I recently read this news piece about police felicitating the first female auto driver in Bundelkhand. I felt nice reading the headline, but then I found myself thinking – why is this such a big deal still. We still ‘celebrate’ women’s representation and find ways to somehow treat this as unusual and special. This attitude is one of the reasons that women’s presence in professional spheres; public spaces on the whole continues to be the exception and not the rule.
I have received one single solitary grocery delivery from a woman some months back from a popular online supermarket. I was pleasantly surprised and said as much to her, but this never happened before or since. It is still rare to find women driving public transport and if we do ever see this, it is in the more progressive cities and regions only. In other words, women are still largely absent from India’s workforce in many professional spheres. If we see women drivers, delivery persons etc., this still surprises and even shocks us. I personally have never encountered a woman plumber, carpenter, or electrician.
This is also why we have news stories like this one, where token female representation will be turned into some sort of PR event. It becaomes little more than a photo-op for some or other government scheme and some official /elected representative gets to spout homilies about “her attempts to become self-independent” (sic). Today, this woman became an auto driver, but do the conditions exist for her to safely and comfortably continue to be one? Is she forever going to be one token anomaly, or will other women be permitted to be “self-independent”?
Employment is empowerment. However Indian women have traditionally been relegated to unpaid caregiving roles and kept out of the labour force. The situation is actually getting worse, not better. India’s female labour participation rate in India was about 26% in 2005 but this fell to 20.3% in 2019. In our society, it is bizarre that women’s employment rates actually fall when family prosperity rises. Women are ‘allowed’ to work not for their own economic empowerment, but depending upon the perceived family requirement. The family ‘status’ is still seen as being somehow lowered if the women of the family ‘need’ to work outside the home.
During the pandemic things just got worse, and women fell out of the workforce in a far greater proportion than men. Many employers would choose to retain/reemploy male rather than female employees. A lot of women running tailoring businesses, salons or small shops were so badly hurt that they’ve had to shut shop as well.
The fact is that all our public spaces are so completely male dominated and that women continue to feel unsafe and uncomfortable in them. They are simply not designed for women or while keeping women in mind. Women out and about, outdoors late at night is still something that society frowns on. It is a vicious circle – there are few women around, so other women feel uncomfortable in public spaces, which further discourages women claiming those public spaces.
We need to increase representation in professions we traditionally only see men in. The more women are around, the more confident other women will feel and the safer those spaces are for women. Further, if we do see more skilled women in various professional spheres, traditional families will be more comfortable with women taking up such jobs. In other words, we need to normalise women’s participation in professions, skilled jobs and in hitherto male dominated professions. More women must step out of homes and normalise being in public spaces.
All the ‘felicitations’ and snappily named government schemes seem to be making little difference on the ground. In fact, they serve only to call attention to the fact that women in such roles are the exception and certainly not the rule. Women in these roles still feel incongruous and decision makers in the family will continue to forbid women from taking up such jobs. The circumscribing of women’s ability to earn and be economically self-sufficient will continue.
Putting into place effective safeguards, improving working conditions, ensuring that men and women are equally paid will create genuine change. Ensuring that more women are skilled and able to enter the workforce will be truly empowering. Quite simply, there is safety in numbers. However, this requires planning, investment and long-term effort – photo-ops are so much easier.
Do you have something interesting you would like to share? Write to us at [email protected]
