<b>Rahul Jacob:</b> The game men play well

We may be at the bottom of Olympics medals tally, but chauvinism is a game Indian men play very well

“Since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented… Let us make the attempt; even if it is doomed to failure.”
-- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

 

Last summer, Mc-Donald’s invited 50 parents to one of its outlets in Goa to a meal, largely to reassure them that it was okay for their daughters to be working outside their homes. The company has female confidantes so that young employees have a mentor when they have problems at work or at home. Yum Brands, which runs Pizza Hut and KFC, pays recruiters a higher commission for women candidates. Now, more than 40 per cent of its managers are women, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. 

Within days of admiring this uplifting article, I was reading of the molestation of young women in Bengaluru on New Year’s Eve. Bengaluru is also a city where as far back as two decades ago, most of the account managers were women in the bank my parents frequented. It remains a city with a large female workforce. Yet, it is just when women begin to “assert” themselves in the most everyday ways — by going to work, by driving, by choosing non-traditional attire, by making their voices heard on Facebook where Indian men outnumber women by a ratio of 3:1 — that the pushback begins. It is precisely their empowerment that makes so many Indian males feel insecure. We may be at the bottom of Olympics medals tables, but male chauvinism is a game Indian men play very well.

This is all too apparent in the barbaric, uniformly male attacks on Gurmehar Kaur’s moving video of pacifism. It is less than five minutes long and yet must rank as one of the most profound anti-war works of art. Virginia Woolf, who wrote Three Guineas as an inherently connected argument for pacifism and feminism, would have applauded. Kaur’s video has revelations such as her attempt as a six-year-old to stab a woman in a burqa while making the irrefutable point that Germany and France have put two World Wars behind them to be allies today yet at least the YouTube version I watched had had fewer than 5,000 views. It appears to have been more satisfying to thump one’s chest and lecture Kaur on patriotism on Twitter and threaten her with rape and death than to listen to her.

We see this also in Karan Johar’s dismissive criticism of Kangana Ranaut for playing “the victim card”. To put this in perspective, an entitled, hugely successful film director who hosts a talk show appears to have found it intolerable to be challenged by an articulate guest, who happened to be a successful actor. A reflexive chauvinism was apparent also in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s glib comment in 2014 that women needed to have faith that the system would give them the right raise — when all evidence points to the contrary in the US and elsewhere. Nadella at least had the grace to apologise profusely afterwards. 

The evidence that India’s bias against women cuts across caste and income divisions is everywhere around us. We have, along with Saudi Arabia, among the lowest proportions of women who work outside the home. Our infant mortality rates, entwined with women’s health, put us below the levels of Yemen and Kenya. A Bloomberg columnist noted a couple of days ago that Bangladesh is on its way to catching up with the poorer southern US states on human development indicators. In India, women have much lower access to female contraceptives than one would expect in a country with 1.2 billion people that has aspirations to be a 21st century superpower.

One of the most distressing things about living in India, even as a privileged male, is listening to women talk about the levels of harassment that is part of their lives. The exceptionally articulate woman who took on the lease of my old apartment had to tell the infamously lecherous head of her organisation that her parents were waiting for her downstairs when she found herself summoned to his office late on Saturday evening. A usually unflappable young colleague came to work one day looking glum after an auto-rickshaw driver responded to her telling him off for ogling by giving her a lecture on her (conservative) Western attire.

As McDonald’s and KFC have found, the 21st century workplace is a better place when it has more women in it. They are better suited to the managerial skills required today for team-building and empathy. For more than half my career, charismatic women bosses have inspired me. The first editor I pitched stories to at this paper’s Kolkata office in the mid-1980s was a woman. My first chief of reporters at Fortune in New York was a wisecracking woman named Evey Benjamin, who still writes me encouraging emails. The writer I most admired at the magazine was Carol Loomis, who told us that there was no shame as a business reporter in saying in an interview, “I don’t understand. Please explain that again.” Both had been part of a generation who sued Time Inc, the owner of Fortune, for discriminating against women decades earlier. It may take another hundred years here, but change is possible.