An NDTV news bulletin once spent a fair amount of airtime on a foreign news feed of Barack Obama in swimwear frolicking in the sea off Hawaii. As the camera focused on the presidential abs and pecs, the anchor earnestly informed us that Obama was taking his first vacation as president of the United States. Then, as she signed off she grinned and said her producer, also a woman, considered this footage the best part of the programme.
It was a light-hearted moment, good for a giggle. But suppose the US president had been a lady with a figure as impressive as Obama’s physique, and a male anchor and producer had made similar jokes. Would those have been viewed as light-hearted or sexist?
The reason for the question is that a couple of months ago, on the same channel, a magazine editor participating in a TV debate facetiously told a female participant that her picture appeared on a cover because she was “pretty”. He was sharply reminded by the anchor – a woman – that this was a sexist remark. Was it?
Grey areas like this will increasingly emerge as rapid expansion compels corporate India to employ more women in a variety of executive positions. And increasingly, it will force managements to rethink and reinterpret the rules of engagement in the workplace.
Women’s rights advocates may consider this a strange thing to write considering that women’s participation in white collar jobs in India is still depressingly low and the famous glass ceiling has scarcely thinned (though, happily, it has cracked in a few places). Indeed, gender relations in the Indian workplace today swing between the buccaneering chauvinism of the Mad Men variety and the impossibly puritanical.
But the point is this. There are more and more sectors of the economy in which women’s participation at every level is significantly higher than it was, say, when economic reforms in India began. Financial services, IT and advertising are the most noticed ones, but even the former so-called “manly” professions such as manufacturing, hotel management and media (including sports reporting) have seen a gender revolution of no mean proportions.
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This means that the old terms of engagement between the genders have altered significantly too. To be sure, this is tricky ground. Our sexual harassment laws are about 14 years old (the result of a Supreme Court judgment Visakha versus State of Rajasthan in 1997) and they lay down fairly strict boundaries. The judgment was certainly landmark in that it redefined sexual harassment as not just rape or assault but as unwelcome sexually determined behaviour such as physical contact, a demand for sexual favours, showing pornography, and other “verbal or non-verbal” conduct of a sexual nature (which would probably include off-colour jokes, lewd remarks and so on).
But these rules set, at best, the obvious and proforma limits. In my submission, the issue now is less about setting new rules than developing new levels of sensitivity. For instance, it is probably still in the fitness of things that sexual harassment is viewed from the prism of women. That is why the majority of representatives on sexual harassment committees are required to be women. But men in corporations that employ a significant number of women point out that what is often considered engaging political incorrectness or even acceptable behaviour in women can be construed as sexual harassment or plain sexism in men.
For instance, a male manager ruffling the hair of a younger female colleague would be considered an unambiguous case of harassment, if the latter chose to complain. But a woman manager ruffling the hair of a younger male colleague; is that motherly behaviour or harassment? Strictly under the law, the latter interpretation would apply of course, but the point is that the issue rarely comes up for complaint by men for fear of ridicule.
This in no way suggests that women should participate in or encourage blatant locker-room humour or the sexism of male colleagues. But it is equally unfair for them to expect men to exercise a restraint from which they consider themselves exempt. The dividing line between rights and entitlement is a fine one and admittedly hard to define, but it is an HR issue that managements are destined to struggle with, the faster India grows.