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Before we move on with this episode of The Scene in the Unseen,
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do check out another awesome podcast from IVM podcast, Cyrus Says, hosted by my old buddy Cyrus Brocha.
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One of the things few people would dispute is that at least half the potential of this
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great country of ours is wasted. Women are treated like second-class citizens in India.
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You've got to have your head in a hole in the sand if you deny this. But is that changing now?
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We are part of a global village and we are exposed to western and more progressive culture.
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We are empowered by technology and markets. Hell, we are in the 21st century.
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It's going to take a long time for every woman in this country to truly gain autonomy and agency.
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But are we at least moving in the right direction? I believe we are,
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but sometimes I'm not so sure. How do we even measure something like this?
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Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics,
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and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen. Today's episode arose out of a conversation I was having
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with my friend Devika Kher, an economist who works at the Takshashila Institution on the
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20 million jobs project. Her colleague in that project, Yazad Jal, was my guest on the show in
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my last episode, which was about India's jobs crisis. But Devika and I were not talking about
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jobs per se, but about women in India. My question for her was, what metrics can be used to determine
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whether women are getting empowered in India? And if so, how fast and by how much? And this
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is a really complex subject because you can't measure most of these metrics. Data is unreliable
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and the metrics can tell you different stories. For example, I told Devika about a column I
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wrote many years ago, arguing that we should celebrate rising divorce rates. Rising divorce
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rates are a good thing because they are a sign of women being able to walk out of bad marriages.
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But Devika pointed out the flip side. It could also mean that more men were abandoning their
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wives. And like this one, so many metrics we could pick have their flip sides. For example,
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some metrics that make it seem that things are getting worse, like rising rape statistics,
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could mean just the opposite. Maybe more women have the courage to actually report rapes.
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We spoke about a bunch of serious metrics and then it got damn boring. So we gathered all the
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folks at Takshashila around a water cooler and brainstormed around funkier and more counter
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intuitive metrics of empowerment. For example, how many women commit white collar crimes?
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What is the number of male kids who are the last child in their family? How many women go and buy
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pickles instead of making them at home? How many people when they get caught speeding in
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Gurgaon tell the cop, tu jaanta hai meri maa kaun hai? You get the drift. So today's episode
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will not provide any answers to the question of how women are doing in India, but will provide
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a whole bunch of different ways of looking at this problem. I'm privileged to have three
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accomplished women in the studio with me and I'll introduce them to you after a quick commercial break.
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What's more, Indian Colors now has an exciting range of new products including fridge magnets
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And if you want a 20% discount, apply the code IVM20. That's IVM for IVM Podcasts. IVM20 for a 20%
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discount at indiancolors.com. Welcome back to the Scene in the Earned Scene. Let me introduce my
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guest one by one. Devika Kher is an economist and policy analyst at the Takshashila Institution in
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Bangalore where she works on the 20 million jobs project. Welcome to the show, Devika. Hi, Amit.
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Nidhi Gupta runs a policy school at the Takshashila Institution and she's done previous
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episodes with me including Notably on Behavioral Economics. Welcome, Nidhi. Glad to be here, Amit.
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Hamsini Hariharan is my colleague at Pragati, the magazine I edit at thinkpragati.com.
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And she's also the host of the brilliant weekly show, The Pragati Podcast. And while she's a guest
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here, I'm also going to ask her to co-host the show with me today. Hey, Hamsini, what's up?
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Hey, Amit, let's smash the patriarchy today. Let's smash the patriarchy and let's begin with
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the sledgehammer wielded by Devika. So, Devika, as an economist, and you know you've been working
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on the jobs crisis in India and you've written a lot about women labor force participation and
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women at work generally, but even beyond that as an economist, how do you think about this?
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I know this might sound like it's coming from the entire project that I've been working, but I
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genuinely believe that with more women working, there would be more women who would have access
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to a lot of resources. And when I say access, I mean not just have a bank account to their name,
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but be able to do e-commerce transactions, right? So for me, I entered into this entire
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genre of women employment from the 20 jobs angle first. The 20 million jobs angle. So, yeah, I
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always thought that with more women working, women will be more empowered and that's just
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a general outcome. I think a lot of economics is speaking out here because I personally believe
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if you have a higher income, you will get a better share in the household decision making,
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you would be the more important part of the family. And therefore, family will eventually
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respect you. So that was my theory. But when I entered into this project, I realized that
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other than the fact that 20 million jobs is a huge task, as Yazad would have told you,
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the problem with female labor employment ratio is completely different from the rest of the
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problem. Unlike the rest of the problem where there's a linear growth, but not at the pace
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at which we want, the female labor force participation rate has actually fallen in the
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last few years. And that just shows us the grim picture of how, leave apart the fact that we
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don't have enough women working. We also do not have enough women. The women who were working
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are leaving the workforce. And this is something that blows my mind because I automatically
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assumed that, hey, things are really bad, but they're slowly getting better. And therefore,
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you'd imagine that more women are entering the workforce. And when I read your pieces
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and pieces by people like Namita Bhandari, which show that just the opposite is happening,
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I don't get it. Why? Why are less women working today than say 15 years ago?
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So there's this thing called the U curve when it comes to female employment. There are a lot
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of research papers. There are a few which have done in-depth study on this. And the idea is that
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women are considered to be income earners, until and unless the household income has reached a
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certain point, beyond which they expect women to be contributing to the household chores,
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which are considered to be the women. So basically what you're saying is that
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in really poor families, there's no choice. They have to let the woman work because they
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need the income. But the moment she reaches a level where household reaches an income level,
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they believe that the woman can get back. So that's the problem.
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So what you're saying is there's something that we call a double burden, right? So generally women
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who are working have to do work, but they also have to come back and cook and clean and take care
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of their kids and all of that. What you're saying is after a certain point, they're saying we will
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take away the double burden from you. You don't go to work, you stay at home. Is that right?
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Yeah, exactly. And the priority that your priority is not to have that career,
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your priority is to ensure that the household runs fine. So then therefore it makes sense for
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them that as soon as the household reaches a point where you can stay back home, your priority shifts
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to taking care of everything that is. And the way you put it, Hamsini, it almost sounds like,
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you know, it's a patriarchy's way of empowering women that you have a double burden. We will take
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one burden to work. That's like all the unpaid care work that women have to do. So take care
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of the children, take care of the men at home, cook clean. It's all unpaid. And it's taken for
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granted. So the man will take the credit for, you know, all the capital he brings home. But
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the woman's capital is simply not considered. Because how do you put money to this? How much
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is it worth? I have a base idea of that, actually. So if you actually do a math of how much do you
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pay your cook? How much do you pay your laundry person? How much do you pay the cleaning lady?
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How much do you pay all of these people who helped run your household? And as someone who's
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been living in a city alone, I do pay people for all of these stuff that my mom used to do back
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home, right? So now I know that this is the amount of money at least that my mom deserves
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for every monthly amount she spends on doing this work, right? So a lot of countries have actually
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tried to come up with a base figure for unpaid care. The problem with that is that even though
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it's acknowledged, no one really pays, there's no real value to it. And I'd actually say that
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base figure would be way too low. Because for most women, you also have to take into mind the
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opportunity cost. If they weren't washing dishes and doing whatever, and if right from the start
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they'd got an education and they were out working, they'd be earning so much more. So their time is
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not worth what your maid plus cook plus sweeper, those services are worth. It's worth so much more.
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So in our jobs conversation, we had the same point, which is for every one woman who leaves
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her household to go out to work, she creates 1.3 around that number of jobs. In a sense,
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the fact that that woman is not at home itself ensures that you would then hire a cook or a
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maid. So it's actually beneficial from the entire jobs angle also, if not from just empowering.
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Yeah, but those are low-skilled jobs that you create.
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But the idea is that then you create, so then one more woman can then afford a household income
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that she will then use based on her usage. So the link is actually positive. The only thing is that
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other than being a cook, I think the rest of them are still women-oriented jobs. You will still get
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a maid who's a woman. You will still get a nanny, you will still get a cleaning lady.
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How much does that do for the image of women in the society? I have doubts about that.
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In fact, that's one of the funky metrics we'll come to later that how many men do these kinds
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of domestic-led jobs? Is your maid a man? That sounds like a very scary podcast episode.
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Yeah, we're going into a completely different area. And outside of the jobs angle though,
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thinking with your economist hat on, what are the other kind of metrics that you'd look at to
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see if women are actually progressing in this country?
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So there are old-school metrics like maternity mortality rate, and that is a good matrix of
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understanding how women are doing health-wise. There is the entire educational level, not just
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the enrollment rate, but also the completion rate. We do not have many people talking about that,
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that a lot of women do enter. Enrollment rate has increased over the years, but the completion
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rate is still the more grim part of it. So why is that? If more women are enrolling,
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why aren't more people... I mean, why doesn't that reflect in the completion rate?
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Because they leave school before they can complete their, even, I think, secondary schooling.
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Because I think the first and primary thing, which has been discussed a lot, is the fact that
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as soon as they have had puberty, you need to have provisions for sanitation, or you need
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a washroom with the water connectivity. So even if the rural schools do have toilets,
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they do not have proper resources around to ensure... And also at some point, after a certain age,
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it might just be dangerous for girls to go to school alone and so on, so the families are like...
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So that's the other thing. So there are many factors, actually. One is the sanitation,
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the other is distance between the school and the household. The third is how many girls in
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that area do go to the school, right? Like if there is only one person going to sending their
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kid to the school, it generally doesn't happen. And the last is value, right? If your aim is to
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get married, then they'll be like, okay, and it is good for a girl to study up till 8th standard,
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but after that, she's going to get married. Anyway, she might as well learn how to cook and
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clean and do everything that is unpaid. I think there is this calculation of opportunity because
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that the family does, right? So if I'm going to send you to school, how much am I going to pay?
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Versus if you stay back, you would be able to take care of your kids, right? So that's the
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take care of these things at home, be able to cook, clean, whatever. Or help your father,
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help your mother with other things. There's a very good phrase a friend of mine, Uday Shankar uses
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when he's talking about when anyone is constructed with a decision, you should ask yourself,
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what are you optimizing for? And here, what happens is that if a family is to ask themselves
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that they treat girls and boys differently because they're optimizing for different things.
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They want the boy to eventually go out on the jobs market, earn money, blah, blah, blah. And
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they want the girl to get married. Yeah. And that's a very economical approach. So if you
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remove the entire judgment based on how they remove options for both the genders. But other
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than that, running a household is an economy in itself. It requires time, energy, effort,
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all of that. And the moment you expect it to happen on its own, then you're being irrational.
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The problem comes from the fact that we have always considered women to be doing that rather
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than making it an option between the two genders. Okay. So adding on to that, imagine that if parents
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actually started seeing going and living with their girl children as an option, right? Currently,
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you see your male child as an investment you're making because in your old age, you're going to
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go live with them or they're going to take care of you. So I might as well invest in that.
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The current notion that we have in India, at least, is that we as parents cannot go and live
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with our children. It begins right there. It's almost considered shameful for parents to go
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and live with a girl. Yeah. Shameful and how can we do it? You are our girl child and we cannot
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be a burden on you. So when they think of the girl child, they think, oh, I cannot, you know,
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and this girl is going to go away and she's not going to be part of our family anymore.
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So if you begin with this notion of you are not a part of our family, then you don't want to invest
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in that, right? So this is a very selfish view of parenting, if you were to think that I'm investing
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in this person or my male child because I'm going to go live with them. Actually, rather than selfish,
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I think it's just an exclusionary way of looking at membership of an economy. I think this is also
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an outcome of the fact that we do not have old aged care in the city. And then old aged care,
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by the way, covers up for all the crashes you don't see around. This is my argument in one of
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the Prakriti articles too, right? That we can't get women to the cities, we should get cities to
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the women. By cities is because cities provide all of those services that if my mom wanted to work
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when I was in kindergarten, she could leave me at a crush and then go back to her work.
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And in rural areas, you can't expect that to happen for various reasons. But one of them
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primarily being that where do you leave those kids if both the parents are working? So I think that's
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an important part. And the other thing that I've been looking at the entire angle of how we look
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at women is also how education is only seen as a basic criteria to get married. And this goes on,
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right? Like even when women get jobs, they are not seen as someone who is going to continue with the
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job. They're seen as someone who will take the job for the meanwhile, and then based on wherever the
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partner is, would have to shift according to that. So we do not want our women to have careers,
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we want them to have jobs for the time being when and where the household needs it. So if you see,
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there was a UNDP report which said around 68% of the women who graduated don't have paid jobs.
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So yes, so when I look at the education numbers, I feel really happy about the fact
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that there are more women graduating, but then I realized that most of them just go back to home.
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And what's the corresponding figure for men? Would you have an idea? Because I'd imagine the
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majority of graduates don't have paid jobs anyway. As you guys know, our 20 million jobs,
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that's our problem, right? So we have a problem. And then I think the other point of this is that
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I'll give you the other figure, which is regarding the labor force participation.
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So while women I told you about how like the female labor force participation rate fell from
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34 to 27% from 1993 to 2013. In that meantime, there were around 24.3 million jobs created for
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men. So while women were leaving back to go back home from instead of working, men got all of those
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additional jobs. And I agree as a pie, we don't have enough jobs out of which the share that can
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be distributed inevitably goes to the men because women then leave the workforce. So even the jobs
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that were created, all of them then literally went towards. And all of these social attitudes
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that we spoke about and will continue to speak about as the episode goes on, how much do you
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think we are stuck in a vicious cycle where if you're a parent and all the people around you
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think this way, you are forced to think this way because otherwise how do you fit in?
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So, I mean, you're absolutely right about that, right? If you think women are being empowered,
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then as a parent, my parents must be able to think that, you know, I must when I said already that
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I must invest in my girl child as well. And a lot of women empowerment is when I'm able to educate
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and bring up my parents and say, you know, with confidence that my daughter is as able as
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my son. When that starts to happen, when my parents spend as much time with me when I'm married as
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they spend with my brother when, you know, he's married, that's when you would feel that women
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are really empowered. I can call my parents to my house to live with me in my house as much as my
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husband can. Right, because it's not his house, it's your marital house. And I am empowered only
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when I can take that decision as well, when I am able to say, hey, my family or my parents are as
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much my family as your parents are and it will forever continue to be like that, right? So,
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I think that's when women in households are truly empowered, right? Of course, women in workplaces,
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I mean, there is empowerment you can talk about in workplaces, which is a completely different
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dimension, right? There is empowerment in households, there's empowerment in society in
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general, and I'm sure you have those things you will bring up. I think there are two aspects to
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this, even with your example, right? One, that liberal feminists call for is equality in
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opportunity, which means, you know, that women should have the same access to jobs and so on
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and so forth. But the second, which you also pointed out in your example, is that there is
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a structural inequality that is geared towards women and that is the cycle that's harder to
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break. So, when we're talking about a viciousness, viciousness? When we're talking about a viciousness,
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it's easier to provide equality in opportunity, at least relatively. Whereas the structural
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inequality is something that has taken centuries and will continue to take centuries of us.
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Yeah, like the second half of your point is, so Namita in her series covers that
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one of the bigger fears of women having jobs was the fact that then she'll become independent
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and open minded and then who will marry her? Because the idea is that an independent woman
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then will ask for rights and certain freedoms, which the society is not ready to accept.
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Essentially, the patriarchy is okay with women being empowered as long as they're still in charge.
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Yeah, of course. Yeah, because even if you look at, we can come to this later, but even if you look
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at marriage rates for more successful women, it's much lower. No one wants to marry a successful
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woman. Yeah, and successful women frankly shouldn't want to marry anything. That is true.
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How do you guys deal with Indian men? So, let's start doing one. So, when we were having a
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water cooler conversation with you guys and all your charming Takshashila colleagues, we came up
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with more than 60 different funky metrics, which we can consider to look at whether women are
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getting empowered or not, whether there's progress. And for many of these, if not most of these,
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data is very hard to come by. So, we don't mean this episode to be some kind of statistically
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rigorous way of evaluating the condition of women in this country because there are no statistics
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and we're not going to be rigorous about this. But if you just look around you, they could present
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a lens of, you know, looking at different aspects of how women are doing. Let's kind of go through
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the categories which bleed into each other, so they're not like exclusive. And my first category
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is titled Women Socially Empowered, like, you know, signs of the social empowerment of women.
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And Hamsini, one suggestion you came up with was how many women go and buy pickles from the
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market instead of making it at home, which is, you know, really interesting solo travels by women.
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Our friend Anupam Manood spoke about women who go to pubs alone, or at all for that matter.
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You mentioned women who go to public sports events. Nidhi mentioned gym memberships for women.
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And one that really struck me as a beautiful metric, what you said, Nidhi, was the number of
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male kids who are the last child, therefore indicating that their parents are... They still
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want a male child. Yeah. So, if you don't see, if you see two sisters or three sisters and then you
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see, oh, no male child, I think that's a very good indicator. That's a great indicator. I think this
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was more like giving up. They tried and then they were like... No, I think it's also that they say
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that we want to have two children, whether it's girl children or boy children, doesn't matter.
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And we are not... And that's why you would see, if you look at your parents' generations,
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they would have more children and they probably stopped after one, you know, male child was born.
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So, if it's only two girls in the family, it says that, oh, parents think that girls can take care
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of them as well, that they don't need to have male children, that they would invest all of their
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time, effort, energy in bringing up these girl children. So, it speaks to a lot of things, right?
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And it's also an indicator of, like, if a girl is a large child, that's also an indicator,
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especially if she's just the first or the, you know, the first only child or the second child of
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two, that those parents, I mean, of course, they could have stopped trying for other reasons,
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like raising divorce rates. Yeah, I think another thing is that...
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Actually, that's what I meant, Amit, that, you know, if there is no male last child,
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then it shows that, you know, that there is empowerment.
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I think a poignant point is that whenever... My mother used to tell me this, whenever
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women of her age would go into hospitals and they were just having children, they would always have
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the option to have their tubes tied. And whenever women were considering this option, and if they
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did not have male children, the doctor would ask, are you sure you don't want to try for a boy?
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And she said, what struck her was that no one ever asked her, are you sure you don't want to try for
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a girl? But that is a very, very interesting point, just to explain how our social mindsets work.
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And women have this attitude also, mothers have this attitude as much as the men, right?
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Yes, yes. We can't blame just men for everything. This is a...
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It's not even the blame thing, right? Like, you have to look at it as a society, not as a gender
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thing. So the society in which our parents brought up was speaking like that. So in that context,
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it wasn't a male or a female thing. It was the fact that as a woman or as a man, you would expect
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women and men to do these things. So that's why I generally hear this a lot that, oh, women went
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against a woman. No, it is a person who was brought up in a setup, went against a person who was
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brought up in another setup. You have to look at the environments they were brought up in and not
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the gender, clearly. Right. I mean, I had a previous episode on this with Aditi Mittal and
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my producer, Swati Bakshi, and Swati made the point here that a lot of women, especially in high
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positions in companies, are tools of the patriarchy. You know, just because there are women in a high
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position doesn't mean that they don't reinforce the same... And I'd just like to add that it's not
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that they... Sometimes they really are patriarchal. It's not that they are tools so they don't
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themselves believe in it. A lot of women themselves have very patriarchal attitudes. I have,
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you know, I know of some people whose mothers would tell them that, how can you have your
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husband, you know, clean up the dishes? And they actually accept that and say, no, no, no, my
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mother won't like it. So one, your mother first has a patriarchal attitude and then you submit to
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it. Right. That, oh, because my mother won't like it because she thinks my husband shouldn't be
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doing it. So I really shouldn't. Why? Exactly. Let's kind of move on through the list. Women
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enrolling for Coursera. I think that was your... Yeah. So I think if women are investing in their
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own education, continuous learning, and here money is not involved. So this is really about
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women wanting to learn. And after a certain age, your willingness or your want to learn something
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is always tied with, do you want to, you know, advance your career? Is this because you just
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have this hunger to learn? And that to me, you know, speaks of empowerment. And statistics of
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these sort should sort of not be very hard to get, right? The Coursera one, yes, sure. But the last
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child is a son would be a bit difficult. But even then, you know, as a woman and mathematics is so
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hard for me. What do you know of statistics? So this is something Amit, we'll get to you on.
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This is a stereotype we were reading the other day where it was an assumption that women should
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not be reading news that's related to war or national security, because it's such grave topics,
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and how would they be able to handle it? Right? So our little hearts can't handle so much.
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But how do you see that changing? Do you see that changing around you?
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Actually, to be very honest, I think Swati brought up this point in the podcast, which
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I did with Aditi and Swati. And, and in her experience was that women in high places tend
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to reinforce the same attitudes. But frankly, in my experience, like for example, I'm the editor
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of Prakriti, but all the people that I write for all my editors, without exception, are women and
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they're, you know, extremely competent and really good. And I mean, they're just all excellent
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editors, and I get along really well with them. And through my career, I've been fortunate to.
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So I don't think that's a huge problem in the media. But it is also possible that because I'm
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a man, it's an invisible problem for me. You know, I can't comment on what women actually have to go
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through. The other angle of it is that you, the media is sort of, there's a selection bias involved
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if you look at the media, because more women tend to come into the media, because more men go
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towards, you know, the STEM side of things. And you have more women likely to, you know, study
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the humanities and then. Sure. And even within the media, there's a thing of, oh, you know,
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women will cover soft beats like culture or entertainment and not do hard beats.
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And in fact, that's one of the metrics we have in another category, which is women going beyond
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gender roles. And I think one of you pointed that out. And within Takshashila itself, you have
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women like, for example, Shibani Mehta covers defense, which is not something. Hamsini covers
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international relations when she's not doing dredge work at Prakriti. And let's just go to
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that subject right now and look at how. So women transcending gender roles. One is, of course,
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women scholars slash journals in fields that men traditionally cover. And you see this even
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in journalism. For example, if you look at someone like Scroll, who do outstanding reportage
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and they have an amazing team of reporters, Supriya Sharma onwards, who actually go out in
#
the field, go out in rural areas and report from villages and so on very fearlessly. And as if it's
#
just the most natural thing to do, which I think 30 years ago, you wouldn't really have had women
#
journals out in the field like that, right? Yeah, true. And there's also an idea that women do,
#
as I said, beats that are not popular. So earlier, when a lot of people say, oh,
#
women are doing finance journalism, this is new. Can they wrap their heads around these
#
crazy statistics? I think to talk about gender roles, right? Somehow we attribute everything
#
that has to do something with empathy to women. That if it involves care and being empathetic,
#
let's have women do this. But if it's something that's a hard field that doesn't, you know,
#
that's too rational or pragmatic, or that we need you to take hard stances, you have men do it.
#
And that's why, I mean, there are, of course, roles that women need to take because of biology.
#
But then there are these artificial gender roles that we create based on why can't men be empathetic.
#
And also, I think the larger point is that even biology being what it is, like even if you assume
#
that men and women are hardwired differently and, you know, acknowledging that difference is fine,
#
as long as you also acknowledge that despite whatever hardwired differences there might be,
#
you treat both sexes absolutely equally. So, you know, it might be the case that women are
#
naturally more empathetic. So therefore, you know, it's natural to get them for those professions.
#
But when it actually comes to how you treat women as a public policy matter, as a governance
#
matter, you have to treat them equally. And I think often there is a conflation between these
#
two where, you know, talking of natural differences, for example, has become politically incorrect
#
because of the assumption that it implies that you are prescribing unequal treatment, which is
#
often not the case, but often is the case with those maniacs on the alt-right and the men's rights
#
activists. Yes. So actually, there's a technical term for it. It's called pink collar jobs, which
#
is the job. Of course, it's called pink collar jobs. But the idea is that women are seen to be
#
doing certain type of jobs. And the sad part is they are trained to do those jobs, too. So it's a
#
vicious circle where you are trained to do the sort of thing you are expected to do. And therefore,
#
you end up doing just that. Right. Right. So exactly. And no, the point goes further ahead,
#
right? Like when government starts building its schemes and the skill India scheme that they came
#
up with, if you look for jobs that they, the skills that they taught for women were all stitching
#
parlour work and very stereotypical. This is official government thinking. Yeah, this is. So
#
government thinking basically coming from the society. Right. But it comes from the fact that
#
a lot of them would invest in. It's not like they are against women working, but they only see women
#
working in certain fields. So what that does is that then women have to compete for those similar,
#
those set of five jobs that are supposed to be female jobs. And then in that, the race, if you
#
do not get the job you like or the pay you like, then you end up coming out of the workforce rather
#
than continuing. And you might be a brilliant woman mathematician. Yes. Or have an aptitude for
#
whatever, for banking, but you'll never know because you're sitting at a sewing machine.
#
The Onion had this one article where they said you might be the prodigy violinist and
#
and you will never know because you never picked up a violin.
#
Which is poignant. I mean, it's not funny.
#
What are the other statistics that we have in crossing gender roles? Women teaching science,
#
Nidhi brought it up, you know, which is again, harks back to what Devika was saying that women
#
are supposed to teach humanities and arts and soft subjects. I'm going to actually disagree with this
#
because if we're just talking about this metric anecdotally, I had one male teacher through all
#
of high school. Teaching itself is a female oriented. Because teaching itself is female
#
oriented. Maybe if you're talking at a high school level, then there could still be a lot more women
#
teaching science. But if you're talking at a college or a professorial level, then you could
#
have a lot more men teaching. Also look at women who do STEM, like who study STEM subjects. Who
#
study STEM, who go on to become scientists, well known scientists, mathematicians. So to counter
#
your point, Hamsini, you countered the anecdote with an anecdote, but I'm going to counter it with another anecdote now.
#
Actually, in high schools as well, we've all had women teachers, but from what I understand,
#
women would teach more language and arts, whereas subjects like math, physics, PE, physical
#
education are all taught by men. So to me, I would feel that women have been empowered if there are
#
more women teaching physical education in schools, or if there are more women teaching math in high
#
schools, in universities, at all levels. No, I completely get your point. I still rest my case,
#
but I do understand where you're coming from when you're saying that we need to have more women
#
involved in all these areas that are seen as traditionally male. Yes, and you would see the
#
outcome when there are more than four women doing mechanical engineering in a class.
#
The outcome is the fact that you don't see your daughter as a mechanical engineer. So you do not,
#
and a lot of, so this is one more point that Namita in her series brought out, was that one
#
of the problems that they faced when they were trying to empower women was that a lot of decisions
#
for women are taken by someone else, which is not the similar case for men. After 18, a lot
#
of the decisions about career, about the city where they're living in, a lot of what they're
#
going to study, a lot of that is with men. But with women, the problem was that even if they were
#
educated, they had to get three permissions before they took their first job, and then two permissions
#
if the job required you to be staying out of home after six. So just that itself is a huge cost that
#
we do not calculate when we are trying to look at women joining the workforce. I was actually
#
thinking about this, just taking my school, right? There were, say, more girls who were topping the
#
class or subjects than there were boys. But now when I think about what all of them are doing,
#
I think two or three of them are working compared to like the one boy who did well and is now doing
#
his PhD in Penn State. So I don't think the disparity struck me until now, because you're
#
right. I don't think a lot of these women, either with their knowledge or without their knowledge,
#
they don't take these major decisions for themselves. The world is not open to them.
#
And also, I mean, your circles would have been relatively extremely privileged circles.
#
Outside of those, it's just like far powers.
#
I mean, just the very fact that in a government form, you have to write husband's name or father's
#
name in so many places is kind of mandatory.
#
So I had, it's a sad joke, but we were talking about women in science, right? In engineering
#
colleges, they're running because there are so few women in mechanical engineering and,
#
you know, materials engineering that they're actually called non-males.
#
So there are males in the class and there are non-males because they for sure can't be girls.
#
A suitable foundation for a dystopian novel on this delightful note.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break, but lots more after we come back.
#
Hey, it's been another great week on IVM podcast. If you're not following us on social media,
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please do. We're IVM podcast on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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Also, please do spread the word about podcasting.
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You are our biggest ambassadors. If you tell somebody to listen to a podcast,
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that is the way that we're going to grow this pace.
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This week on Simplified, the Simplified gang breaks down the fund of oil prices.
#
Why India pays so much for fuel.
#
This week on Cyrus's, Cyrus is joined by writer and film personality, Raj Grover.
#
He regales us with stories from partition and the heyday of Indian cinema of the fifties and sixties.
#
On the Prakriti podcast, Pawan and Humsani discuss the government regulations that make
#
the lives of restaurateurs difficult in Bangalore. They've got a really special guest.
#
Manu Chandra is on that along with Madhu Menon.
#
This week on IVM likes, IVM staffers, Janam, Abbas and Surbhi sit down and talk about movies
#
that didn't live up to the hype. Last week, the Rediscovery podcast went live with their fourth
#
season. Listen to the first episode as Ambika and Hoshna talk about quitting their jobs for traveling
#
and is it for everyone. On Shunya one this week, Shiladitya and I speak to Sairi Chahal.
#
She's the founder of Shiro's, which is India's largest online community for women.
#
This was another really, really interesting talk.
#
And with that, let's get you on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. We're discussing women transcending gender rules and
#
you know what the other examples given is women as drivers slash bouncers, which
#
gave, but I mean, I don't know where I have you guys ever seen any women bouncers?
#
But not just in India, nowhere.
#
Yeah. And here's a survey I'd like someone to take that if you're a man sitting on a plane
#
and the pilot announcement comes from a female voice, will you be a little more nervous?
#
It's a rhetorical question. Exactly. It's rhetorical. Not me at all, but multiple times
#
when I've been on the, in a cab in an Uber or so on, I've had the cab guy curse at a woman
#
and say, you know, woman driver, what can you explain?
#
I think the Bangalore Political Action Committee, BPAC, is actually training women to drive more
#
cars because that's a great way.
#
And I think the one great thing I've seen at least in Bangalore Metro is most of the metro
#
drivers are women. Yeah. So that speaks of, you know, it's a, that is a deliberate government
#
policy by the Bangalore Metro.
#
Oh, okay. So there are two things in this. One is just trying to understand how many women have
#
driving licenses, right? Like that itself is a good indicator of how many have access to,
#
leaving apart the fact that in India you can get a driving license without knowing how to drive.
#
But A, that B is how many single women use different transports in the sense flights or
#
metro, right? So in India, like you would see when you're traveling via a flight or via metro,
#
you would see most of the women have a co-passenger, which is mostly a man.
#
But the idea is that if you can see more women traveling alone, that's a good indicator of the
#
fact that A, they are empowered enough to move around freely. But the second thing is that a
#
lot of people who take flights are the ones who use it for business purposes and not for private.
#
That's the statistic. So if there are more single female riders or female passengers,
#
you realize that they are part of that, the higher.
#
In fact, Nitin Pai has suggested one of the metrics he's suggested was to see how many
#
women have Metro cards. Metro cards. Yes.
#
So it's not only social empowerment, but it's also the fact that they have the agency to go
#
search for jobs, for example. One thing that I was saying is that the line in an airport at the
#
women's section, for example, is always much, much longer. And that's just a design issue.
#
These airports are not designed for women. If they were, then these, we would not have to say.
#
There are like four gates for men. And one will be for women.
#
And like the women will also have kids with them.
#
By the way, so I once actually fought with one of those airport and I said, I want to stand in
#
this line because the other line for women is just so long. I have a flight to catch. Why can't you
#
just let me pass through this? I will stand with my hands out and you know, you're not anyways,
#
you know, frisking the guy. So you do what you're doing with me or call one of your
#
women colleagues here. And he just refused. He said, no, you have to go in the woman's line.
#
But he showed you your place in the line. Yeah. Yeah. So now to invert this,
#
we're talking about, you know, women transcending gender roles.
#
Are men transcending gender roles also metrics for the empowerment of women?
#
For example, Manoj K. V. Romani, who writes a brilliant I on China column in Prakriti,
#
which is quite the best thing in Prakriti, suggested a great metric. How many men cook
#
or do domestic work? Would this indicate women are being empowered?
#
Yes. So I'm going to draw attention to this friend's episode, where Ross and Rachel get
#
a male nanny, right? And they eventually fire him because that's how fundamentally insecure
#
Ross feels about this kind, qualified person who is working for him. Just because he's in a space
#
that he's really not accustomed to seeing men in. So I think, yeah, men taking other gender roles
#
is indicative. But there's also a thing that it's an economy of having lesser jobs.
#
Men will take whatever that comes their way, is what I think. What do you think, Dilka?
#
So one thing is the fact that men taking generally a female-oriented job
#
is an indicator of the fact that within the household, the dynamic is changing,
#
in the sense that if there is this thing called the decision burden, I don't know the exact name,
#
but the idea is that even though a man would clean dishes and do the three tasks you ask him to,
#
the managerial task is mental load. It's called the emotional load.
#
It's called the mental load. Yeah, that still stays. So that is one problem with that.
#
The other thing is that, as you mentioned, if you see more number of men as cooks around you,
#
that does not mean that, oh, now men want to become cooks and so the gender stereotype is
#
being broken. No, we have very little number of jobs to begin with and men are expected to go take
#
the job. Also, men are chefs and women are cooks. Yes, exactly. Men are chefs and women are cooks.
#
Even in a household, if men are cooks, they will not do the cleaning. The women will do the cleaning.
#
I've got to tell you, I don't do the cleaning in my household, but neither does my wife. We have a
#
maid who comes in and does it. A maid. A male maid. A non-male maid. So that's the idea, right?
#
You have actor and actress. You have terms for each of those professions, which had the dominant
#
male or female persons, but you don't have made and some like some female version of it.
#
Male servant. Male servant. Male servant is the house servant sort of guy who would stay with you.
#
The maids that come are all female. You don't have a male-maid term.
#
Maid in your head is a female word. Men as domestic help is also, I think Anupam has suggested this
#
metric and one very interesting and awesome metric, which is also easy to get data on,
#
which Nidhi, you suggested, was how many men download big basket apps? Yeah. So, you know,
#
the burden of doing grocery, not just deciding what to cook, but also getting all the ingredients
#
falls on women because, you know, that's how we divide the gender roles. But if you see if
#
a big basket app has been downloaded by men and they are using it, that tells you that the roles
#
are changing, that the women are being empowered. The men are also worrying about it. I think another
#
metric that I think would speak of women empowerment is fathers dropping and picking children up
#
on weekdays as well, not just on weekends and attending PTMs. So if parent-teacher meetings
#
are not just attended by mothers, but fathers, that also tells that they are taking part in
#
care work as well. And if it happens on a weekday, even more so because, hey, the mother also has a
#
job to go to. So sometimes it's the mother, sometimes it's the father. Nidhi, the first one.
#
I had a thing about the first thing. So a lot of e-commerce apps, my problem with counting them as
#
an indicator is that women do not use the e-commerce apps for the payment end of it. So
#
what you would do is you would have a phone because you're a man in the house. So you,
#
of course, have a phone. You would have the app. You would make your mother select what she needs
#
and then make the payment. She would not be told how to make the payment. I'm sure that's changing
#
and a lot of people will be like, no, we're teaching our parents how to do it. But of course,
#
just generally, if you have money enough to buy a phone for one of your parents,
#
it's generally the father. That's a great example of the scene in the unseen, like one metric which
#
seems to work, but it may not. I actually wanted to add to your second point. When you're taking
#
your daughter to school, I'm sure you'll see this, but now what I hear is that parent-teacher
#
meetings, schools send daily WhatsApp messages to all parents informing them of what homework
#
your kids have, which is horrible because now your parents know everything that you're up to.
#
But in most schools, the registered mobile number is always that of the mothers unless it is a
#
single parent household. Even if it is a family which is divorced and the child is staying with
#
her father, the registered number will still be that of the mother. Is it a good thing or a bad
#
thing? Because this would also indicate that mothers are more responsible. But do you want
#
mothers to be the... Do you want that responsibility? Who asked us to be responsible? So I think a
#
proxy is that if they actually go and pick up the child, or if they are going for these PTMs,
#
like I said, that shows that they are as involved in this care work and they might become the
#
emergency contact as well. Okay. I'm also going to counter that point because the way I look at it,
#
if you take a two-parent household where the mother is doing a lot of house work before she
#
goes to work, the father will drop the child because he can drop the child earlier and then
#
get to work. Whereas the woman will have to clean up after everyone has left home and only then will
#
she be able to begin the rest of her day. That's why I said if the father is also picking up the
#
child on a weekday. All right. That makes sense. That means they have to leave work and do it. So
#
if somebody has to pick up their child at 2 p.m., it means, hey, sometimes you do it, sometimes your
#
wife does it, which means that there is some equality. Darling, I was busy in office. Let's
#
kind of go back to our earlier metric. We have many metrics. So I don't know if we should even
#
go through it like this category by category since we've made them. Social empowerment of women,
#
number of male kids with the last child, women enrolling for Coursera. Nidhi, you suggested
#
women taking abortion decisions alone. Yeah. So one, there's a lot of sex selection,
#
right? So female children are generally aborted and then it comes from the family. So from the
#
husband or from the husband's father, mother. But if a woman is taking that decision independently,
#
one is that, you know, that woman decides I don't want to have this child, that is empowerment
#
itself and that she is responsible for her own health. Right. So sometimes actually this
#
aborting the female fetus also happens at a stage where it is dangerous
#
for the pregnant woman. Right. Right. And at that time, a woman by herself would not decide
#
to do it because it's danger to your own life. But if a woman's deciding before that term,
#
it tells you of a woman is empowered because she can take this decision now by herself that
#
whether she wants to risk her life or not, whether she wants a child or not,
#
irrespective of whether it's a male child or a male fetus. I'm majorly wary of that because
#
a lot of these decisions in Indian setup are taken by the family. And so see, again, that's why I
#
said that if it is decided by if a woman independently decides. Then it will go back to whether or not
#
women have free will. No, that's the thing, right? Coming back to the society. I think we agreed
#
that sort of this is a metric that is impossible to kind of get data on and women are mostly seen
#
as a means of. The other thing that Nadia mentioned was the sale of oral contraception. I think that
#
is a good indicator. Which is I control, you know, how I, when do I want to reproduce, right? So yes,
#
I want to be sexually active, but that doesn't mean that it is only for the purpose of reproducing.
#
And I want to control when I want to bear a child. And I think that's also women empowerment,
#
because you would see that in the, you know, in poor people, the age at which women bear children
#
is much lower than in, you know, people who are educated and. In fact, that's possibly another
#
metric, like the age at which you have the first child is alone. Because educated women and who
#
work tend to have children much later in life. And Hamsani, in this, I've got this another metric,
#
which you suggested, which I think is a fantastic metric for seeing how empowered women are,
#
which is the number of women in prison. Yes, the number of women in prison, simply because
#
first there is a very mother India attitude that we have towards women, right? And the second is
#
that if they are in prison, then they have been convicted. It shows that they have an agency to
#
do something. Even if that is a criminal act, they're going towards something. A second point
#
that I wanted to add to that, another metric that you can look at is the number of children in
#
prison, right? Because often what happens with women is that if they have children, there's no
#
is that if they have children, there's no one else to care for. Then generally these children get
#
sent to the prison where they grow up with their mother. You mean innocent children or mothers who
#
have been convicted grow up in prisons? Yes, in India. And you have a fact, Devika, about juvenile
#
homes, right? So the one of my colleagues, Sara, she was working on this topic before she joined
#
Taksha Sheila. And one of the crazy findings is that we do not have spaces for juvenile female
#
offenders. So instead of sending them to the jail, they're sent to the orphanages. So male
#
juveniles get sent to juvenile homes, female juveniles get sent to orphanages. I want you to
#
wrap your head around that for just a minute. But how are you linking this with women empowerment?
#
I'm sorry. No, this was a fun fact. Even your other metric about my children being in prison,
#
how are you? I think her broad point is that if more women are in prison, that's actually a sign
#
of women's empowerment, because these are women who are actually going out and doing something
#
instead of sitting at home. It's a proxy indicator. Yeah. And the fact that I think one of our
#
colleagues mentioned about white collar crimes. The thing is that this is fighting the stereotype
#
that women, again, going back to the fact that women are always right, so they will always be
#
empathetic. So they will always do the right thing. So they can't read the word news, right? This goes
#
beyond the fact that you realize that a lot of women are taking up professions which are legal
#
or illegal to and are considered to be a co-conspirator for something which they would
#
generally look for. So white collar crimes are great because it means that the woman is educated
#
and that she knows how to get around the system. So there have been studies which say that women
#
can be as corrupt as men if there is an opportunity. So there is absolutely no difference in attitude
#
of, you know, taking bribes in women and men if there is an opportunity. So since we're never
#
going to get rid of corruption in India, which brings us to our next category. It's a lovely
#
natural segue. The financial empowerment of women and some of the, like Anupam suggested,
#
two-wheeler and car ownership, which should be easy data. Which is an easy data. You have
#
data on how many women have ownership of assets. You can do that. There is bank accounts opened
#
under the woman's name. How many women commit credit card fraud? How many women have credit
#
cards and under their own names? How many pay their own credit card bills? How many women,
#
like Shivani mentioned, how many women pay their own phone bills? How many women take loans? How
#
many women take loans is a great one. One that Nitin mentioned was how many women do property
#
litigation? How many women have property in their names? To begin with. Yeah. And actually that may
#
also have a flip side in the sense that a lot of men will have their property in their rights.
#
But all of this drives back to the fact that financial independence is the core of women's
#
empowerment. One metric that I've been reading about is that I think 2% of the women in our
#
country live by themselves. Which is not a very difficult fact to believe, unless you're in one
#
of those really privileged elite circles, that it is true. Women rarely live amongst themselves,
#
by themselves. That is why it's so difficult for them to get flats to stay in if they're staying
#
without family and so on. The idea of bachelor girls, for example, is a very unpopular opinion
#
because it means that a woman is financially independent and therefore can do whatever she
#
wants socially because now she has agency to act. Coming back to the point that I made, this is my
#
definition of a woman empowerment. But to the point of the flip side of this entire conversation,
#
financial inclusion in India right now, if you look by numbers, might show a different picture
#
than they really are. For example, I might have a bank account on my name, but I do not even know
#
how to use a credit card or a debit card, right? So yes, households do have more than one bank
#
account and some of them are named account holders or women, but they do not make the decision.
#
Now this is a common argument and a well-known argument, right? My contention to this is that
#
this is what I see is a first step. That yes, right now, the account that has been opened
#
under the woman's name is of course not that woman's. But the idea that that woman knows that she
#
has to sign the paper if you want to take that money out of that account, at least gives a sense
#
of authority. Though it's highly overrated right now, most of the financial decisions in a household
#
are completely taken by a man. Like women are just meant to sign certain documents and that's it.
#
They do not get a call. Same thing with land ownership, right? That's generally tax evasion.
#
Didn't someone also mention that women signing their wills as one of the indicators,
#
which means that they have property and that they have the agency to actually then decide?
#
Not really. So they have property because their husband needed taxes. So I'll tell you,
#
this is a grim situation. I know I sound very pessimistic right now and a lot more women right
#
now have access and I agree. But mostly what happens is the man in the family decides who
#
gets to have what property or what asset on their name. The man decides what property would be named
#
after the female in the house for tax evasion or not for tax evasion or just for the distribution.
#
And then that person creates the document. The idea is that the woman still does not have access
#
because she does not create that will. She does not decide. In that sense, I also agree with you
#
because you have so many schemes for women, right? If women save, then it's better. You get tax breaks
#
and so on. What happens is that this is pure nominal representation. It's how political
#
representation and they're gamed by the men in the family. They're gamed by the men in the family,
#
right? Whenever this is my argument against saying, oh, you know, we have so many women,
#
panchayat heads in our country. And then I say, okay, how many of them are the wives, sisters,
#
mothers of men who have been panchayat heads or want to be panchayat heads? Then a good indicator
#
would be women heads of panchayats who do not have any family connections. Yes. And that would be
#
non-existent because who in politics currently? Okay. I want you to remember the women's
#
reservation bill that never got passed because on the day, the multiple days that it was supposed
#
to be passed, ministers, male ministers stood at the gate saying, go home unless you want to lose
#
power, do not come into the parliament to vote today. But again, the reservation doesn't work
#
really. Like I have a major problem with when we keep on saying, it's like Indian way of committee
#
banalo, right? Like just make a committee. If there is a concern in the country right now,
#
okay, just we have a committee, which is making a document on it. Did we ever implement it?
#
It's a cop out, right? Like, yes, I'll create 33% seats. There'll be three women at best,
#
two out of which would be there because their husbands were in politics.
#
The idea is that whenever we look at a solution from the suppliers end and not from the demand
#
end, this is coming back to economics in the sense that look at simple education, right?
#
Why are vouchers better than forcing schools to hire students from certain backgrounds? Because
#
yes, schools will hire that if you ask them to, but does that mean that those kids are getting
#
that sort of exposure that you expect them to have? Not necessarily. Instead of they get to choose.
#
So a huge debate in education sector right now is that should we give vouchers to students and
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let them choose whatever school they want? Or should we just create enough government schools
#
around? And the answer generally comes out is government school, which is a bad idea.
#
You want to empower the children.
#
Yeah, you want to empower them to make the decision and give the same level of quality
#
that the rest of the people have, right? So similarly, if you come to the entire thing
#
of parliament, right? You will create a 33% reservation and yes, for first two years,
#
you'll be like four women will enter and be like, what a success. We have four women in the parliament.
#
But does that mean that on the grassroot, we'll have more women standing up for elections?
#
And also what I think is reservations are also, aren't they a very patriarchal solution? It's
#
like say, we'll give you so many seats. Rather than that, you want women to stand up and say,
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we'll take the seat, who are you going to give it to?
#
Exactly. We'll stand for elections in the thing.
#
So the idea is that there are 50% reservations, right? One good metric would be to see how many
#
villages have beyond 50% reservation in representation.
#
I think another metric would also be if, so let's say, but this will have to be done in a longer
#
time frame. So let's say you had reservations for 10 years or 20 years wherein, you know, so whatever,
#
10%, 30% women reservation was that after that, after the sunset clause, how did it pan out?
#
Did actually women continue to get more seats? We never see the sunset of these clauses.
#
I'm going to point out another thing that's here, right? Whenever this is in politics,
#
again, in terms of representation, women taking women like decisions. So you say, okay, we have
#
elected Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi. And yes, they're women. And that's great. Sure.
#
But either considered to be strong leaders because they emanate male masculine qualities.
#
But I'll contradict that.
#
No, no, no. What I'm saying is that is one idea that exists. And the second is what have they
#
actually done for women empowerment? What policies? What?
#
I'd actually argue that I'm a big fan of Margaret Thatcher. I think she did a lot. I think Indira
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Gandhi was an absolute monster and completely the opposite. Sorry, what were you saying?
#
So no, complete the line of thought.
#
No, that was Amit's point.
#
Okay. So my point is that two things. One is look at it from a meta angle.
#
We correlate all the dominant decision-making says that Nidhi had mentioned, right? The hard
#
decisions to a male sort of thinking. If you are prime minister of a country and you, in whatever
#
perspective, I'm not taking sides, thought that, okay, emergency is the call of the day.
#
It's not a manly decision. It's the decision that person took at that given point of time.
#
She was thinking like a person. The decisions that you take at such positions are generally
#
hard decisions. You won't be making soft decisions like, should I go have vanilla ice cream or not?
#
And they are almost all have very high cost benefit attached to them. So none of them are
#
easy decisions. So at this moment, if you think that they didn't act in a womanly manner when
#
they were taking a decision, it's a stereotype that you are thinking.
#
I both kind of agree and disagree. I agree in the sense that yes, that I don't think gender
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has much to do with that. She was driven by a lust for power. Whatever it takes to get power,
#
I will do it. But I also think it's true. And going back to biology is that I think
#
men are hardwired to lust for power more than women are quite simply. And therefore it might
#
seem that women who lust for power are behaving in a manly way. And not all of this is socially
#
constructed. Some of it is biological as well. Yeah, it is biological as well. But I mean,
#
they feed into each other and our job as members of society and people who are contributing to
#
culture is to mitigate all these inequalities of human nature, which involves also not denying them.
#
But regardless, I mean, I basically agree. But one of the indicators that we had mentioned was
#
number of women standing in elections or head of states. Other than that, a number of women
#
related issues in political manifestos, right, when parties are coming up with elections.
#
Which is a great metric because you think half your voters are women.
#
So then they do only prohibition. That's done completely for women,
#
almost in all states. And that's literally counterproductive.
#
Yeah, that is. And the other one is they give you money if you're getting married,
#
right? In Karnataka, I think there's also a scheme. If you get married, they will give you money,
#
which I think is the most useless allocation of a state's resource, if there was one.
#
Have smart ladies tried to game that? It seems like you can make a lot of money by
#
rising to a career in policy. Have you ever considered getting married?
#
What a career, it's a job. Let's move on. So we've done social
#
empowerment. Sure. We have done financial empowerment and they feed into each other.
#
Sexual empowerment. One metric you suggested was how many women go and buy condoms.
#
Yeah. So if you know, right now it's the men who are supposed to kind of have the condom with them
#
or go buy because also, by the way, I don't know if you know this, if I were to go and buy
#
sanitary napkins in a pharmacy, they would wrap it in paper, put it in a black
#
polythene because it can't be shown. That's the taboo associated with buying sanitary napkins.
#
Now, if as a woman, I go and buy condoms, you know, that's just abominable. How can I,
#
how can I be sexually active? So I think if more women go and buy condoms, it speaks of empowerment
#
and it speaks of changing attitudes. Absolutely. Maybe we can get AI to look at CCTV
#
footages of pharmacies. Another proxy could be, and I don't have any data on this, but number of
#
sex toys designed for women. Lovely. Yeah. So that would talk of, you were just saying that,
#
okay, women also can do this for pleasure. But is there a sex toy culture at all in India?
#
For example, even men don't use sex toys, right? There are actually sites for women's sex toys also,
#
by the way. And actually women would need sex toys more because it's women who tend to be
#
more unsatisfied. Yeah. I was actually thinking on your first example, one of my friends to
#
mitigate the fact that she had to go to a pharmacy, decided to use one of those apps that would deliver
#
home stuff. So then when the person came and she opened the door, the delivery boy was staring at
#
her as though, you know, an explosion occurred and then she was just like, okay. And then he
#
smiles very sweetly and she got very, very creeped out. But the idea is that even if you're using
#
delivery services for this, the judgment completely exists. And that's in fact another metric. How many
#
of these delivery people are male as opposed to female? I mean, Shibani suggested how many women
#
are on Tinder. You said the same thing at the same time. Yeah, because there is also the idea that
#
there are far fewer women on dating apps than men. And this is very normal that like on Tinder,
#
for example, men would swipe 50 times, whereas a woman will match with anyone who she swipes with
#
simply because there are those few women. So men compensate for the emotional labor women go through
#
in a relationship with some physical labor at the start of it. I think also that we are lesser in
#
number in general. It's just absolute numbers that are lesser women than men. Not by so much.
#
That, and also the idea that a woman actually going out and saying, I don't want an arranged
#
marriage. I'm looking for having sex with a total stranger itself seems like a very counterintuitive
#
idea to a lot of people, right? So being on a dating app automatically indicates that you're
#
there because you're looking for something. And I guess that in a sort of way is empowerment.
#
And also it tells you something about how men look at the women they meet on dating apps.
#
Yeah. So it's like, Oh, okay. So if I meet her on Tinder, I'm not going to marry her. Though I know
#
for a couple of Tinder marriages, but you know, that's moving on to, I think the last category,
#
but the biggest category, I mean, encompasses a lot women given space dash respect by men,
#
which could be something as simple as getting rid of manuals, where you have more women on panels
#
and you try to have as much diversity as you can, or it could be women in top positions that.
#
Yeah. So this is, this is a data I have finally. The number of startup founders or co-founders in
#
2015 in India, the female of them were just 9%. And what was it earlier? Like, do we have a sense
#
of what that is? Must be much more. Must be much more. But I think Devika actually had
#
at one point in time. I don't know if your opinion has changed on this now that you don't look at
#
putting together a manual. You should not get a token woman on board. I have felt like a token
#
woman and I don't like that. I, because see now the criteria for a woman is if you look at a panel
#
and you invite it, you look for another female because otherwise you're the token female then
#
are you there because you are so good in your field or are you there because they did not want
#
So this becomes a game theory problem. It's like if there are two potato chips, everyone will take
#
the last one, the second last one, but not the last one. It creates an adequate problem.
#
I actually have been running the policy course for so long. And frankly, like in long time that
#
I have been conducting workshops where we call speakers have consciously never thought of the
#
person from the gender and still managed to get really accomplished female academician speakers
#
on all topics. But the idea that the moment you degrade me to my gender rather than my
#
qualification, somehow I find it very insulting that if let's say Hamsini is called on the table
#
because you know, we are talking about international relations and there are only four women in the
#
country who talk about international relations. She has written one article. Okay. She's done
#
nothing. She's just written one article. That's a hypothetical example. She's written much more than that.
#
And as an editor, I know what an expert she is. But what they were saying is that it's unfair to me
#
as an academician that you put my gender before you put my work. So the other side of that is,
#
yeah, so I buy the argument that when you're putting together a panel, you should not condescend
#
to women by having a token woman. But the other side to that is, and this is a revelation I've
#
got from reading Philip Tetlock's great book, Super Forecasting, and it's backed up everywhere,
#
is that the best decision making, that good decision making correlates with diversity,
#
the greater the diversity in any group which is making decisions. So therefore, not for reasons
#
of tokenism or representation, but just from reasons of efficiency of you should normatively
#
try to make a group as diverse as possible without resorting to tokenism. And I think there is also
#
merit in saying that once you have a woman on the panel, I agree to all your points,
#
it creates some aspiration among people who are watching. So other girls who are trying to study
#
international relations, if they see another woman up there, she might be there only for tokenism.
#
But everyone else who's watching, there is this aspirational aspect that, hey, even I can be there
#
someday. And that's how you kind of change the whole ecosystem around this. Similarly for sports,
#
right? If I never see any world-class badminton players as a girl when I'm in my teens and I've
#
just started to learn to play badminton, I would think, well, I can never get there. But if
#
PD Sindhu can be there, if Saina can be there, then I know that here I stand as much a chance
#
to do better in badminton in India as the boys, because I see these role models. And those role
#
models might have had a very tough journey, right? And that's a fantastic point. And I'll take a
#
quick detour here. I wrote a profile of Sakshi Malik a couple of years ago, a long feature on
#
her after she won the Olympic medal. And the question that I wanted to explore, and it really
#
interested me, was how come in the most misogynistic state in this country, which is Haryana, you have
#
so many female wrestlers coming up, what is traditionally a mancy. And the reason for that,
#
and the reason for that was pure patriarchy. The reason for that is that around the late 70s,
#
early 80s, there were these former wrestlers who were now coaches who didn't happen to have sons,
#
they had daughters. And suddenly they found that wrestling has become a medal sport.
#
So it was a way of achieving their aspirations in wrestling, but because they didn't have sons,
#
here you got to do it with the daughters. And that kind of happened to create a culture of
#
wrestling in Haryana. But what that means, as you correctly pointed out, is that regardless of how
#
these women got there, they can still be role models for girls. I think one thing is that just
#
seeing women in public spaces, seeing women in private spaces where you have not seen them
#
before itself has an aspirational quality, which is why one of the earlier metrics that we came up
#
with is the number of girls in public sports fields. This is not about kinship, but the idea
#
is that women are present on your mind space. And I think that itself will provide the diversity in
#
decision making or just in the way society looks at so many things. Wherever you're listening to
#
this, if you just go out on the street in the middle of a day and look around, I'll tell you
#
a lot. I remember I toured through Pakistan when I was covering the cricket tour in 2006.
#
And I remember going to Peshawar and a bunch of us went out and one of us was a girl and she was
#
literally the only girl we saw that evening. In crowded streets, we went on food walks,
#
we had kebabs, we did things. Just one, the only woman in the place was the non-male.
#
And you see this difference, I think even in different parts of cities and different
#
localities. There are localities where you know as a female, you're not supposed to be around there
#
after certain hours. So yeah, coming back to the complete circle of my point, which, and this is
#
where the other argument wins, right? Like I would be that token woman. So as an individual, I might
#
be like, what am I doing here? I completely agree. It has social benefits for the future. The same
#
thing as converting all the sentences where we used he earlier, we have started using she pronouns
#
as she's. I actually had a problem with that when it started. And then I realized, okay, this is the
#
same thing, right? Like when your example is a very male oriented example, and then you see she as
#
the pronoun being used, then you're like, okay, maybe as far as possible, by the way, I try to
#
use she. I mean, it's, it's interesting for me. For me, a lot of these things don't come naturally
#
as an answer because I try to break the gender barrier in my thought process itself. So if I was
#
a man, would I be asking myself these questions? And no. So why am I asking myself these questions
#
as a female, right? Like a man who goes on a panel does not question his credibility as a female.
#
When you go to a panel, you are like, am I here because I did well or am I here because they
#
didn't find a woman other than me? And that really bothers me a lot. But I do see like,
#
like going back to Amit's point about biology and psychology of women, I think I've heard of
#
these studies where they say that when a woman looks into the mirror, she would think, oh, how
#
I'm not perfect. And you know, I need to do this to make myself look better, as opposed to a man
#
when he looks into the mirror, he sees this perfect, handsome. All of you are sitting and
#
looking at me and laughing, which doesn't do much for my self-esteem. And also how women always
#
undersell themselves. And men always oversell themselves, not just in CVs, but also when they
#
go to interviews, a woman would think a thousand times. But Nidhi, is that biological or is that
#
social? I don't think it's that social. You know, what I would say is that all of us men or women
#
are hardwired to be self-delusional because that is the only way we can survive in this world.
#
And I think that the fact that women often in such situations lack confidence or are questioning
#
themselves all the time, I think that's more of a social thing. And it's a very sad reflection.
#
Exactly. For example, if you take negotiations for salaries, I actually was reading an article
#
which was talking about the United States of America, but the idea that women negotiate
#
far less for salaries than men do. And just intuitively, this made a lot of sense for me,
#
because I see women as underselling themselves. And I see that as a social construct. I don't
#
see that as them putting their self-worth lower just because they're... And again, it goes back
#
to what, you know, my friend Uday said, what are you optimizing for? And girls are taught to optimize
#
for, you know, pleasantness and acceptability and assertiveness is a bad thing. Yeah, totally. I'm not
#
saying that comes biologically. I'm just saying that is how it is. Psychologically, somehow we've
#
been cultured and we've been, you know, we are told that you undersell and it's okay to undersell
#
yourself. As long as you're getting the things done. So I think one of the indicators of women
#
empowerment would also be how many women are into the high paying jobs. Right. And is there
#
parity in what a woman CEO earns and what a man earns? Short answer, no.
#
I mean, that data we do have. Moving on with, you know, the subject of women given space, respect by
#
men, Anupam, your fellow economist friend, Devika came up with generic products that keep women in
#
mind. That was my recent crib on social media where if you see phone sizes, they're just getting
#
bigger. The pockets for female clothing and I think that the revolution in feminism is going to start with pockets.
#
This is a metric Yazad Jaal suggested pockets in women's traditional clothes. Like now you can
#
buy silvars which have pockets, for example. Not just traditionally, even western, a lot of
#
women's trousers don't have pockets. Or they have pockets that are so small that nothing will fit
#
into it. For a key or at best a key. That's the size. Not a 10 rupee note. Yeah, not a 10 rupee note.
#
Because your job is to be an adornment. You don't need function. No, because they're selling me this
#
other product called a purse or a bag. And how will they sell me a purse or a bag if I can keep
#
everything on myself. I have a log. This is an entire podcast in itself. So the idea is that women
#
pay something called the pink tax. Just because there are toys or basic things from razors to
#
whatever. If it's in pink, it costs more. And this is true across a variety of products.
#
Wow, the pink premium. It's called the pink tax. So if you take razors, for example, and you compare
#
the male and female razors, the pink one will cost you twice as much, even though it is the same thing
#
with the same blade. But it's pink, you guys. And the crazy thing is before the 1970s, actually,
#
the colors were reversed. Blue was for girls and pink was for guys. You know, another one that we
#
were discussing earlier, another metric is air conditioning. You know, men and women feel cold
#
at different temperatures. And air conditioning was invented and then evolved and became commonplace
#
in the 50s and 60s when workplaces were full of men with the token non-male. And therefore,
#
18 degrees. And the standard air conditioning temperature evolved at a temperature that men
#
are comfortable with, but women feel too cold. And it would be interesting to see if that's
#
changing today. So if you see women around you constantly wearing like shawls or jackets and
#
they're complaining of feeling cold, tell them that the society has been gaslighting them for
#
years now. You're not cold. I'll tell you something which is less of a premium product than like an
#
AC. If you look at local trains in Bombay, the handles which you can hold are usually put out at
#
average height of a man, which is taller than an average height of a woman. Even in the women's
#
compartment. Yes, even in the women's compartment. Because they create compartments at the same time,
#
right? Like then they paint it pink. But before that, it's the same compartment. So most of the
#
women, because of the average height being really shorter, cannot reach the top handle. It's
#
completely pointless for them. So if you are creating an entire compartment for women,
#
other than painting it pink, why don't make the handles a bit lower in like longer in height?
#
I had the similar point about bathrooms. Have you noticed how always the lines to women's
#
bathrooms are long? It's because they're not designed. They have so much space. They will
#
allocate the same amount of space to men's toilets and women's toilets. We can let's not get into
#
gendering of toilets at all. But the idea is that it's not designed for women. It's not designed
#
keeping them in mind at all. And how about pressure cookers are not designed? Prestige pressure
#
cookers, which Nitin jokingly suggested, you know, the sale of prestige pressure cookers as a
#
metric because of what was that line? Will you tell us in your sonorous voice, Nitin?
#
Exactly. And they should be used in the context of men buying pressure cookers to cook for their
#
wives. How are pressure cookers not painted pink is beyond me. Like they are sold completely as
#
female products. They should just paint it pink so that we know it's for us. Otherwise, how do we
#
know it's not for us? Like, you know, it's, we are not that smart. So now two of you have meetings to
#
get to when we'll have to wind this podcast up soon. So I'll, I'll sort of just by, you know,
#
in general, I have been hopeful about the culture changing, you know, in the same way that for
#
example, when section 377 got abolished recently, all I saw and perhaps this is selection bias
#
because of people have what I follow on social media and all that. But all I saw was an outpouring
#
of joy. And there wasn't much of the bigotry and hatred and homophobia that I would have expected
#
maybe a couple of decades ago or even in the eighties when I was growing up, which seemed
#
to reflect to me genuine social change or you should open the Twitter thread rather than just
#
reading the abuse lies below that. Yeah. So, and, and I would have assumed that the same kind of
#
social change is happening for women, but am I wrong? I mean, are there, are you generally
#
optimistic or pessimistic? What gives you hope? What gives you despair about the state of women
#
in India? And we'll start with you, Devika. Okay. I am optimistic, frankly, I maybe because from
#
the background that I come from, I have mostly got whatever I wanted without having too much of
#
an issue when it came to access. Yeah, right. Like I'm, as we call them the one person, right.
#
But even the one person then faces the entire point of you can't leave home pop post eight,
#
you have to keep on calling your parents wherever you are, which men are not expected to. So these
#
are, but I look at them as not such so important an issue as I would look at the aid, the drastically
#
falling rate of women employment. I think that's a really big concern. And not all of it is frankly
#
forced. Some of it is voluntary, but that is a very little number. And no one's looking at it
#
seriously. We, we look at women issues as tokens. So yes, we will always have like two people who
#
made it to the top, but they did made it despite the system. That's a survivorship bias. Exactly.
#
That's a survivorship bias. Right. So I am optimistic to the fact that the social conversations
#
have started changing. The parents which were vary of their daughters working are now fine with them
#
working for certain given restrictions and set up, which is always a better move. So on that note,
#
I'm positive about it, but I would not consider small changes in like if a first woman,
#
prime minister or a president of United States to be a major change. I think that's just,
#
that's just token female there. How much like Bangladesh has always had a female state of
#
head, but you see somebody's wife, somebody's daughter, and that's the thing, right? Like women
#
are not seen as individuals. They're seen as somebody, some male person's relative.
#
I'm waiting for the day when Shoaib Malik's goes a century and the headline is Sania Mirza's husband.
#
Yesterday I actually saw a tweet that said Deepika Pallewa's husband is going to board right now.
#
And I was like, who's Deepika Pallewa's husband? I was like, okay then. A fine squash player in her
#
own right. How dare you. You're giving me a name, but yeah, I'm one word answer. I'm optimistic. I
#
think social conversations are changing. Nidhi, what about you? I'm optimistic as well that you
#
see so many women going out to work and that you have, you were able to very quickly gather together
#
this panel, tells you that there are enough women now who can talk about their own issues,
#
who can voice their issues. I'm hopeful also because there are now women in decision-making
#
positions. So they're not just being told what to do and how to do, but they're actually deciding
#
what to do and how to do. And for states, if you're looking at the state machinery, it might be
#
tokenism, but look at the private players. Look at big corporations. Of course, it's still not
#
equal to the number of men in decision-making positions, but at least women are climbing up
#
the ladder as well. And at some point you'll reach an inflection point where it'll tip, right?
#
And then what makes me despair is that there is still not equality. There's no parity between
#
what is, you know, you expect more from women than you do from the same, from men in those positions.
#
You give lesser to women, you pay them lesser than you would to a man. So that's what makes
#
me despair, but I'm absolutely hopeful that, you know, we are going to see more and more women
#
being empowered. It's a long journey. Hamsini? I despair. I do. I'll tell you what. A friend of
#
mine and I were talking and he said, you know, if you could live in any century before this,
#
when would you live? And I said, are you crazy? As a woman, why would I want to live in any
#
century before this? This is the best time to live, you know, technologically than ever before.
#
And if I had to live earlier as a woman, it would simply be worse. But just because our time now is
#
better than earlier doesn't mean it's a good time to live. Just because we're more equal now than
#
we were 20 years ago doesn't mean we're equal. We're not. And this goes beyond equality in what
#
I see as you may win this battle, but you have to fight another one. The way I look at women's issues
#
often is that you're just constantly fighting till you figure out what you want and how to get that
#
and not worry about other things because your bandwidth as a human being is limited, right?
#
And after a while, you're just angry at the world for taking so much away from you.
#
So I would like to believe in a world where we're moving towards parity. But I also know
#
that this is not something that will be achievable in any of our lifetimes. And I'm sorry for that.
#
No, that's fine. And that kind of reminds me of, you know, how as a man, I can take my gender for
#
granted and you can't. It's a constant presence and a constant fight. Before I thank you all, Nidhi,
#
would you like to, you know, three of you work at Takshashila, which is a place which has some
#
amazing women policy scholars and women students whom you train. So would you like to talk a little
#
bit about your courses? Thanks, Amit. You say public policy is essentially about how governments
#
decisions are made and implemented. And as aware and engaged Indian citizens, we must understand
#
how India's domestic and foreign policies affect each one of us. At the Takshashila institution,
#
we have programs on offer for those who want to, you know, just get their feet wet and test the
#
waters, but also for those who are serious about a career in public policy and politics.
#
That said, even if you don't want to enter politics, knowledge of public policy is essential in,
#
you know, today's times. And this is why we've made sure that you can take our courses from
#
anywhere and while working. Maybe you're a student planning to take the UPSC exam.
#
Maybe you're a Teach for India fellow. Maybe you want to join a political party.
#
Maybe your job requires you to engage with the government machinery. Or maybe you just really
#
want to participate in India's transformation. We encourage you to check out our courses at
#
www.takshashila.org.in slash education. That's takshashila.org.in slash education.
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Hamsini, Nidhi, Devika, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thanks.
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Thank you. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do follow all my guests on Twitter.
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Hamsini is at Hamsini H. Nidhi is at Nidhi 1902, which is a year of her birth. And Devika is at
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Devika Kher. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A and you can browse past
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episodes of The Scene and the Unseen on www.sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
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Do you have a night routine? Well, everyone has one. And the to-do list usually looks like this.
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Brush your teeth, set that alarm, get into your pajamas and switch off those screens.
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But here's one more to add to that list. Tune into the Positively Unlimited Podcast
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for a dose of positive action and tips on how to build powerful mindsets.
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Why don't we talk about mental illness? For that matter, we don't even talk about emotional wellness.
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And if we can't talk about either of these basic, very basic aspects of being human,
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what do we do when we just feel like something's not right?
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Hi, I'm Zayn. And I'm Avanti. And this is Marbles Lost and Found, a show where we invite
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conversations about mental health and illness and just get people to talk about it because it's okay
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to do so. Catch Marbles Lost and Found every Tuesday on the IVM app, website or anywhere
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you get your podcasts from.
