Democratize society for women's equality at all levels.

March the 8th, International Women’s Day, impacts corporate life a little less this year, for two reasons. One, it fell on a Sunday; and, two, in reality, Indians observe the day, for the most part, purely as a token, whose import is restricted to some women-oriented activities that day, with little spill over for the rest of the year. Women are seriously under-represented inside the womb, forget corporate boards, Parliament seats, the civil service, the judiciary or the professions.

There is a good reason why the sincere efforts of many professional women (and some men) fail to make a difference to this hypocritical attitude towards women. Those who do try to make a difference in terms of gender sensitivity and gender equality rarely try to link this process with the overall democratization of society, and so limit their own impact.

 Consider the discourse on women’s safety. It centers on policing, legal penalties, panic buttons, etc. Very few voices seek to review society’s attitudes towards women, about the serious breaches with religious teaching and tradition that women’s equality calls for.

The futility of pursuing social change in the limited space of elite interaction is brought home, more often than not, by violence. The elite have to interact with the non-elite. Emancipation clashes with the traditional notion that women who place themselves outside spatial and temporal locations that are considered virtuous are asking for sexual depredation.

 A woman who climbs the corporate ladder alongside her male colleagues at the workplace can feel secure about her young daughter as she traverses home, city and campus, only when women’s equality is part of society’s consciousness at all levels.

Yet, she has a disincentive to see the question in broader democratic terms. Her own relative emancipation is achieved at the expense of subaltern women, to whom she outsources her domestic chores. Sharing of housework by men at all levels, in other words, is part of the process of rendering March 8 something a little more than a mere token.

Rupsha Roy
Msc.Media || PG:1