Hard-sell on Women's Day

The anniversary has become a commercialised event

The celebration of International Women’s Day, which falls today, started over a century ago, building on a commemoration of a national women's day in the US when garment workers struck work to protest their working conditions. About 40 years ago, the United Nations put it on the annual calendar as a means of fostering awareness about gender equality and women’s empowerment. The idea is well meaning, but the hard fact is that the commemoration has not sparked genuine social change. A recent UN report acknowledges that not only has progress towards gender equality been slow but no country — not even uber-progressive Scandinavian countries — has achieved it. If anything, says the UN report, growing inequality, climate change, and exclusionary politics are rapidly reversing any hard-won advances. Worse, sexism pervades both sexes: A survey showed that 90 per cent of people — both men and women — are prejudiced against women.

These inconvenient truths would be evident to anyone with a minimum awareness of public affairs. Less acknowledged is the insidious undermining of the import of International Women’s Day by the corporate sector and its vast public relations machine. For companies, this day is no different from Valentine's Day, Diwali, Mother’s Day, or all those other special “Days” that Hallmark invented to sell its cards and cutesy bric-a-brac. In the weeks leading up to March 8, women’s mailboxes will be stuffed with commercial “offers” — new brands of cosmetics to discover the “woman in you”, discounts on shoes, garments, and, to complete the stereotype, home appliances. At its best, this overt commercialisation can be considered a benign form of sexism. What harm can it do when it offers women an opportunity to take advantage of marketing offers, or so this line of argument runs. The issue is more subtle: It reinforces the sum of formulaic clichés imposed on women by society at large and feeds into standard prejudices about women, which range from their image as airhead fashionistas to the sole executors of domestic/household work.

There are two other opportunistic elements to this process. The first is the promotion of “women achievers”. This is the time of the year when it is possible to discover all manner of women in all walks of life who, their PR outfits insist, have “broken the glass ceiling” and/or “succeeded against the odds in a man’s world”. No one should undermine these achievements, but singling women out in this way only serves to underline gender differences rather than mainstream women in the workplace. Such gender-based self-promotion runs the risk of reducing the approach to women’s issues to tokenism. The company law stipulation that all companies above a certain listing threshold have at least one woman as board director is a case in point. The intent behind this rule is sincere but the impact has been negligible as far as expanding the ranks of women in senior corporate positions is concerned.

Tokenism has also spilled over into the second element of Women’s Day opportunism. This comes from the world of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has expanded ever since the CSR mandate was introduced. Every Women’s Day offers an opportunity for corporations to showcase programmes to “empower” women, mostly poor women, through various “livelihood” schemes. The intensity of CSR promotion on this head has not been matched, however, by any significant alteration in the plight of India’s poorer women. Ironically, it is women who have taken the brunt of rising unemployment, with their participation rate falling from a low of 35 per cent in 2005 to 24 per cent after demonetisation and the crash timetable for goods and services tax. There is perhaps little that companies can do about such unique, policy-driven disempowerment. But in marketing their own empowerment programmes, they end up making a mockery of a very real crisis.