Do glass ceilings exist only in professional spaces? Look around and think again! Glass ceilings exist everywhere: In professional, social, emotional, physical and material contexts as constructs to subvert female views and ideas, needs and desires, egos and identities.
We bring up our boys and girls in an all-pervasive misogynist culture, where boys are raised to entitlement and girls to submission. Sometimes, it is subtle and, at other times, explicit in both the formal education mores at school and the verbal and social transmission of education in homes.
“Boys will be boys” is the idea used as a dictum for the normalisation of several things. For instance, boys’ sexuality blossoming too rapidly in middle school is a topic parents shy away from considering. The boy enters a box of rehearsed patriarchal learning and a script to abide by for the rest of his life which tells him that licence for sexual activities is to be taken for granted. It teaches him that once “the adolescent sex drive is triggered”, even he himself isn’t responsible for where it leads him to and that taking “no” for an answer is an impossibility.
The normalisation of a licentious, free-wheeling sexual exploration, that is allowed and acceptable for boys, creates a position of the male as the active and the female as the passive. However, female sexuality is taboo, if explored by the female herself. It is only to be at the mercy of men, to be tampered with or even exploited. Hence, there exists the huge pop culture industry in India normalising phallocentric language in songs and erasing the need for “consent” in the portrayal of man-woman relationships in movies: “kudiyon ka laga hai buffet, jo chahiye, karlo choose”.
Girls and boys grow up singing these songs and unconsciously plotting in their consciousness the notion of women being “meat” for display, for objectification, for “physical gratification”, for “lustful enjoyment” as it were, and a “piece of flesh” which has no right to say “no”, thus rehearsing the same patriarchal script of rules over and over again. Young girls if found to be consuming adult literature are penalised hard, but for young boys, parents look the other way for the same so-called “violation” committed, because “it’s just a part of growing up”. “Boys will be boys”, after all!
In other words, patriarchy is not promoted and preserved by the man alone. The woman too, in her own way, contributes heavily through the various inhibitions, social mores, folklore, customs and glass ceilings which she religiously holds on to as a “normal” in her life, besides teaching her daughter to accept the same as a given in hers, instead of something to be shattered and done away with. Therefore, it is no wonder that the battle for women’s equality is mired in so many obstacles, when a woman’s mother, mother-in-law, neighbour, grandmother, sister, aunt, teacher, and boss are up against her, simply because she dares to dream of achieving everything that a man is capable of.
Many argue that equality is slowly and steadily making its way into our lives, citing how the gender divide is tilting in favour of the fairer sex, especially in urban India. Is that so? Equal doesn’t necessarily mean identical. A woman and man are essentially different in their sensibilities, physiologies, social and emotional aspirations, even in terms of the yardstick of professional gratification and hence it is not as simple as just switching a man with a woman and vice versa, while overlooking the immense responsibility every woman is also occupied with generally, whether mentally or physically or on the home front.
Equalising a woman to liken a man in terms of cloning his ways of working or simply exchanging gender roles is just another way of reiterating patriarchy. And that is neither equality, nor liberation for women. A woman needs to be treated as a “human equal”, not a “man equal”—and our professional spaces, both public and private, are still far from it. Male subordinates still cringe while taking orders from female bosses, especially if they are in technical fields and the female boss hails from general administration. Females are also expected to be nice and humble, and not behave in a matter-of-fact manner and professionally in their work spaces and are even criticised for possessing these qualities, whereas a male boss is deified for being curt and “professional”. Glass ceilings are being shattered by women painstakingly in the professional world, but what about the glass ceilings that exist in the patriarchal minds of both men and women? Is there a way to shatter those?
The answer lies perhaps in education and social awareness, where the media has a big role to play. Education needs to encompass more life skills like conflict management, critical thinking, communication skills, problem solving, emotional intelligence, stress management, sex education, etc, rather than rote academic skills. Education needs to aim at nurturing humane and human equals rather than clones of each other in the name of equals. Misogyny is a mindset that is embedded in childhood through lesser and under-dignified chores and routines reserved for daughters. Females are only regarded as passive bearers of everything sanctimonious or paradoxically unholy on earth. Hence, all slangs and cuss words are shaped after them, abusing their body parts. Thus, education, instead of helping in perpetuating the status quo, needs to purge itself of these blemishes and emerge as a bridge between the different sexes—male, female, transgender—to help build a stronger nation.
In this regard, the media needs to promote idols who have shattered the glass ceiling in different fields: Social workers like Kailash Satyarthi, who has been working for the cause of children for decades, and Harish Sadani of MAVA (Men Against Violence and Abuse), who has been working relentlessly for women’s causes, coaches like Pullela Gopichand, who mentors super girls like P.V. Sindhu, and fathers like Mahavir Singh Phogat and Harvir Singh Nehwal, who raised daughters like the wrestler Phogat sisters and shuttler Saina Nehwal. The media needs to reiterate their vision and portray instances of equality that is achievable and worth emulating, instead of only the utopian mirage of urban prototypes in nightclubs with no holds barred on intoxicants and excesses or the placard-brandishing feminists who cry foul at the very mention of the word “man”—both of whom are an exaggeration and an exception in a country where the heart still resides in small towns and villages where patriarchy is still the order of the day unfortunately.
Sophocles had said in his famous tragedy, Antigone, “If my body is enslaved, still my mind is free.” For women, things will look up only when she herself learns to look up, when she learns to unshackle her mind and think in terms of solutions to problems instead of avoidance or endurance of them, for the biggest of battles are first won in the mind.
Two things that can make her think along those lines are education (both vocational and academic) and economic independence, however miniature in form and structure it may be, because with every penny she earns, she earns much more in terms of self-confidence, courage, and dignity of labour. The various educational and vocational training provisions of the government therefore need to orient themselves to serve that end, whereby it is important that the authorities do not treat this as an isolated women’s issue but as a family welfare issue since the woman is the nucleus of the family unit. Her physical and mental wellbeing affects the family at the micro level and the nation at the macro level. The concerned authorities should, therefore, envisage long-term and short-term programmes enabling the rural family unit to emancipate organically as a whole, and not by imposing some utopian hired foreign model upon them for quick magical results. The emancipation should also be “organic” because India is a heterogeneous society with variant social, economic, cultural and political ambient features which play very significant roles in determining the success or failure of such schemes and operations.
The way forward is through collaboration. The emancipation of woman is not possible without the emancipation of man. As women aim to shatter the glass ceilings outside in professional spaces, men need to look inwards and shatter the glass ceilings of prejudice, regressive conventions and patriarchy that often exist in their mind spaces.
Debaroopa Bhattacharyya is founder and editor-in-chief of Tribe Tomorrow Network. The views expressed are personal.