Break The Bias

 We have recently observed women`s international day on 8^th March 2022 amid an ongoing pandemic crisis. The newspapers and TV channels were full of the appreciation rendered to the womenfolk of the world and rightly so.

Based on the information on Wikipedia the earliest purported women`s day observance was held on 28 Feb 1909 in New York City organized by the socialist party of America at the suggestion of Theresa Malkiel. There are other claims that it was observed by women garment workers as a protest on March 8, 1857, but it is not confirmed. An international socialist conference was organized in August 1910 in Copenhagen in which the establishment of an annual woman`s day was proposed though no specific date was mentioned. There were 100 delegates from 17 countries who agreed with an idea to promote equal rights including women`s suffrage. International Women`s Day initially had no fixed dates but was generally observed in late Feb or early March. Americans continued to observe National women`s day on the last Sunday of Feb., while Russia celebrated IWD for the first time in 1913. In 1914, IWD (International Women`s Day) was held on March 8, for the first time in Germany, possibly because that was a Sunday. The demonstration in different countries continued in the form of celebrations of women`s day or international women`s day and predominantly remained a communist holiday roughly until 1967. UN started celebrating women`s day in 1975 which had been proclaimed the International women`s year. In 1977 the UNGA invited member states to proclaim March 8 as an official UN holiday for women`s rights and world peace. Since then it has been observed annually with some theme being the focus of the year. This year`s theme is Break the Bias- Imagine a gender-equal world, a world free of bias and discrimination, a world that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and together we can forge women’s equality. In India, in addition to the IWD celebrations, Feb 13 is observed as national women`s day on the birthday of Ms. Sarojini Naidu.

I have tried to give a brief background of the IWD and it is courtesy Wikipedia. You might wonder why I am writing about IWD this year only. There are two reasons for that- one I heard a story in which a few women surveyors visit a home. When they knocked at the door, a young woman in the house was busy taking care of the household because she was a so-called housewife/homemaker. The father-in-law of the woman tried to get up from the sofa he was resting in, but in the meantime, the young lady went out to open the door. The surveyors asked the lady if she was a working woman. The old man overheard the statement and hurriedly came out and intervened before his daughter-in-law could say anything. He told them that his daughter-in-law is a working woman. She is a very good tutor/teacher because she looks after the studies of her children, she is a caring nurse who looks after the aging in-laws, she works as a chef and cooks food for all the family members, she is the perfect finance manager who manages the household needs very well with the money given by her husband and it is all because of her efficient work that my son can perform well in his office which enables him to get a good salary which she manages so well. The woman surveyors could not say anything and looked at the old man. After a brief silence, the man asked them to note all the works which his daughter-in-law performs. The ladies said that they do not have any columns in their form which makes any of these works qualify for the women as working individuals. The old man asked them to go back and get these columns added to the form to make it reasonably realistic.

My second motivation is a book titled desperately seeking Sharukh- India`s lonely young women and the search for intimacy and independence. I read it recently, it is written by Sharanya Bhattacharya (She is trained in development economics at DU and Harward. Since 2014, in her role as an economist at a multilateral development bank, she has focused on issues related to social policy and jobs). This book gives a picture of the Indian women still caged in many ways despite progress made by them in different fields. They still are dependent on the menfolk for many reasons and patriarchy is still in dominance. Though the title seems to be deceiving as the book might be about actor Shahrukh Khan but it is not so. Shahrukh is just a thread to bring the writer close to the women from different regions and backgrounds. It is the book that talks about the journey of Indian women post-liberalization. As I mentioned Shahrukh is the thread that connects the writer to the women she talked to know, He is the one who opens girls and women to the writer and her colleagues. The first few pages are devoted to him but later he and his films come in between just to keep the dots connected. In the first chapter, she somewhere quotes the saying” I tried when I was younger to learn something about love and since it was not taught in schools, I turned to the movies for some clues, “What love is and what to do about it” by Andy Warhol 1975. The writer tries to explain why girls liked Shahrukh even if he was not nice to a woman in some of his movies. It was because in most of his movies he was always respectful to the fairer sex and cared for them, be it DDLJ, KKHH, KKKG, and many more. That explains in a few words, the title of the book - search for intimacy and independence. Though I would like to avoid more deliberations on that and directly move to women`s contribution in GDP and their participation or percentage in the workforce. While writing this, I can recall an incident that took place about 10 years ago. I am sharing something that many of you would have come across at some point while interacting with other people. As is the case in many families, the husband earns the money and the wife looks after the family without going out to earn in technical terms, the same was the case with this couple. The family is really very well to do and the lady despite being highly educated did not need to work outside hence devoted herself wholeheartedly to look after her family, especially children. She honestly sacrificed everything for the kids and ensured that all their needs were fulfilled and they get the best of the education and that happened. The children did exceedingly well and started earning in their respective fields. One day when there was a discussion on GNP and GDP and the contribution made by citizens, one of their children said that there was no contribution of the mother in the nation`s GDP. This was not intentional but a casual remark nonetheless very powerful to have agitated the mother. I would not write further discussion which took place but I was really upset and hurt. Then I tried to calculate the amount the homemaker should have been paid and that came out to be not less than the income of the child who said that. I do not say that the child was wrong but the fact this is the way our governments and economists see things. I am not an expert in economy and finances but fully understand the feelings of the father in law what he talked to the ladies who came for the survey (in the story I mentioned in the beginning). In the patriarchal culture, women have been made to look after the family which is considered to be their primary job. The same has been beautifully reflected by the writer when she writes: “the men must earn money and the women must earn love”. It pained me but the next paragraph gave some relief where she writes that earning love is far more laborious than earning money. I cannot stop thinking more from the same paragraph in which she writes, “In India, the support offered by men and government agencies when it comes to household chores and care ranks amongst the lowest in the world”. She further writes, “Women bear the overwhelming burden of being the sole providers of care for children, nourishing the future workforce, while also caring for the elderly”. She does not stop here and strikes with a statement “Love motivates us (women) to take on back-breaking gestures of care with good cheer. Even with plentiful domestic help, love ensures that women enthusiastically keep house. Feminists have long argued that women`s unpaid, unappreciated role as caregivers is a form of ~domestic slavery~ which we are socialized into accepting”. Why do the women do it? I think it is because of the love and to get love in return. Though they do it because of their love for the family but do they get love in return, I leave this to you to ponder upon. Scholar and writer Bell Hooks say “Sexism decrees emotional care and love is the task of women and men come home too tired to deliver emotional goods.”

There are families where the women work outside home and also hold the responsibility of taking care of household chores, though both men and women would be working for same number of hours equally hard outside. This you can see everywhere around. If I may be allowed to share the example of our school. The employees in the school are almost in equal ratio. They do more or less equal work and devote almost the same time to schoolwork. But if we look at the responsibility owned at home by women is much more than men. They would do almost everything and most men would not be a part of the household activities, like food, care of children and elderly people, etc. This applies to me also despite the fact I am a strong supporter of gender equality. I think the reason is- this is the way we are brought up. I keep wondering, have my mother, aunts, and my wife been made to sacrifice their rights and liberty just applauding women like the one responsible for keeping the family close-knit and gracefully united. Women are made to believe time and again to be DEVI and in disguise of this word, aren’t they exploited? I may be wrong in some cases because now things are changing, but unfortunately the change is slow. Sometimes there are a few queries raised by girl students about why was it right for their brothers to be outside their home any time but not for the girls. Why is it so that boys can go to watch films with their friends but not the girls? Why is it not bad for a boy to talk to a girl and a girl talking to the boys is perceived with a different angle. There are many such questions for which there would be no convincing answer. The only thing in which I believe is, whatever is wrong for the girls, is wrong for the boys also and we should teach our male children the same values right from their childhood.

In this context, I would like to quote certain facts from the book. As per the writer, the women folk spent more than four hours every day on household work in addition to their outside work whereas the men spent only about half an hour. If you have lived and seen the village life you would not be surprised by this data. There the women do almost the entire work of the house and do equal labour in the fields as the men do. A 2017 World Economic Forum report found that sixty – six percent of Indian women’s labor goes unpaid. Oxfam found that Indian women put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care every day, estimated to be around 19 trillion to the Indian economy. In 2017 amongst urban youth in the age bracket of fifteen and twenty-nine, women reported the highest ever unemployment rate in independent India at 27.2% compared to 18.7% for men. Two leading labour economists noted that ‘job–loss growth has not affected men but only women in net terms. According to the government’s quarterly periodic labour force surveys, between April and June 2020, in the period of India’s 1^st national lockdown nearly 57% of urban men above the age of 15 were employed. The same share for urban women was 15.5% by the end of 2020, as per a report published by an economist at Azim Premji university using nationwide survey data collected by CMIE, 90% of male workers, those who had jobs before the pandemic in December 2019 were able to hold on to some form of employment while 7% were unable to return to the workforce. For women jobs, before the pandemic, only 43% were able to continue working while nearly half never returned to paid work. She writes if I narrow 2017 numbers to focus on urban population between the ages of 15 and 59 years of age 74.2% of men have been employed and the same estimate for women was 19.8%. It was further found that the situation was not great in metropolitan cities but surprisingly two cities that report the highest share of women with regular paid jobs are Raipur and Coimbatore while the cities like Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Mumbai report huge gaps between men and women in salaried jobs. She mentions in detail about SEWA (self-employed women association) by the women`s wing of the Ahmedabad labour association. Informal workers are those who do not receive traditional office-based benefits usually working on an ad-hoc basis without any written contract. The writer has done a lot of research and during the process of collecting data, came across many women and understood the condition of women first hand. If I share the whole data and even very little details of the information given in different chapters, the article will convert into a small book and all my readers may not enjoy the same. So I would focus only on a few issues where we need to ponder and contribute to the life of women of the country towards making it better than what is it now. When the writer talks about a lady accountant and the struggle she goes through, you see the same picture in many other fields in which women are not given opportunities. Thanks to the courts and governments that our girls have now the opportunity to get admission in Sainik Schools and also join NDA (National Defence Academy). The women in our country had the reputation of debating fiercely with men on varied topics. Due to various reasons things changed over a period of time and today we find them in a situation not very encouraging for them. We all talk of liberty, independence and freedom of speech for all but half the population is deprived of even contributing to decision-making in family matters. When Ms. Sharanya talks about Manju, a girl from Rampur (where all women said that they felt bored when the writer interviewed them) and the way her mother, she herself and, other women in the village are treated, makes you question whether we are in the 21^st century. Manju and her mother are not the only examples. She has also written in detail about Zaheera and her daughter Meenal from Ahmedabad.

Many women used to work from home even before lockdown in an unorganized sector. For example, textile, incense making, embroidery etc. They are paid a meager amount on a per-piece basis. Why do we wait for Dr. Ruma Devi (Now A woman entrepreneur from the Barmer district of Rajasthan) to struggle on her own to achieve what all our women are capable of achieving? Today she is appreciated and recognized by all but do we support them from their childhood. It gives a lot of satisfaction when you find families in which the birth of the girl is celebrated by everyone.

By this time, you would have realized that this topic is vast to manage and one can go on and on. So, I would like to wrap it up and write again sometime with an expectation that at least some of us would break the bias. This is true that women are the backbone of the family and society but that does not mean to burden them with so much responsibility that they forget their identity. Let us all try to bring up our children, both boy and girl, in an identical manner and not to differentiate on the basis of gender. The women should not be forced to earn love but they should be loved unconditionally. I would like to reiterate that the women who are so-called homemakers should not be made to feel ashamed of what they are doing, rather appreciated for the positive contribution they make in the life of family members in some way or the other. I would like to end with the statement of the writer when she says that the caregiving work of the women should be added to the GDP of the country so that the policymakers can have such policies which recognized their contribution and help them to grow further. Let us replace the statement “treat them equal” with “break the bias”.