How educated urban working women risk losing empowerment

Some may contest that celebrating International Women's Day and organising a plethora of panels on the occasion is tokenism. But sometimes they give us time to sit back and reflect. I had the good opportunity to sit through a very intimate but intense discussion organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), where a range of international and national women achievers spoke, reflecting on their own personal experience and those at their workplace.

Talking about tokenism somebody raised a valid point that how come on International Women's Day we only pick out women achievers and put them on a pedestal? What about the many faceless, voiceless invisible women, carrying on struggle after struggle, are they not to be celebrated? Why don't we share the stories of homemakers? Are their struggles and stories not worth sharing?

The weekend before that, I had another good opportunity to attend the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of my society's Resident Welfare Association (RWA), and I would like to share observations I took away from the two meetings and my own reflections of fellow women friends and colleagues.

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What has particularly struck me is the urban, the educated, the working women and her callousness to women's rights and respect. So below is a simplified day-to-day step theory of losing empowerment by educated urban working women:

One has heard from fellow women colleagues over a period of time, that if there was one TV in the house then women give up their right to watch TV after marriage. Men, it seems prefer to watch sports or news and women would just go along. And these could be young girls who till before their marriage would fight with their siblings for the control of the remote to watch their favourite movie or soaps. Perhaps now with the TV available on the computer and mobile, things may have changed for a section of the society. It's a small thing but losing your right or your choice of entertainment is perhaps the first step in accepting bullies all your life through.

It's strange that men and women going to similar office settings with similar office timings of nine to five, do different things when they get back home. I know of friends, where the husband doing the same office job as the wife once home, puts on his running shoes and goes off for a walk. The wife, back from the same office, gets into the kitchen. The dinner is to be kept ready by the time the husband comes back from the walk! Other women get busy with helping the children with their homework, while their husbands step out of home for a mohalla gup shup! Losing your right to stay healthy or relax is a second step in accepting inequality.

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At the RWA AGM, which had about 50 participants, we had only about five of us women participants. This when the society comprises of educated women, many of them achievers in their own rights and a number of them working women which sometimes is used interchangeably for empowered women. Why then when it comes to decision-making meetings or bodies do we have only a handful of women turning up? This happens in urban centers. On the contrary, while working in the rural areas in our development sector work, we motivate women in our projects to actively participate in the decision-making processes. And village women actually do!

But one comes back to one's own comfortable neighbourhood and women are least interested in participating in decision-making, which would ultimately also affect them. Taking it to the next level, while working in the area of peace and conflict we always raise the issue of how the people most affected in a conflict are women and children and still their voices are the least reflected in the decision-making of conflicts or post-conflict situations.

However if women continue to shy away from initial decision-making processes then how can one expect them to be involved at higher levels of decision-making? And if educated and empowered women are not going to get involved then how can we expect women in the semi-urban, rural and tribal areas with socioeconomic dependence to come out? Losing your right to decision-making, therefore, might be the third step in allowing yourself to be treated as a second-class citizen.

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At the AGM when some women raised issues about security, after being threatened by one of the male residents in the middle of the night with dire consequences, it was pointed out that women should expect to be treated unfairly if they raise their voice against injustice.

Another woman got up to shut the affected women up, accusing them of using the "woman" card. A similar point was raised by the panel when one participant accused some women of misusing dowry laws to harass the in-laws. To this a fellow feminist retaliated, that there are so many laws in this country and most of them are abused and misused, nobody talks about them, why then is the issue of women misusing laws always highlighted?

One needs to understand that it takes a lot of courage for women, even if it is an empowered woman to raise voice against injustice. In fact, it takes a lot of courage for anybody to raise their voice against injustice, men and women alike.

We need to, therefore, support voices that speak up against injustice and not muffle them by silly, meaningless questioning. Therefore, losing your voice might be the final step to losing empowerment.

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And I am not blaming men alone for doing this, it's an equal choice, and one that women agree to and they need to understand that equality has to be practised at every step of life and just "being allowed" to go out to work is not equality.

It is decision-making at every step, it is the choice to reject, to uphold, to give up and to grab that needs to be practised in everyday life. That means equality.

In India, our Constitution gives us such wonderful rights but if we do not access them, then nobody can help us. We need to use our legal and constitutional rights on a daily basis to make India an exemplar for women rights and respect. And it has to be pushed equally by empowered women and women achievers, homemakers and working women and educated and uneducated women alike.

Only when women can stand up for their own equal rights can they stand up to protect the rights of their children, men and women in distress and nature and animals. As creators, our responsibility is not just to ourselves but to our creations as well.

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We also have a responsibility to all those women who fought to get us the rights to vote and equal pay and to those women who are yet to experience their rights. We got our rights easy but remember if our mothers and grandmothers hadn't pushed for their rights we would still be standing up against barricades. It's thanks to them that we don't have to go on demonstrations to seek our rights but we still can, in our own corners, in small ways, keep pushing the envelope till we all have attained equal rights. Freedom they say when comes easy goes away as easily as well, so respect the privileges which we have inherited, fight to keep them and to enlarge their scope and support those who don't have them yet.

So women, let's "stop bonding and start networking" as was wisely put by one of the panelists. If a woman raises a voice, listen to her and support her, if you see a women entrepreneur (even a vegetable vendor) buy from her, it's when you invest in women be it your money or your faith, it's then that you push and turn the wheel of empowerment. And it's perhaps needed more now than ever when there is already a decline in the workforce participation of women in India.