On the right side of 'Herstory'

Women are largely invisible in the business landscape. Shaili Chopra's book, featuring their stories of entrepreneurship, shines a light on their role in society and brings them out of the shadows

Sisterhood Economy: Of, By, For Wo(men)

Author: Shaili Chopra

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 258

Price: Rs 599

While putting together a special issue on 75 years of Independence that celebrated the contributions of India Inc with a hat tip to 75 business personalities, a stark question jumped out of my list: Where were the women? It is a fact. The business landscape has been dominated by men — no doubt some truly remarkable ones, the doyens without whom the India story would be incomplete. In recent years, though, a smattering of women has started to become visible on this landscape. A majority, however, continues to work in the shadows. What are their stories?

It was precisely this question that led to Shaili Chopra’s book, Sisterhood Economy: Of, By, For Wo(men). And much before this book, it was this very question that led to her career shift in 2012: From a television journalist covering business news to an entrepreneur running a digital media website called SheThePeople that would focus purely on women-related news, issues and entertainment.

The invisibleness of women hit Ms Chopra with a force she could not ignore while she was on her way back from what would be any business journalist’s dream assignment: An interview with Warren Buffett. “Buffett,” she writes in the book, “was the 276th man I had interviewed. Where were the women?”

Sisterhood Economy is a response to that question. It is a spotlight that aspires to drive away this invisibleness.

Ms Chopra sets out to tell their stories, through interviews with 500-plus women — and some men, conversations with whom speak of how they view women’s role, place and responsibilities in society. These aren’t stories of women only from the cities. The book cuts across regions, class and caste. It also does not restrict itself to women of a certain age group.

The writer begins by trying to understand why women view themselves as less and are, therefore, willing to settle for less: Less salary, rights, opportunities... The starting point, of course, is the conditioning from childhood, with parents squarely to blame for their biases and discriminatory, myopic view of gender roles. And also those societal expectations where marriage, home and children take precedence over a woman’s desires, qualifications, competence, talent and dreams.

You could flip through the pages of Ms Chopra’s book and say, “Oh, I know that story. I’ve heard it aaaall too often.” The women’s names change. Their stories don’t. Whether it’s a woman desperately trying to allow her parents to let her study, doing one course after the other, and even a PhD, just to delay the inevitable — marriage. Or to land a good marriage, at her parents’ insistence. Or whether it’s a woman watching her husband repeatedly take her mother-in-law’s side over hers and asking her to adjust. Or whether it’s one setting up a small business so that she may make some money of her own and also get away from an abusive husband for those few hours in a day.

Familiar stories — all of them. So well-known that they’re no longer interesting. That in itself should worry us as a society — and also as an economy, which is not tapping into this latent force. Ms Chopra quotes a McKinsey report that says, “India could add up to $770 billion — more than 18 per cent — to its GDP by 2025, simply by giving equal opportunities to women.”

So what is this book? Is it a rant? No. But it is a complaint against the way things are. By covering various aspects of women’s lives — childhood, housework, marriage, singlehood, in-laws, dowry, health, sexuality and pleasure, relationship with money, divorce, technology as a window to liberation — Ms Chopra holds up the mirror to the many-layered Indian society and also to women. The message is as simple as it is complex: That every woman needs just one person to not give up on her — and that person is herself.

Some women’s realities may even seem unreal to other women. Like this one: “Many women talk about how their first [health] check-up happens once they are pregnant.”
 

Sisterhood Economy isn’t just a book of despair. It is also one of hope — which springs, as it should, from women’s own accounts.

In the very first chapter, for instance, is the story of 20-year-old Pragya Ganesh Lohan, Maharashtra’s Raigad district’s first woman carpenter. She got into carpentry when her father was looking for a partner and asked her if she would join him. There’s also the story of Shweta Katti, who grew up in a Mumbai brothel at Kamathipura — yes, the area in which the film Gangubai Kathiawadi is set. Katti went on to bag a full scholarship from New York’s Bard College. And there are stories of the many women, mostly from lower socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, who found empowerment through the beauty parlour economy (there’s a whole chapter on this). The rising number of women investors and the efforts to gain financial literacy all point to positive movements.

But the book also has flaws, including some factual slips. Ms Chopra writes, “Esther Duflo is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize”, which is incorrect. Malala Yousafzai is the youngest, winning it at 17. Ms Duflo, at 46, was the youngest to win a Nobel in economics.

The book’s title, which chooses to go with the spelling “wo(men)”, reminds of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories where he goes with “womyn”. Mr Garner turned those tales on their head. Ms Chopra aspires to do the same — as do millions of women, some by quietly but consistently chipping away the walls; others by going for it hammer and tongs. The bra-burners. The suffragettes. The women of Iran. The women who dared to drive on the roads of Saudi Arabia before the country relented. The women who took a bullet in the head for women’s education. The women in our homes and in our neighbourboods… Chip away. Hammer on.