The Women Whom Mainstream Feminism Forgot

                                                               

Suddenly, the Indian media has discovered "working women".  There's a deluge of articles in the print media, TV shows,  and an explosion of social media handles and entities centering the "working woman". Most of this discourse is focused on the "empowerment" of working women. You'd be forgiven if you thought we'd been intentionally hiding all this time!

However, look a bit more closely, and you would discover that this definition of "working women" is largely confined to a certain category of : those working in offices or corporations, in well paying jobs. 

This should surprise nobody. Women with money of their own, and cash to spare, are now a big part of the consumer segment. It therefore makes sense for any business to focus on them - and the media is most certainly one! And middle and upper class feminists are lapping up this attention.

Don't get me wrong. Gender inequalities dog women every step of the way, and the higher up the ladder a woman travels, the tougher it gets for her. Sample these stats from a Catalyst report : 
1. Women earn 65% of what their male colleagues earn for the same work. 
2. The more educated a woman is, the wider the gender pay gap.
3. The gender pay gap increases as women advance in their careers.

Most businesses now employ a fair number of women. And the women who succeed in these fields, often work the buddy system system, just as men do. They come from families of privilege and they know how to leverage contacts.

But look closer. The victories that these women forge, are propped up on emotional and care work being performed on their behalf, by other, less paid women. 

Behind every successful man, so goes the adage, there's a woman,  usually his wife-cum-housekeeper-cum-baby-producer. Women continue to do more housework than men by overwhelming numbers. 

But with more women working outside the home in paid jobs, behind every successful woman there's a housekeeper, a maid, a cook. In all probability,  poorly paid and badly treated as Nivedita Menon writes. 

In the most important bastion of female subjugation, the home, the woman continues to slog away, marginalized. We've simply elevated one set of women and replaced it by another, less advantaged one. Yet, we lament endlessly about the lack of labour participation of women. This discourse cuts out working class women who don't belong to the upper or middle class. 

When the motivation is solely profit, humans are the first casualty.  Patriarchy has kept women tied to home and to caregiving work, yet this labour is not factored into wages. When called in to work, women are paid less, their work is deemed less valuable, then they are blamed for lowering wages. Capitalism and patriarchy work in tandem. 

All emotional work and a lot of care work is unpaid. Women continue to perform this labour unappreciated.
Close to two thirds of adult women  in India while away their most productive years engaged only in housework- uncounted, unpaid. 

Let's look at some other numbers. As more than 67% of all rural Indian households depend on firewood for cooking, every year Indian women spend 374 hours collecting firewood. 

Even as men flock to cities in search of better livelihoods, women left behind turn to the fields for sustenance. The number of women in agriculture has steadily increased, yet more of them are now labourers, tending to the lands of others with no land to their own names.

What is work? Economists say, only that which can contribute monetarily to the economy, can be counted in the GDP as work. When women stay home to raise babies it's decried as a loss to the GDP but nobody asks, without new members to add to the workforce, without children, where would your GDP be? Yet childcare continues to be devalued. 

The labour of women- productive and reproductive continues to run our families, our society and indeed our whole nation. Women keep the wheels of our national economy running. Feminism aims to improve the lot of all women, more so the marginalized, those away from the mainstream. We are nowhere near achieving that. 

And we are not even talking about these women in our public discourse. We mainstream feminists have left these working class women out in the cold. 

The light bouncing off the glass ceiling has left us so awestruck that it's been distracting us from looking at the women at the bottom of the pile, under the ladder. The real work of working towards a more humane and just society for all women hasn't even begun. 

Caregiving and Paid Work

How often have you heard the argument that women would be better off, and the cause of their empowerment greatly furthered, only if they worked? Even the most well meaning women and often men -read privileged, and blinded by it- will say it with all the emphasis at their disposal. Implicit in the statement, is the assumption that women normally don't "work"!

                                                   Picture: image courtesy UN WOMEN
                               
Going outside the home to work, and being compensated monetarily for that work, is quite a recent development in human history. The idea of work outside the home, monetised, is less then a hundred and fifty odd years old.  

So much of our lives are determined by money- the having of it, the ability to spend it and save it. - the consequence that if you don't have enough of it, or don't earn it at all, you are not worth much, is only to be expected.

 Since the work such as cooking, cleaning, washing, care giving, child rearing and care of the elderly and the infirm, generally considered women's work is not valued monetarily, it's fallout is the undervaluing of women's lives. Proof, if it were needed, is in this piece in Huffingtonpost India  saying that Indian women do ten times the unpaid work that men do.

One is likely to think, at this juncture, what's to stop a woman from going out to work? Many women are doing just that. But when it comes to women it all gets massively complicated. Because uterus, eggs, new humans. 

Having babies and furthering one's family- and the human race, by extension- would logically seem to be in the interests of men, too; a father is, after all, as much a parent as a mother. Yet the structures of patriarchy have been so constructed that over centuries, childcare and nurturing has been relegated to women and now they are deemed to be specialists at the job. A job that keeps them at home, unpaid and undervalued. 

If you read women's magazines you may be familiar with that rare beast, the "work-life balance". This struggle is restricted to a very small segment of the Indian population, women born into privilege, who were afforded an education and then could exercise the option to pursue a career. Yet many of these women had to opt out of flourishing and highly successful careers, specially when they had their children, as told in this recent story in Quartz. Like I said, uterus, eggs, new humans. 

Needless to say, men need make no such attempt at balance because the life part is well taken care of for them and they are free to look into their careers with single minded focus. If they do pitch in with care work, they earn extra brownie points for it. Women, on the other hand, even when earning an income outside the home, are saddled with child rearing and care giving. Men are encouraged and expected to seek partners with less earning capacity than themselves for this reason.

There's a website with pretences to feminism which goes by the tagline: "for women who do". Left unnamed, presumably, is the category of the millions of women who don't.  Of course, house work doesn't count as work. When the media does centre women, it talks to them condescendingly.

Not unsurprisingly,when the talk does veer to getting women into paying jobs the purpose is to boost the economy. Here's an example from CNBC.com that says why women should be allowed to do more paid work as it could be a huge boost to the economy. So even when there is an acknowledgement that a woman can't just up and walk out of her home into a job, no thought seems to be given to look into the hurdles in the way. The economy is centred, not the woman.

In summing up :
1. Large numbers of educated women stay home or give up jobs once they get married or especially once they have babies.
2. Women who were working outside the home, but cease to do so after marriage, do so either because their husbands or in-laws will not allow them as it's beneath their dignity or because the jobs available aren't well paying enough.
3. Women stop working outside the home after childbirth due to lack of proper child care facilities.

A few suggestions.
1. Give monetary support to mothers or other care givers. A fixed amount, per child or elder who needs full time care. This will add value to the care giving work, while making the obtaining of the supplies needed for taking care of the child or elderly. 
2. Encourage employers to provide child care facilities to their employees. 
3. Paternity leave should be extended and made mandatory. Child rearing should be as much a man's job as a woman's if you really wanted to bring the child into the world.
4. We could tie this up with added incentives for parents having a girl child. This kind of a gesture could also be of great symbolic value. Let's not forget that we have an abysmal sex ratio at birth. 

Post script: Only 933 girls are born for every 1000 boys in India as per the Government of India 2011 Census. The causes of that and its repercussions are a matter for another discussion, another day.