Women's Day: Celebrating the struggle beyond the bias

Swati Maliwal

Shruti Kaushik

Sangeeta Agarwal

Shireen Quadri

Parneet Kaur

We have discussed it all — reproductive rights, abortion, dowry, workplace inequality, financial disparity, relationships, rape — International Women’s Day is a day to look back in anger, but with pride too. Chills run down our spine when we recall the First wave South Asian feminist Kamala Bhasin’s call for women to break all shackles and build a new world — “Tod tod ke bandhanon ko dekho behne aati hai… aayengi zulm mitayengi… yeh to naya zamaana laayengi.”

Sangeeta Agarwal, who is perhaps the country’s first woman to head a professional, public listed, stockbroking company as its MD way back in the 1980s says, “Challenges were plentiful. Initially, acceptability was a big challenge. Clients had never ever interacted with a woman stockbroker before. Many times I was refused appointments because I was a woman. Today, things have changed and women are preferred over men in many fields. It’s a long way to go.” Dehradun-based Shruti Kaushik, who started an NGO — Saheli Trust in 2013, believes that revolutionary movements like women empowerment can’t change things overnight. She goes on to share, “The first step must be to acknowledge women’s contribution to the economic sphere and create more opportunities for them. Society is gradually developing a sense that when they are trying to provide equal education to a boy and a girl, they cannot judge a woman based on the fact that she also wants to work after marriage or she wants her husband or brother to chip in with home chores as well. I am now surrounded by young women and men who want their single parent to get married again and I am proud to see this glimpse of change.”

Clouds of commercialisation

International Women’s Day is a global event, which defines its purpose as “celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements
of women” and bringing a “call to action for accelerating gender parity.” In recent years, however, the PR surrounding the day has veered into a full commercial furore. It’s hard to ignore the buzz! Nishtha Yadav, an HR professional in a Bengaluru-based multinational, says, “Perhaps instead of a discount on hair spas, we could have free annual library memberships for young girls. Or how about discounts on educational courses for female university students?” “The significance of the day and the larger issue of advancing gender equality, get drowned out in the noise that is largely made on the day. Often, what is doled out on this day is tokenism. There is no talk of concrete action or policy intervention. Sadly, the celebration is hyped up and people remain limited to symbolism. Beyond that, not much is being done to bring major changes at the grassroots level and beyond. Women, whether in villages, small towns or big cities, continue to struggle with the same old issues in their daily lives. While we talk of all kinds of development and are going towards Meta, NFT, VR and AI...the condition of women has not changed as drastically as it should have in the past several decades,” says Shireen Quadri, entrepreneur and founder of The Punch Magazine, an independent arts and culture publication. Swati Maliwal, Chairperson of Delhi Commission for Women, says: “Social media is playing a huge role these days in campaigns. From Arab springs to Anna Andolan to even the recent farmers’ protests, social media increased the momentum of these and many other movements. Earlier, the government was many times able to contain the spread of information regarding protests, but now that is impossible to do. People are able to come together as a virtual community and rally behind social causes. It’s a great medium to reach out to people and use creative campaigns to drive home a point. That said, social media has its own issues, especially on the young minds that need to be dealt with.”

The struggle is on

“Women have reached the topmost positions in all the fields but the struggle to get there still continues. Even today, women form a minuscule part of the Parliament. So, we need to work much more to be a truly inclusive society,” adds Swati. India has slipped 28 places and has been ranked 140th among 156 nations participating in the rankings on the WEF Gender Gap Index, 2021. It is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. “I recently saw this episode of Shark Tank India where a woman, legally adult, was not allowed to carry on her business as they think women are meant for “inside spaces” and “outside” is for men. What we fail to understand is that such extreme binaries are only thoughts that exist in hollow. Women, even today, face an extreme amount of subordination from the opposite gender, and from the same gender as well (we’ve seen older women subordinating the younger of their own gender). This happens because we’ve stored our older thoughts and we are not letting them go.

The typical example is workplace harassment that women are facing in modern society where bias in terms of salary, position, promotions, etc., exists despite favourable government laws,” says Parneet Kaur, 21, an English Honours student at Delhi University. "Our annual women’s workforce participation is plummeting. Moreover, the pandemic did not help as there has been an alarming rise in domestic abuse," she adds.