Why should International Women’s Day Matter?

I recall a panel of alumna during last year’s International Women’s Day celebrations at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where I teach. After the panelists had responded to the moderator’s questions, the session was opened up to the audience. Suddenly, a man rose from the audience and aggressively started questioning why only women had been included in the panel. He went on a tirade claiming that the tables had been turned and how men were at a disadvantage now; diversity hiring, for instance, was favoring women. He shared in great detail the inordinate pressures on men to earn and be providers.

What really bothered me was that several of our male students started clapping, apparently endorsing the ill-founded charges and claims of the young man. I wanted our young students to understand that there were reasons why we still needed to champion girls and women. So, I got up, and challenged his assumptions explaining that, until very recently, we had been subjected to "manels”, and nobody even noticed – forefronting males was the default in public and workspaces, invisibilizing women who had to “manufacture respectability” to justify their presence outside the home. I drew his attention to the fact that women and girls have been disadvantaged for long by India’s “son-preference” culture, which showed up in simple indicators like life expectancy, infant and child mortality and highly skewed sex ratios due to the sex-selective abortion of female fetuses.

According to the demographer P.M. Kulkarni, about four million Indian girls, ages 0-6 were missing from the population during the 2011 census. Of these, 2.5 million were missing due to gender-biased sex selection (pre-natal discrimination) and 1.5 million due to excess female mortality (post-natal discrimination). What could be a starker sign of gender inequality than being deprived of the right to be born or not surviving infancy?

India’s sex ratio at birth (female to male births) is still skewed against girls and this is why it is critical that concerted efforts need to be maintained to reverse this gender discrimination that starts even before a girl is born.

Some indicators for girls and women have reversed and  gender gaps have narrowed or even equalized in the last decade. For instance, female life expectancy has surpassed that of males (as is true across the world but wasn’t the case in India until recently) and the infant mortality rates for female and male children are much lower and nearly equal now. 

Despite the improvements, girls remain disadvantaged in several respects. While there is heartening news on school education regarding inclusion and performance, with women breaking the barriers in higher education, surpassing males - a silent revolution - no doubt, we still see inequalities in education with more men pursuing lucrative professional courses such in engineering and technology, law, and management. In contrast, more women are found in the sciences, arts, and humanities. 

Women’s disproportionate share of household and care responsibilities has reduced their participation in the labour force, leaving them underappreciated and subject to lesser rights and freedoms. India’s Time Use Survey (2019) showed that while women spent 289 minutes a day in unpaid domestic services for household members, men spent only 88 minutes. Women also spent nearly twice the amount of time on care duties compared to males. These numbers show us that the battle for gender equality is far from won.

Yet, a report I did for the UNFPA in 2019 with Taanya Kapoor, showed that parents' attitudes towards female children were slowly transforming, with more and more equal opportunities being provided to daughters. "I used to think – That, so what if I study, I will still just be married off. Because eventually everyone just gets married off. Then here [in school] I learned that marriage is not everything, that I can have a life of my own. I can become anything I want.”- Arti Singh, Prerna Girls School Alumna. (U. Sahni 2017). Data shows us that girls from across regions, ethnicities, castes and tribes benefit from formal education and this improves  intersectional inclusion. This is a heartening development.

While son preference persists and male children continue to benefit from it, girls and women earn hard-won respect through their diligence, better performance in education and providing care for the younger and older generations.  Parents today are proud of their daughters’ educational performance and pursuit of prestigious careers. “When I got into IIT, my parents were so excited they threw a party, invited all neighbours and cut a cake. My mother is so proud of me that every time she introduces me to someone at any gathering, she ensures that she mentions I am studying in IIT.”- Female respondent, 21, from an IIT (April 2019)

As Nisha Dhawan showed in her impressive doctoral thesis on “The case for women in non-traditional livelihoods: A sociological inquiry”, women entering historically male-dominated careers such as cab driving, wo(manning) petrol pumps, taking up professions such as carpentry, working as an electrician, disrupt patriarchal structures. She underlines that change needs to be at the structural level even as individual women break out of a fossilized gendering of work as male or female, which excludes women from pursuing many types of careers.

EMpower’s work with adolescent girls equips girls to dream of and pursue independent lives and careers – it helps them develop “capabilities” underlined by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, as key to voice, agency and empowerment. With capabilities, girls break patriarchal moulds; it has been marvellous to watch the  girls from the adolescent girls learning community develop skills to strike paths for themselves and become leaders in their own right. As a member of the India Advisory Council, I am thrilled to see girls from the EMpower’s Girls Advisory Council, attend board meetings, make programmatic presentations and offer their advice to.

These  girls, budding into young women, will be role models in their communities showing others that “nothing is impossible”. They light the way to new imaginaries of girlhood and womanhood, challenging norms and reshaping expectations. In doing so, they create space for a world where girls and women are valued fully, not in comparison to anyone else, but for who they are. This International Women’s Day, let us accelerate action on making our daughters’ dreams come true!