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In India, our families and our popular culture prepare a woman to think of marriage as the most important thing she can do with herself. They teach her that a life can only be concretized and legitimized through a stable marriage. And most Indian women learn to love the men they marry.
I’m not here to compete, I am here to rule.
Somehow, we ensure that men and women inhale what society expects of them, and magically, most of us play out our respective gender identities and idioms. Men must earn money and women must earn love.
Love, as expected of women, is similarly invisible, intensive work without any clear norms of remuneration. Love needs time, skills and effort. Earning money in the world outside, though hideously stressful, is far more straightforward.
taking up or sticking with paid jobs. In 2017, as in 1993, nearly seventy-one per cent of urban Indian women between the ages of thirty and thirty-four were engaged solely in unpaid housework.
For example, in Tamil Nadu, nearly eighty-three per cent of urban men with postgraduate degrees were in the workforce compared to 46.3 per cent of women.’ Having
In Bengaluru, for instance, only 22.2 per cent of women are in the labour force compared to over three-quarters of their male counterparts. And urban men tend to earn more than urban women too, in each bracket of class, caste and education.
While Other Backward Castes (OBC) and some segment of Scheduled Castes (SC) have made economic gains over the past three decades, employment gaps between men and women within these communities have only increased. For the past fifteen years, half of all OBC or SC men have always been employed. Female employment rates within these groups have halved in the same period. Sociologists posit that these gaps are not only due to discrimination, but also because communities want to emulate the puritanical practices of the upper caste, among whom female employment is the lowest. Many also say that with
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If we wish to define a line to divide women across the social spectrum into the haves and have-nots, the ability to find free time or independently ‘buy leisure’—drink, smoke cigarettes, watch movies, go to the beauty parlour, attempt self-care or do absolutely nothing—emerges as one of the strongest statistical and sociological definitions in all of south Asia. The poverty of choice plagues our women.
The moment a woman steps out, you are signalling something to the world, that you have broken with tradition. And
Privileged women are often those who exercise complete control over their bodies and how they spend their time. And so, in this house, with my new job, no longer patrolled by family, free to do what I wished, I was gifted the ultimate female privilege.
Soon, you become complicit in your own discrimination, looking for a man to help you trade upwards in the world.
I had failed to find the right man but had miraculously found the right work. Suddenly, I’d become a sum of my professional competencies.
As per data from CMIE for 2019, only ten per cent of mothers from the wealthiest segment of urban India, those between the ages of twenty and fifty-five, held a paid job. Even
According to data collected by the International Labour Organization (ILO) between April and June 2018, an urban Indian woman spends five hours on household chores every day, while an urban man spends twenty-nine minutes on housework.
Real life required far more bargaining. A man could love you, he could be persuaded to marry you, he could be a terrific father, but he wouldn’t necessarily champion your freedom.
You dread marriage, defining it as a bottomless dark ditch from which no Rajput woman has ever emerged.
‘Boys getting any salary-wali job would always result in a party. My parents and I would go with gifts, strangers would eat sweets. There was nothing for me. My parents were very proud. I knew that. My father called all his brothers and cousins to inform them. A few friends invited me to celebrate with lunches or coffees. But there was no party. They would have organized one if I had asked, but I expected them to do so on their own. If I was getting married, then there would have been a big explosion of joy. I guess a good job is not seen in the same way, but I really think it should be.’
No one ever celebrated the small projects she finished at government. I knew that she desperately needed someone to mirror her sense of achievement, to recognize how far she had come, to see merit in the choices she had made, to acknowledge that her way of participating in the world wasn’t menial or meaningless.
There is no policy fix for feeling that your achievements as a professional woman will never be as rewarded as your achievements as a beauty, wife or mother.
A select few find men who see a woman’s work outside the home as a non-negotiable part of who she is; men who don’t view helping at home as irregular favours but a non-negotiable part of who they are.
Why is it so hard for many of us to publicly accept that the market for personal rewards and professional recognition is disproportionately skewed against women who desire success and independence?
If wealth accords love, a man’s income buys him far more love than a woman earning exactly the same paycheck.
