It was Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, who came up with the classic proclamation: “Women hold up half the sky.” It may sound like one of those enigmatic Confucian proverbs but it lay at the core of his cultural revolution. Today, half a century later, the central moral challenge of our times remains the full emancipation of the world’s women. In India, that ambition seems perpetually out of reach. In the current stormy debate in Parliament, it is no accident that the Congress is mostly targeting the two women involved, Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhararaje, while Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who is accused of being involved in the mother (it’s always mother, never father) of all scams, finds only passing mention. Women are more vulnerable, more prone to crumble under pressure, or so goes the traditional refrain, composed by men of course. For women to be taken seriously, they simply need to be super achievers. As Hillary Clinton once famously said: “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.” She could well become the most powerful woman in the world so she does have a point, but there’s no ignoring that old cliche that the civilisation and culture of a country are judged by the status that it accords to its women.
We live in a celebrity-obsessed, appearance-conscious world where there is much greater focus on how women look and not what they say. Ten years ago, a ‘liberated’ woman referred to someone who had sex before marriage, and not one who was fighting for women’s rights. Similarly, feminists were frustrated lesbians, looking to rob men of their manhood. In fact, most women today are afraid to call themselves feminists because of the negative stereotypes associated with that word. Misogyny is also alive and well. Like when Larry Summers, president of Harvard, suggested that women’s aptitude for science and math was weaker than men. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi faced flak for praising his Bangladeshi counterpart for her courage to fight terrorism “despite being a woman”. Successful women have spent the best part of the last 30 years of relative emancipation being labelled as “men in skirts” and other such derogatory dogma. Like Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was always referred to as “the only man in the cabinet”.
The glass ceiling may have been breached in many areas, but attitudes and invectives remain deeply entrenched. We have just had American presidential candidate Donald Trump trash-talking a female television anchor and egregiously insulting her in public. This is the same man who once told a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice that it “would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees”. He, like many other males, is still to realise that masculinity doesn’t depend on the subservience of others. Is evolutionary history to blame? The old ‘hunter-gatherer’ matrix defined the origin of sexual division of labour, man as hunter, woman as gatherer, one which persisted far longer than it should have. Translated into today’s man as bread-earner and woman as homekeeper/child-bearer, it has been twisted and transmuted to suit the occasion and the kind of society where such divisions persist. Often this gets exposed quite by chance. In India, the recent stipulation in the new Companies Act required every listed company with a specified turnover to appoint at least one woman on its board. It led to a mad scramble since so few companies under that category had any women on their boards. Come deadline, and most resorted to tokenism, filling the post with wives or sisters or daughters, but thereby hangs a tale. It jolted everyone awake with the question ‘why not’ instead of ‘why’. Suddenly, companies discovered that women brought more to the table than a tray of cookies. After the recent ruling on women, tycoons like Harsh Goenka were quick to declare that women directors were essential because they bring a different perspective and freshness of ideas!
Here’s the breaking news. Stereotypes are being demolished and there’s a silent revolution under way that’s changing the gender discourse in remarkable ways. The group of courageous women this week’s cover story is dedicated to may be exceptional but they are not the exception either. Without anyone quite noticing, women have mastered the work-home balance and invaded male-only domains like never before. Stereotypes will have us believe that women miss out on opportunities at the workplace because of an inherent reluctance to take up new challenges and overwhelming domestic commitments. A study released last week knocked that belief on its head. The study was on employee intentions for the current financial year and showed that a higher percentage of women (73 per cent) spoke up for a clear career progression than men (68 per cent). The study, conducted by global recruitment firm Michael Page India, also showed no difference between male and female promotions over the last two years.
Starting with the cultural, hospitality and education sectors two decades ago, women are now everywhere. The service industry—healthcare, education, hospitality, IT, finance, fast-moving consumer goods and media—has an advantage in attracting women but they are now dominant in banking where women routinely figure in India’s most successful ceos’ list, and becoming more visible in areas like politics and law. Every day, the newspapers bring us inspiring stories of women all across India breaching male bastions. They are even driving cabs. What that means is the battle of the sexes is over, declared an honourable draw, and now it’s to do with talent and ambition and drive, where gender is not an issue. The phrase ‘woman on top’ has been stripped of its sexual connotations as more women are reaching senior positions than ever before. Radical feminism is out, basically because it’s no longer needed. When squash player Dipika Pallikal demands equal pay for men and women in her sport, no one blinks an eye. It’s reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s famous quote: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
There is still, clearly, a long way to go for Indian women to achieve parity or complete freedom in a stratified and conservative society like India but they have made huge strides, high heels notwithstanding, in the last decade or so. There is good reason for that. The visible increase of women in the workplace, to begin with, is strictly to do with a talent-starved economy. As Cyrus Mistry, chairman of the Tata group, noted: “When women are insufficiently represented in the workplace, we lose out on 50 per cent of the talent pool. In an environment where human capital makes all the difference between success and failure, this is a massive loss which countries and corporates can ill-afford.” It may not yet be time to pop the champagne, call in the male strippers and initiate a reading from The Vagina Monologues, but the fact remains that male and female roles have never been less strictly defined. Women could yet wind up holding up half the sky.
