apart in a pandemic. But when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. And Liz is living her best life as the prime minister in waiting. So much so that she’s almost relaxed. As relaxed as AI gets.

Her interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme passed off with few alarms. She even found her way into the building and navigated her way out without having to call security. A vast improvement on her launch event the previous week. And she even managed to talk the usual bollocks without sounding too robotic. Close your eyes and you could almost imagine she was human.

She knew her plan for unfunded tax cuts wasn’t inflationary because Patrick Minford had told her so. This was the economist who had forecast that Brexit would increase GDP by 7% and that food prices would fall. Bring on the Nobel prize.

Later on Thursday afternoon, Radon Liz was at Little Miracles, a charity for children with life-limiting and other disabilities, and looked quite at ease. She must have made countless visits like this as a constituency MP. She chatted to the kids for a while about the hassle of being followed around by the media. She looked pointedly at the collection of sketch writers. But there was kindness and laughter in her eyes. She can at least see the absurdity of someone like her becoming prime minister. And she does believe in a free press. Unlike Rish!.

Truss then moved on to the parents and listened as they shared their experiences. Afterwards, I asked two of them, Wendy and Brian – neither Tory voters – what they thought. Nice enough, they said. Though the proof would be in the delivery. If Truss were to spend proper money on social services, that would be a first.

By then Radon Liz had moved on. Just time to say she was all in favour of a new royal yacht, provided it was funded by Tesco, and that she was Labour’s worst nightmare. Wet dream more like. But she’s entitled to her delusions. And with that she was off. Job done. It had been the quintessential Liz experience. Charmingly superficial. Little Miracles would still be short of funds and the parents would still struggle to get the services their children needed. But more importantly, Truss would be in Downing Street. She left as she came. Without a trace. On brand to the last.

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How to avoid the return of office cliques

Some managers are wary of telling staff that going into a workplace has networking benefits writes Emma Jacobs in The FT

After weighing up the pros and cons of future working patterns, Dropbox decided against the hybrid model — when the working week is split between the office and home. “It has some pretty significant drawbacks,” says Melanie Collins, chief people officer. Uppermost is that it “could lead to issues with inclusion, or disparities with respect to performance or career trajectory”. In the end, the cloud storage and collaboration platform opted for a virtual-first policy, which prioritises remote work over the office. 

As offices open, there are fears that if hybrid is mismanaged, organisational power will revert to the workplace with executives forming in-office cliques and those employees who seek promotion and networking opportunities switching back to face time with senior staff as a way to advance their careers.

The office pecking order 

Status-conscious workers may be itching to return to the office, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at Columbia University and UCL. “Humans are hierarchical by nature, and the office always conveyed status and hierarchy — car parking spots, cars, corner office, size, windows. The risk now is that, in a fully hybrid and flexible world, status ends up positively correlated with the number of days at the office.” 

This could create a two-tier workforce: those who want flexibility to work from home — notably those with caring responsibilities — and those who gravitate towards the office. Rosie Campbell, professor of politics and director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, says that past research has shown that “part-time or remote workers tend not to get promoted”. This has been described as the “flexibility stigma, defined as the “discrimination and negative perception towards workers who work flexibly, and [consequent] negative career outcomes”. 

Research by Heejung Chung, reader in sociology and social policy at Kent University, carried out before the pandemic, found that “women, especially mothers (of children below 12) [were] likely to have experienced some sort of negative career consequence due to flexible working”. Lockdowns disproportionately increased caring responsibilities for women, through home-schooling and closure of childcare facilities. 

Missing out on career development 

Some companies are creating regional hubs or leasing local co-working spaces so that workers can go to offices closer to home, reducing commute times and the costs of expensive office space. Lloyds Banking Group is among a number of banks, for example, that have said they will use surplus space in their branches for meetings. The risk, Campbell says, is workers using local offices miss out on exposure to senior leaders and larger networks that might advance their careers. “People might say it’s easier to be at home or use suburban hubs but it might actually be better to go into the office. Regional or suburban hubs are giving you a place to work that isn’t at home but isn’t giving you any of the face time.” 

Employers and team leaders may need to be explicit about the purpose of the office: not only is it a good place for collaborating with teams and serendipitous conversations but also for networking.  

 

Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead, points out it is difficult — and paternalistic — as a manager to suggest an employee spends more time in the office to boost their career. A recent opinion article by Cathy Merrill, chief executive of Washingtonian Media, in the Washington Post, sparked a huge backlash on social media and more importantly, her employees, for arguing that those who do not return to the office might find themselves out of a job. “The hardest people to let go are the ones you know,” she wrote. 

Her staff felt their remote work had been unappreciated and were angry that they had not been consulted over future work plans — so they went on strike. 

Mortensen does not advise presenting staff with job loss threats, but puts forward a case for frank and open conversations about the value of time in the office. “Informal networks aren’t just nice to have, they are important. We need to tell people the risk is if you are working remotely you will be missing out on something that might prove beneficial in your career. It’s tough. People will say they sell things on their skills but you have to be honest and say that relationships are important. Weak ties can be the most critical in shaping people’s career paths.” 

The problem is that after dealing with a pandemic and lockdowns, workers may not be in the best place to know what they want out of future work patterns. Chamorro-Premuzic says that he fears that even people who are enjoying it right now, may not realise “they are burnt out. It’s like the introvert who likes working from home, they’re playing to their strength — staying in their own comfort zone.” 

Examine workplace culture 

As employers try to configure ways of working they need to scrutinise workplace culture and find out why employees might prefer to be at home. Some will have always felt excluded from networks and sponsorship in the office — and being away from it means that they do not have to think about it. 

Future Forum, Slack’s future of work think-tank, found that black knowledge workers were more likely to prefer a hybrid or remote work model because the office was a frequent reminder “of their outsider status in both subtle (microaggressions) and not-so-subtle (overt discrimination) ways”. It said the solution was not to give “black employees the ability to work from home, while white executives return to old habits [but] about fundamentally changing your own ways of working and holding people accountable for driving inclusivity in your workplace”. 

Some experts believe that the pandemic has fundamentally altered workplace behaviour. Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Remote Work Revolution, is optimistic. “Individuals are worried about their career trajectory because the paranoia is, ‘If we don’t go to the office will we get the same opportunities and career mobility if we’re not physically in the office?’ These would be very legitimate worries 13 months ago but less of a concern now.” 

Chung co-authored a report by Birmingham University that found more fathers taking on caring responsibilities and an increase in the “number of couples who indicate that they have shared housework [and] care activities during lockdown”. This might shift couples’ attitudes to splitting work and home duties and alter employers’ stigmatisation of flexible working. 

Prevent an in-crowd 

There are some measures that employers can take to try to prevent office cliques forming. Some workplaces will require teams to come in on the same days so employees get access to their manager, rather than leaving it to individuals to arrange their own office schedules. Though this would mean team members might not get access to senior leaders or form ties with other teams that they might have done when the office was the default. 

Lauren Pasquarella Daley, senior director of women and the future of work at Catalyst, a non-profit that advocates for women at work, says senior executives need to be “intentional about sponsorship and mentoring” rather than letting these relationships form by chance. 

They must also be role models for flexible working. “If employees don’t feel it’s OK to take advantage of remote work then they won’t do so.” This means ensuring meetings are documented. If, for example, one person is working outside the office then everyone needs to act as if they are remote, too. 

Chamorro-Premuzic says managers should work on the assumption that in-office cliques will form. This means organisations need to put in place better measures of objectives, performance measures independent of where people are, as well as measuring and monitoring bias (for example, if you know how often people come to work, you can test whether there is a correlation between being at work and getting a positive performance review, which would suggest bias or adverse impact), and training leaders and managers on how to be inclusive. 

“We may not have tonnes of data on the disparate impact of hybrid policies on underprivileged groups, but it is naive to assume it won’t happen. The big question is how to mitigate it,” he says.

Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

Balance of power deters would-be whistleblowers from rocking the boat

Sean Ingle in The Guardian


A couple of days ago I asked a UK Sport insider why more athletes do not go public with their concerns. “Put yourself in their shoes,” came the reply. “One path is potentially well rewarded. And then there’s another that comes after speaking out. If you are a rational person, do you want to travel down the road of a Brian Cookson or a Jess Varnish? There is a massive disincentive to rock the boat.”

One can see their point. Cookson, having enjoyed a long career in sports administration, is now president of the UCI, earning £235,000 a year. Varnish, having spoken out about the problems in British Cycling – and having been largely vindicated – finds herself marginalised and ostracised. At 26 she also knows her career in elite sport is probably over. What would you do?

British Bobsleigh team told: keep quiet about bullying or miss Olympics


Of course not every complaint is serious or justified. And nor is elite sport a place to hold hands round the campfire and sing kumbaya. But in a week where fresh and disturbing allegations about bullying in British Bobsleigh and child abuse in British Canoeing were heard there is an urgent need to tilt the balance in favour of whistleblowers and honest brokers.

Indeed, lost amid the flurry of reports into British Cycling last Wednesday was the damning verdict from the financial accountants Moore Stephens on UK Sport’s whistleblower policy. In their view it was inadequate: it needed to be “more robust”, “encourage a culture of openness” and “provide statutory protection from unfair dismissal for making a protected disclosure”. The question is how.

The main problem is that a vast amount of power lies with UK Sport and the heads of each sport – and very little with the athletes, who are subject to an annual review whereby their lottery money can be cut or stopped completely.
“Player power” is often heard of in football but for those in Olympic sports the power dynamic favours coaches and administrators – which hardly encourages athletes to question them.

One coach recently told of an athlete who made some modest but justified criticisms of his sport. A few months later his lottery funding was trimmed. Perhaps it was coincidental but his fellow athletes took away a lesson: he rocked the boat and lost out. As the coach explained: “A lot of signals are sent to people to say don’t misbehave and I am troubled by that. No one is saying that bullying and other such behaviour is widespread but there is an environment that does not allow enough checks and balances.”

One can imagine how vulnerable this leaves the athletes. One false move and their livelihood is toast. It does not help that Olympic athletes do not really have a strong union. Nominally there is the British Athletes Commission, which represents 1,400 Olympians and Paralympians, but few believe it has enough resources or independence to be as effective as it needs to be.

There is another factor at play, too. Many athletes want to stay in sport, either as a coach or administrator, when they quit the field of play. For those who pick up a reputation as a troublemaker the stink is hard to shake. As the former British bobsleigher Henry Nwume, who spoke to the BBC last week about problems inside his sport, told me: “You have everything to lose by talking. Athletes know that they run the risk of being attacked, discredited and blackballed. And that continues even after they retire. They fear positions that might have been opened for them will be closed. And they will become persona non grata.”
Whistleblowers also know their accounts are likely to be belittled by athletes inside the system. This is not necessarily malicious. Coaches tend to treat potential medallists better: one I spoke to admitted he was seen as a “golden child” by his performance director and never received – or even saw – the abuse that many of his friends got. So when Sir Bradley Wiggins or Sir Chris Hoy is asked if there was anything wrong with British Cycling, perhaps one should not be shocked when they say no.

One potential solution, put forward by Baroness Tanni-Grey Thompson’s duty of care review in April, is for an independent sports ombudsman – or duty of care quality commission – which is separate from UK Sport, to “maintain public confidence that sport is conducted ethically”. To me that makes sense. But change also has to come from within.

UK Sport deserves praise for lifting Britain from 36th in the medal table in 1996 to second in Rio last year. There are many smart people in the system, too. But it surely knows now that its tunnel‑vision focus on winning can breed the type of performance director or head coach who knows the main performance indicator is medals and so puts athlete welfare lower on the list of priorities. It does not help when UK Sport’s chief executive, Liz Nicholl, insists that “99% of this system is working really well” when increasingly the evidence suggests otherwise.
The best organisations do not just challenge themselves to be better. They allow themselves to be challenged in turn. In fact, they welcome it because they know being open and subject to rigorous examination helps them improve. Next month Katherine Grainger, a ferocious competitor with vast intellect, takes over as chair of UK Sport. How she responds to the mounting issues of athlete welfare, whilst keeping standards high, will surely define her tenure.

The Fourth Envelope

by Girish Menon

Paul, venerated corporate chief

Had three sealed envelopes

Which he consulted

In times of crises

Enabled his long career

And gave it to successor Neil

Neil ascends the throne

In time comes the first crisis

Opens the first envelope

‘Blame your predecessor’

The crisis abates

Neil survives

Changes the firm’s structure

Creates the second crisis

Opens the second envelope

‘Blame the culture’

The crisis is managed

Neil receives huge pay hike

Neil sacks loyal staff

Engulfs in a third crisis

Opens the third envelope

‘Prepare three such envelopes’

Neil is not ready to quit

He calls Paul for counsel

Paul says I have the mantra

That works all the time

You can have it

If you pay me the dime

Neil buys the counsel

‘Blame the economic downturn’

Neil survives the crisis

Decade in the saddle

The firm has not grown

The staff is insecure

The board has cronies

The economic downturn

Neil’s saviour in time

Top Australian surgeon advises female doctors to allow sexual harassment to get ahead

Lucy Clarke-Billings in The Independent

A senior surgeon has triggered controversy after telling junior female doctors to go along with sexual abuse at work for the sake of their careers. 

Australian vascular surgeon Dr Gabrielle McMullin drew criticism for comments made at the launch of her book - Pathways to Gender Equality.

Speaking in an ABC radio interview after the event, she said she encouraged women in her field to protect their climb up the professional ladder by “complying with requests” for sex.

The Sydney-based surgeon said sexism is so rife among her colleagues, young women should probably just accept unwanted sexual advances because speaking out would tarnish their reputations.

Dr McMullin, who studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland, said she stands by the comments she made on Friday but that her advice was “irony”.

"What I tell my trainees is that, if you are approached for sex, probably the safest thing to do in terms of your career is to comply with the request," she said after the launch.

Her shocking comments triggered angry reactions from sex abuse and domestic violence campaigners, who claimed her remarks were “appalling” and “irresponsible”.

Dr McMullin told ABC's AM program the story of Dr Caroline Tan, a young doctor who won a sexual harassment case in 2008 against a surgeon who forced himself on her while she was training at a Melbourne Hospital.

Dr Tan didn't tell anyone what had happened until the surgeon started giving her reports that were so bad they threatened the career she had worked so hard for.

But McMullin warns complaining to the supervising body is the 'worst thing' trainees could do.

“Despite that victory, she has never been appointed to a public position in a hospital in Australasia,” she said. “Her career was ruined by this one guy asking for sex on this night.

“And realistically, she would have been much better to have given him a blow-job on that night.”

Dr McMullin's comments have been roundly criticised by others in the medical profession and in women’s rights groups. 

But she said many people had thanked her for speaking out and some had come forward with more appalling stories of their experiences.

She said her critics had misunderstood her stance.

"Of course I don't condone any form of sexual harassment and the advice that I gave to potential surgical trainees was irony, but unfortunately that is the truth at the moment, that women do not get supported if they make a complaint," she told the ABC.

"And that's where the problem is, so what I'm suggesting is that we need a solution for that problem not to condone that behaviour.

"It's not dealt with properly, women still feel that their careers are compromised if they complain, just like rape victims are victimised if they complain," she said.

One victim, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing her job, told the ABC she experienced years of sexual harassment from a senior surgeon.

The victim said if she revealed her identify, she would not be considered a safe person to work with.

"If you complain... you'll be exposed, you'll be hung up to dry, you won't be able to work," she said.

"You'd be seen as a liability, that's my opinion. You absolutely would be seen as a liability moving forward.

"It's well and good that the legislation and laws say x, y and z but that wouldn't happen in practise. It would be unlikely to."

Kate Drummond, chair of the Women in Surgery committee at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, disagreed with this suggestion.

"I think we have robust processes, not only through the college for the trainees but also through the workplace," she told the ABC'S The World Today's program.

"I mean, these are people who work in hospitals and there are clear workplace processes to deal with these kinds of problems.

"And so I think there are parallel processes that we would encourage people to use and also to take the support of people like those of us in the Women in Surgery committee and we're very happy to strongly support these people."

Ms Drummond said there had been less than one complaint per year to the Women in Surgery committee regarding sexual harassment.

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

  

By Girish Menon

Only the other day at the Bedford cricket festival, Om, our fifteen year old cricket playing son, asked me for advice on what he should do if he nicked the ball and the umpire failed to detect it. Apparently, another player whose father had told him to walk had failed to do so and was afraid of the consequences if his father became aware of this code violation. At the time I told Om that it was his decision and I did not have any clear position in this matter. Hence this piece aims to provide Om with the various nuances involved in this matter. Unfortunately it may not act as a commandment, 'Thou shall always walk', but it may enable him to appreciate the diverse viewpoints on this matter.

In some quarters, particularly English, the act of playing cricket, like doing ethical business, has connotations with a moral code of behaviour. Every time a batsman, the most recent being Broad, fails to walk the moralists create a crescendo of condemnation and ridicule. In my opinion this morality is as fake as Niall Ferguson's claims on 'benevolent and enlightened imperialism'. Historically, the game of cricket has been played by scoundrels and saints alike and cheating at cricket has been rife since the time of the first batting superstar W G Grace.

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Another theory suggests that the moral code for cricket was invented after World War II by English amateurs to differentiate them from the professionals who played the game for a living. This period also featured different dressing rooms for amateurs and professionals, there may also have been a third dressing room for coloured players. One could therefore surmise that 'walking' was a code of behaviour for white upper class amateurs who played the game for pleasure and did not have to bother about their livelihood.

This then raises the question should a professional cricketer walk?

Honore de Balzac once wrote, 'Behind every great fortune there is a crime'. Though I am not familiar of the context in which Balzac penned these words, I assume that he may have referred to the great wealth accumulated by the businessmen of his times. As a student and a teacher of economics I am of the conviction that at some stage in their evolution even the most ethical of businesses and governments may have done things that was not considered 'cricket'. The British during the empire building period was not ethical nor have been the Ambanis or Richard Branson.

So if I am the professional batsman, with no other tradable skill in a market economy with no welfare protection, travelling in a last chance saloon provided by a whimsical selection committee what would I do? I would definitely not walk, I'd think it was a divine intervention and try to play a career saving knock.

As you will see I am a sceptic whenever any government or business claims that it is always ethical just as much as the claims of walking by a Gilchrist or a Cowdrey.

I am more sympathetic to the Australian position that it is the umpire's job to decide if a batsman is out. Since dissent against umpiring decisions is not tolerated and there is no DRS at the lower echelons of cricket it does not make sense to walk at all. As for the old chestnut, 'It evens out in the end',  trotted out by wizened greats of the game I'd like to counter with an ancient Roman story about drowned worshippers narrated by NN Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

One Diagoras, a non believer in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent ship wreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, 'Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?"

In a similar vein I wish to ask, 'Where are the batters who walked and found themselves out of the team?' The problem with the quote, 'It evens out in the end' is that it is used only by batters who survived. The views of those batters with good skills but who were not blessed with good fortune is ignored by this 'half-truth'.

So, Om, to help you make up your mind I think Kipling's IF says it best:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

Then, you may WALK, my son! WALK!

There is another advantage, if you can create in the public eye an 'image' of an honest and upright cricketer. Unlike ordinary mortals, you will find it easier, in your post cricket life, to garner support as a politician or as an entrepreneur. The gullible public, who make decisions based on media created images, will cling to your past image as an honest cricketer and will back you with their votes and money. Then what you do with it is really up to you. Just watch Imran Khan and his crusade for religion and morality!

The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.

Motherhood, the career that dare not speak its name

By Cristina Odone Politics Last updated: March 13th, 2013 

Claire Perry MP: motherhood is a career

Claire Perry, Tory MP for Devizes and childhood guru to David Cameron, says she's had three careers: she's been a banker, a mother and a politician. It is brave of her – and not because bankers and politicians are the most despised professions around. Ms Perry is brave because she makes claims for motherhood that has too many feminists and members of the Coalition sneering: it is a full-time, unpaid job.

Perry is promoting "Mothers at Home Matter", a group that wants the Coalition to recognise the contribution of stay-at-home mothers. Their message is urgent: when the state has to step in to care for children, the tax payers end up paying millions in creches and programmes like SureStart – now recognised as a hugely expensive Labour failure.

Worse, psychologists are now worrying that being raised outside their home environment by a succession of "professionals" can scar children for life. In Sweden, where this is a matter of routine, school records show the highest truancy and "worst classroom disorder" in western Europe. The star witness for MAHM was Jonas Himmlestrand, expert in Swedish family policy, who reported that his homeland, where 90 per cent of children are in subsidised child care, has seen a serious decline in adolescent mental health, between 1986 -2002 declined faster than in 10 comparable European countries.

So, forget the Swedish model. MAHM believes the key to happy families is to change the tax system that right now forces women to work. The UK is almost alone amongst developed countries in not recognising family and spousal responsibilities in its tax system. The burden on the single earner has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Many single earner families are in the poorest third of the population. MAHM want families taxed on the basis of household rather than individual income. They call "for a debate about income-splitting, transferable tax allowances and protecting child benefit for parents with dependent children."

Politicians should pay attention: the number of mothers who stay at home is down to a third — but, as I found out when I researched "What Women Really Want" for the Centre for Policy Studies, the majority of mothers would like to stay at home to look after their children. That's quite a constituency, Messrs Cameron et al. Ignore it (and your pledge to introduce family tax credits) at your peril.

The zone and the importance of imagination

A sportsman in the zone, like an artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus. He has the ability to be in the game and yet stand above it, seeing it clearly

Ed Smith

December 16, 2012

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	Mike Brearley: went beyond merely visualising a desirable outcome Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images

Mike Brearley, the former England and Middlesex captain, recently gave a talk about "the zone". Before cricket, Mike was an academic philosopher; after cricket, he became a psychoanalyst. Taken as a whole, professional sport is a relatively small proportion of Mike's career. But it afforded him an intense period of practical absorption and experience. Looking back on three careers spread over one varied life, Mike spoke to an audience at the London School of Economics about what cricket had taught him about concentration, technique and freedom.

Sometimes the best way to define something is to describe its antithesis. "The zone" can be a slippery concept. But we all know what bad form feels like. Brearley began with a memorable description of a player in crisis: "We try to focus on all sorts of things that should be unconscious - like the centipede, who, trying to think about each leg before it moves, ends up on its back on a ditch." 

"The zone" is the opposite. When we are in the zone, there is a sense of effortlessness, your body acting as though it does not require instructions from the mind. Many batsmen have written about the zone, but this was the first time I've heard anyone describe "captaincy in the zone". 

It was 1982 and Brearley was captaining Middlesex against Nottinghamshire. It was a bouncy pitch, and he was trying to think of a way to dismiss the opposition star player, Clive Rice. Brearley not only sensed there was a chance of Rice misjudging the bounce - many captains would have done that - he also began to imagine as though he, Brearley, was in fact the batsman.

In Brearley's phrase, "Here I felt my way into Rice's body and the shape of the shot. I sensed there might be a thick outside edge, and I pictured the ball flying to a deep wide slip, perhaps 20 yards back. I put Clive Radley in this position, and shortly afterwards it went straight to him at catching height. When something similar happened in the second innings, this time on the leg side, Rice thought there was something magical about my captaincy; in fact, it was a mixture of bodily intuition laced with a great deal of luck."

Brearley is describing something rarely discussed in a sporting context: the practical value of imagination. It transcended merely "visualising" a probable outcome. Brearley used his imagination, as a novelist might, to bring to life a very unlikely potential scenario. "Many years later," he added, "I saw a film of Bushmen hunting a deer on foot. As they followed the tracks of the deer in the stony ground, the hunters 'became' the deer, using the identification to find the faint footprints in the ground; they shaped themselves into the way of moving and likely course of the deer."

It is a rare perspective. We hear a lot about plans, very little about imagination; much about strategy, little about adaptiveness. Brearley's point is that a captain has to balance conscious planning with imaginative hunches.

A team can also enter "the zone", just as a single player does. Brearley explained what happens when a team is "hot": "Each player breathes in the others at their best, is strengthened by that identification, and gives off similar vibes to the rest of the team."

Note how the positivity becomes self-perpetuating, even contagious. That is why good teams always have a strong core of senior players: this core takes the weaker "waverers" with them on the journey towards self-belief. Thus the team - rather than being just a list of individuals - becomes an organic entity in its own right. One of the truest phrases about good teams is that they become "more than the sum of their parts".

What of the individual? One of the thrilling aspects of watching a player in the zone - and I am thinking more of football and rugby than cricket - is the sense that he is both aware of the whole pitch and yet totally absorbed in the small details; he is ahead of the game, yet also living in the here and now.

I once had a memorable conversation with the film director Stephen Frears about the French footballer Zinedine Zidane. Frears saw parallels between a football playmaker in full flow and a film-maker in the zone. "What I really admire - and you see it particularly in players who are just past their prime - is the feeling that what they have lost physically they make up for by seeing the whole picture. They grasp the shape of the game. They can somehow stand above it and see it clearly."

Brearley calls this "seeing the wood and the trees: he looks and takes in the detail; but he also looks with a broader gaze, in a way that allows unconscious ideas and connections to flow". The sportsman in the zone, like the artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus.

This sounds very abstract. What does it feel like in more practical terms? I would say I felt fully "in the zone" only a few times in my career. One day, when I made 149 for Kent in about a session and a half, stands out. And, looking back on it, there was that sense of both narrower and wider focus. I remember being aware of gaps in the field. In fact, there seemed to be a ready-made "channel" - it seemed to exist in its own right - running in a line to the boundary, dissecting mid-off and extra cover. 

Time and again I hit the ball into that channel, as though I had only to aim vaguely in that direction and my body subconsciously directed the ball exactly into the gap between the fielders. Without straining or thinking about it, I could both watch the ball onto the bat, and yet also see that channel leading to the boundary rope.

Later I tried to recall what batting felt like that day: "You stay in the present, enjoying it for what it is: the feel of the bat in the hand, the rhythm of the ball arriving in sync with the shot, the feel of the earth under feet, a lightness and yet a rootedness. Your mind is revving at the same rate as the pace of the game. There is no sense of being rushed (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting the balls to be delivered quicker). There is harmony. I felt very clearly, on that day in July 2003, that my role was to not get in the way - to make myself the conduit more than the agent."

Brearley described batting in "the zone" in similar terms. But on one point I disagreed, or at least had a different take on things. Brearley interpreted "the zone" as an extreme version of the more common phenomenon of "good form". At one level that is obviously true. But I feel that "the zone" exists in a different sphere to the question of form. Form is an achievement, the zone is a feeling. A batsman can enjoy a spell of scoring heavily without getting anywhere close to the zone. The zone is subtler than form, more mysterious.

	I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power

In particular, I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. (I acknowledge that even the latter relies on a great deal of preliminary hard work and practice.) I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power. In the zone, the world is co-operative; you do not have to bend it to your will.

An awkward, perhaps impossible, question follows: what is the sportsman's optimal relationship with his own will power? On the one hand, we know that will power drives athletes to many of their victories. And yet I also believe that your controlling mind prevents you from playing at your absolute best.

So would you achieve more if you trusted yourself just to "play", instead of trying to manipulate events with your will power and strength of character? I suspect the answer is different for different players.

A good example of two opposite approaches is the rivalry of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Nadal relies on his phenomenal will power - as though he draws confidence from the strength of his own character. Federer, in contrast, seems to play best when he does not interfere with his own talent. It is as though Federer's brilliance exists of itself, in its own right: he merely has to set it free. It must be difficult to advise Federer when he is losing: "try harder", "fight more" - those ideas seem entirely inappropriate for his game.

Maybe for some players (the Federer type), the zone is almost a prerequisite of performance. For others (the Nadal type), the zone is practically an irrelevance.

****

At the dinner after Mike's talk, where the guests were mostly LSE professors, I reflected how easily he could be mistaken for a distinguished lecturer in philosophy. And yet each of the worlds he has touched - academia, sport, psychoanalysis - has benefited from insights and experiences he developed in the others. Had Mike lived a narrower life, and focused on one strand to the exclusion of the others, I suspect he would have had a less surprising life - and, I think, a less influential one. Breadth, paradoxically, can lead to depth.

By nature I am an optimist: my firm conviction is that sport is getting better in many respects. But I could not escape a feeling of sadness that it is highly unlikely that a similar career could happen in today's ultra-professional sporting world. I doubt an academic philosopher in his 20s would be persuaded to return to professional cricket, or that a professional cricketer, having retired from the game in early middle age, would subsequently pursue a full career in psychotherapy.

Perhaps Mike's insights will help a new generation of players get into the zone more often. But I suspect the particular zone he experienced is an increasingly uninhabited space.

For Indian women in America, a sea of broken dreams

By Narayan Lakshman in the Hindu

When Pavitra’s Delta Air Lines flight flew into Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on a crisp blue July morning back in 2008, her heart pounded with excitement. Though it was a dangerous time economically and few companies were hiring, her husband landed a good job with a major IT firm and was assigned to projects across the U.S.

Pavitra, who had a bachelor’s degree from India and some work experience, had made a careful plan to embark on a course of higher studies — permitted under her current H-4 visa — and then seek employment. It was all coming together for her, it seemed. But she was in for a rude shock.

Within months of her settling down in a strange new land, she found out that not only were higher studies a financially draining option, given the lack of funding for spouses of H1-B visa-holders, she was also unable to pursue a graduate programme because with her three-year Indian undergraduate degree she was not considered eligible for graduate enrolment in the U.S.

With a paucity of viable alternatives, she turned her attention to the job market, an effort that proved even more futile. “I tried applying for a job but as soon as the recruiters came to know of my H-4 visa status, they would say they do not sponsor H1-B,” Pavitra said.

Matters then took a turn for the worse. Trapped in a labyrinth of visa-related restrictions, she began to feel she had no purpose in life. “I started going through depression, loss of enthusiasm and self-esteem. I started having chronic migraines every day,” she said. As migraine attacks went, hers were so severe that she could not even open her eyes, often threw up, and had chills.

“I had to call my husband every day at work, saying I am ill and he used to come home running. Life for him was very difficult, juggling between work commitments and my doctor visits,” she said. He was unable to look for better work opportunities since he was worried and wanted to look after her.

Now in the midst of a mind-numbing routine of hobbies, she asks herself: “Where am I in my life today? Still a dependent, still need to start my career fresh at this age.” And her future looks cloudy too, as it is a shaky prospect to start and raise a family on a single income, and whenever she tries to get back in the job market, “getting back my self-confidence, independence, self-esteem... [is] going to be a struggle for me.”

If Pavitra’s situation were an idiosyncratic case of misery in the wilderness of American suburbia, it may not be a collective concern. Yet that is not the case and, to be specific, 1,00,000 to 1,50,000 people, mostly women, from India, other parts of Asia and the rest of the world are stuck in this deadening reality of joblessness and social isolation, rapid erosion of self-esteem, and attendant toxic malfunctions in their personal lives.

Let’s step back and consider the facts and numbers in question.

The issue of H-4’s debilitating impact on its holders is not a new one. In fact, writing on cases of abuse of H-4 women by their H1-B husbands in The Hindu in 2008, Shivali Shah, a New York-based lawyer, explained that the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service does not provide H-4 spouses with work authorisation until well into the green card process.

There is no prospect of working on the H-4 visa per se. The State Department’s guidance on a range of non-immigrant visas notes: “A person who has received a visa as the spouse or child of a temporary worker may not accept employment in the U.S. with the exception of spouses of L-1 visa-holders.”

“Therefore, these women are financially dependent on their husbands for anywhere from two to nine years,” Ms. Shah pointed out, adding “H-4 women are middle-class and have status in the U.S., but immigration laws can make them indigent and undocumented at the whims of their husbands.”

So how many individuals are affected by this law? Since around 2004, the USCIS has set the annual cap for H1 visas issued at approximately 65,000. Even if one were to conservatively assume that 50 per cent of these visa-holders were married, it suggests close to 32,500 spouses or partners on H-4 visas a year.

Given that the H-4 visa is often of six-year validity, it would not be far off the mark to assume that there are well over 1,00,000 individuals stuck with this visa, possibly over 1,50,000. Further, the most recent USCIS data quoted in a study by the Brookings Institution suggest that 58 per cent of the H-1B visas are granted to Indians. This means that well over 50,000 Indians are in this position.

This includes only H-1 spouses. There is a host of other visa-types, for example, I-visas for journalists, all of which are subject to the USCIS work ban for their spouses — except L-1s, usually issued for senior executives who are on intra-company transfers from other nations. If the spouses of visa-holders in these categories were also counted, the number of frustrated, but often talented, individuals unable to work would perhaps grow exponentially.

To truly come to grips with the intensity of the problem faced by individuals trapped in the H-4 visa quagmire, a glimpse into the corrosive nature of the visa’s work restrictions is useful.

Rashi Bhatnagar, a H-4 visa-holder in the U.S. who was willing to have her real name used in this story — all others have been changed to respect privacy concerns — set up a Facebook group called ‘H-4 visa, a curse,’ after facing the deadening reality of joblessness, having enjoyed years of a successful career in India. Though she had a master’s degree from India, she had numerous doors of opportunity slammed on her in the U.S. after she had to relocate to this country to join her IT-worker husband.

However, Rashi counts herself among the fortunate few, whose spouses have a senior role, some leverage with their employer and hence some hope for flexibility, such as an early or expedited green card application. For most other “H-4s,” the mathematics of the waiting time for the right to work is debilitating, killing off their most productive work years from their late twenties to late thirties.

In the EB2 category of temporary, non-immigrant workers, a H-4 visa spouse would typically wait for six years before a green card application is made and then potentially another six years for the issuance of the green card. This makes a total of around 12 years, time spent languishing in the aisles of Walmart, making small-talk with vendors on street corners, engaged in the soul-destroying household chores and the limited joys of child-rearing.

In the EB3 category, the six-year wait for the green card process initiation is compounded by an even longer eight-12 year wait for the green card itself, requiring the H-4 visa-holders to hold their life in suspended animation for a staggering 14-18 years. Over the passage of such a length of time, all hope of resuscitating one’s passion to pursue a meaningful career is likely to be extinguished, with only a sense of lonely desperation left in its wake.

Part 2

To better understand the impact of the U.S.’ H-4 visa, the non-working visa given to the spouse of a work-authorised H-1B visa holder, The Hindu conducted a limited survey via a Facebook page that is a portal for H-4 visa holders. Along with the administrator of that page, Rashi Bhatnagar, who is herself on an H-4 visa, respondents were asked about the circumstances they found themselves in after they arrived in the U.S.

The responses not only hinted at a wide range of personal and health setbacks for female Indian H-4 visa holders but also testified to this visa’s impact on those from other nations, grown children of H-4 visa holders and, in some rare cases, male H-4 visa holders.

Take the case of Kathy, who used to be Senior Principal at a firm in the United Kingdom. After she and her children moved to the U.S. to join her husband, they had to put their oldest daughter through college with absolutely no access to financial aid because they were not permanent citizens of the U.S.

To make matters worse, when her daughter finished college she found herself, like her mother, stuck at home and unable to earn a living using the skills acquired at university. “She sits in her room all day, on her own,” Kathy worried, adding that her daughter had few friends and got very depressed.

Kathy herself fared poorly and it took a drastic toll on her health. Initially she and her daughters had private health insurance, but after she was diagnosed with a pineocytoma, or non-malignant brain tumour, she was dropped from her insurance. Apart from the compelling case that such instances make for reform of the H-4 visa restrictions, they underscore the need for the sort of health insurance reform that President Barack Obama has pushed through. As for Kathy, she and her daughter have no health insurance, no prospect of working and face a daily routine of social isolation and despondence.

Another striking case that the survey revealed was of Rahul, a male H-4 visa holder who followed his IT-professional wife to the U.S. For him, too, the stark reality of U.S. employers’ unwillingness to sponsor an H-1B struck home after many months of a frustrating job search. Cut off from friends and family and no longer the sociable, buoyant person he used to be, Rahul turned to alcohol — at a heavy cost. Caught in a downward spiral of depression, he attempted suicide several times. “I hurt myself very badly during one of these attempts and had to be hospitalised after calling 911,” he said. However, he showed resilience and tried to bounce back from that low point. He returned to India to change his field from sales and marketing and gain a greater IT focus. He even found work in a U.S. firm’s India office in the hope that the firm would apply for a work visa for him.

“Unfortunately the recession hit in 2008 and the company did not do well,” said Rahul. He had to resign himself to the prospect of staying on in India and battling the spectre of alcoholism that had arisen once again, not to mention thoughts of depression and suicide. Meanwhile, his wife and three-year-old child live out their lives in the U.S. without him.

Among most respondents to the Facebook survey, health issues arising from depression and a sense of hopelessness appeared to be common. One respondent, Joyita, said she was constantly visiting neurologists and physical therapists for treatments related to psychological turmoil “which have their roots in H-4 visa’s work restrictions”.

Even where physical symptoms were absent a sense of utter despair replaced the initial optimism that these spouses of H-1B workers had felt. Shauravi, for example, felt that she could not afford an MBA or other professional degree given the lack of funding opportunities. But the alternative, to “be at home for whole day without working and be very dependent to my husband ... has made me very weak just thinking about it”.

Another respondent, Ketaki, worried that the only degree she could afford was of no interest to her and lack of friends and complete dependence on her husband in a new environment had made her lose her self-confidence. Similarly Lavanya, who left a senior post in the Indian government, found herself struggling to keep up her self-esteem when she could not find any job, not even one that required far lower skill levels than those she possessed.

For several survey respondents their vulnerability had led to abuse within the marriage, in some cases resulting in complete familial breakdown. Priya told The Hindu that after suffering numerous beatings by her husband, she managed to file a police complaint and had him arrested. However, because as an H-4 spouse she had no access to bank accounts and other paperwork — all of which were controlled by her husband — she was unable to afford an attorney to fight the case. She was left praying for a denial of visa renewal for her husband for she had no other means to reach out to her family back in India.

A similar case was Poorvi who, despite overcoming financial hurdles and completing a U.S. academic degree, faced marital trouble, loneliness and spousal abuse that ultimately led to divorce.

The severity of personal problems faced by individuals in this position begs the question of why the spouses of H-1B, I, and a range of other visa holders have been denied the right to work, while L-1 visa holders’ spouses were granted the right some time ago,

Sheela Murthy, an expert on immigration law, told The Hindu that there had occasionally been talk in official circles about granting H-4 visa holders the right to work, but “that was before the economy tanked”. Apart from the sheer political pressure that any government would face if it tries to push through such a reform, it could also lead to some uncomfortable questions as to why the spouses of other visa holders — including the A, B, C, D, G, and F visas — could not similarly be given the right to work .

The H-4 case may be a “strong but not a winning argument”, said Ms. Murthy, noting that another fact pertinent to this case was that India ranks among the top 10 nationalities of illegal immigrants in the U.S.

On lobbying the White House and Capitol Hill for relaxing the work restrictions, she said: “I do not think we have been able to make the case clearly and strongly, with statistics and numbers, and have a very limited and strong message, to take up the drumbeat that gets both Houses of Congress on board.” There was still something missing in the strategy and articulation, she suggested.

In the end there is a complex argument to be made that must consider all of the difficult questions relating to the politics of post-recession unemployment, the plight of spouses of other visa holders, and the broader context of comprehensive immigration reform and illegal immigration.

Yet even as the weight of these unanswered questions stalls progress on H-4 visa reform, thousands of individuals in this category will continue to live with their broken dreams.

(Concluded)