Hurray for the race towards equality! Gender equality in particular. The equality effort has been yielding, slowly but surely.
The journey though, of the archetypical nurturers playing on equal footing with the proverbial providers, hasn’t come without collateral damage.
The contemporary woman – she changes diapers as she closes a business deal, bakes a cake as she catches a con-call, picks up groceries as she parades back home from work. All-round perfection? Or double jeopardy?
She does all things she’s been traditionally doing, alongside everything she has to do to prove herself equal in capacity and capability to men. Which, as if it isn’t already an unfair yardstick, for most women isn’t an alternative but an add-on. So she ends up a multitasker, a superwoman, an all-rounder, fatigued, tired, overwhelmed. She is pressured to perform in a world that makes her misery her merit, her grief her glory, exposing a deep malaise; a society failing to recognise that the very essence of equality is difference.
The premise of equality rests on recognising and respecting the difference between people and considering their inherent diversity as equally essential in the functioning of the world as we know it.
Nurturing and providing are two sides of a complete picture. Take either out and the picture pales. Regardless of who wears which hat, we must credit them for what they bring to the table. The problem worsens when media – movies, TV soaps and adverts unwittingly celebrate this double whammy, all the while thinking they are contributing to progressive thought.
The Airtel advert where the woman is a demanding boss to her husband at work and goes back home to cook up a full dinner for him is unreal, unfair, and unequal. Airtel’s work stereotypes, unlike Ariel’s #sharetheload and P&G’s #thankyoumom campaigns that offer support and recognition.
Ladies, you can only be the boss lady at work if you are also the slave lady at home! This pressure of the ‘also’’ is awful. This broadening of roles is schizophrenic.
We want equality; how about if a woman brings in the dough, she needn’t knead it also. Or, if a man takes care of the home, he needn’t provide for it also.
The root problem is a society not recognizing that ‘sitting at home’ (What does that term even mean? Who sits at home?) is an actual, real and legitimate job to which we need to ascribe a monetary value just as we do to any other job. Nurturing is just as strenuous as hunting. Why monetarily reward one and take the other for granted?
Economics has been the source of inequality in all aspects of world politics; gender politics isn’t an exception. Truth is, homemakers, regardless of their gender, should be entitled to an equal share in the revenues of the incoming salary in the household.
Now, it just so happens that most women are better homemakers. Intellectual hara-kiri as it may be in times where ‘Is the woman’s place only in the kitchen’ is the liberal-feminist war cry, I ask, so what if it is? Why is it something to be apologetic about?
Women are built differently. They can make babies, men can’t. This biological benefit alongside others arguably makes women ‘biologically’ more suitable for nurturing. On the other hand, there are women I’ve known who don’t have a maternal bone in their body.
Biology is not the only marker in deriving a person’s worldview. Why, biology doesn’t even always make its mark on each and every individual uniformly! Yes, each woman can biologically have babies. But other traits are subject to variation. For instance, most women are shorter than most men, but also many are not. And most men have a better spatial understanding, but there are some women who’ll parallel park with a blindfold!
A person’s worldview is not just a biological blueprint. It is a confluence of physiology, psychology, upbringing, environment, education! Whatever a person’s biological pre-disposition, his or her personal choice should be the only index by which he or she should decide his or her role, nurturing or providing.
If a woman’s choice is to fly a fighter plane, so be it. And if it is to make paper planes for her kids instead, so be it. Just don’t make the fighter pilot go back home and make the paper planes also.
If a man’s choice is to build a home, so be it. If it is to make it pretty, so be it. Just don’t make the builder be the designer too.
These images of ‘super moms’ and ‘super dads’ can be, for some, an effortless personal prerogative, but as prescribed performance, they stifle and suffocate.
True equality will be when we celebrate the either/or, regardless of gender tags, for what they bring to the table and not put the pressure of the also. True equality will be when we monetise what the nurturer does at home, which, I suspect when you put a number on what she does, might add up to a number as high, or in fact, much more than that of the ‘Chief Wage Earner’, pointing towards a surprising side to the equality debate: Is it possible that if at all, in this difference between men and women, it is the women who may be, just may be a notch superior?
That’s another debate. For another time.
The author is member of strategic planning council, DDB Mudra Group and national planning head, DDB Mudra
