Pushing for gender parity: Because women hold up half the sky

I first heard these words, attributed to Mao Zedong, at one of the anti-rape rallies happening all over Bombay in early 1980, in the aftermath of the Mathura judgment. They captured my imagination and struck me as utterly, obviously true. I was almost 16. At 51, women are still holding up half the sky—the words now popularised by a recent bestseller—and still getting very little credit for it. This is why, along with feminists all over the world, I am pushing for gender parity today.

Not 25%. Not 33.33%. Not a vague promise of equality someday. But parity. 50-50, or thereabouts, making room for other marginalised gender identities. Nothing less than half the sky.

The Global Gender Gap report is not new but worth revisiting anyway, just for today. The global numbers are appalling. In 2006 and still in 2015, women earn roughly half of what men do. More women than men are enrolling in universities, but only in four countries do they form a majority of leaders. Women make up 19% of the world’s parliamentarians; 18% of the world’s ministers and by now, at least half the world’s countries have had a woman head of state. The report finds that where parties have adopted voluntary quotas, the leadership gap has filled somewhat. The report finds that companies with more women in leadership roles perform better than those that are less diverse. Investing in women’s health and education yields returns in terms of women’s economic and political participation, the report states.

In India, the female to male labour participation ratio is .35 and they earn about half the amount that men do for the same work. Only 61% of women are literate, and the educational attainment drops dramatically from primary (84%) to secondary (46%) to tertiary (24%) levels. The child sex ratio had fallen to 919 in the 2011 census — that is 919 girls per 1000 boys, signalling that male child preference is as strong as ever. Women are 12% of Parliament and 22% of the cabinet (in spite of calls for gender parity in the cabinet!). Women make up 33-50% of local government but at the state assembly level, their percentage ranges from 4-15%, no more.

The true tragedy is not that these numbers are low, but that we are so easily satisfied. We are grateful for every little sop. We should not be. Mao’s words are said to be part of a longer Chinese proverb that goes “Women hold up half the sky, but the heavy half.” We should be staking a claim to half of everything, including access to opportunity, resources and power. We should settle for nothing less.

So this International Women’s Day, I am setting us an agenda for the coming year — an agenda that will require us to push with everything we’ve got. To do that we will need to give up our willingness to compromise and satisfice.

Push for parity 1: Half of everything in politics, I say— half the seats in every legislature and half the seats in every cabinet, including half of key ministerial positions.

In order to do this, we will have to keep reminding our political elite — politicians and media experts — that there are smart, capable women out there in every corner of the country. Start by telling their stories to each other. Create directories so they can be found. Compile profiles so their accomplishments reach the world. And promote their leadership every chance we get.

On the other hand, we also need to tell women that they can be leaders. We can bridge the access gap on paper but it will take a lot of interpersonal work to bridge the confidence gap. Growing up in a patriarchal society, girls learn more about what they should not do, what they cannot do and what is unbecoming for them to do than what they are capable of doing. We see what they accomplish in spite of that upbringing and the number of things they manage successfully in the course of a life they term ‘ordinary.’ We can spot their potential to be leaders; indeed, we see they are leaders. But who will tell them that?

The third part of this will be to redefine leadership. Last year, the Prajnya Archives put out a call on Women’s Day of women’s experiences of leadership. We got the fewest responses ever, because I suspect, we were using a far more expansive understanding of leadership than do most women. We saw leadership in the girl who had been class monitor; the woman in charge of her housing society’s roof garden, and the mother who managed to raise four kids on her own while her husband travelled with a transferable job. Women did not. They considered their experiences trivial. We need to get society to recognise leadership potential in every experience.

Push for parity 2: Half of the workforce, half the organisational leadership at every level.

Only 29% of Indian women work in the formal sectors of the economy where they can be counted. However, most Indian women work in informal sectors. Making that work visible and making it count should be the second push.

In the coming year, can we talk about the work women do at home? Let us start putting monetary values around tasks that women perform in most households — washing, cleaning, cooking, tidying up or laundry. This is not yet an argument for paying them for this work, but just for placing values on it so we value it. We do not say any more, “No, my wife doesn’t work, she is a housewife.” When we understand the value of her support services — the monetary value — we will understand that this is skilled work (if tedious). The corollary of recognising that value is recognising the skills it takes as real skills that she could used in the public sphere if she chooses.

At the other end of the spectrum, let us talk about the formal, corporate workplace. Gender diversity in the workplace and creating the conditions that promote and sustain that diversity is now a mission for several human resource entrepreneurs. Mentoring women to gain confidence, to re-tool and find their way through a corporate workspace is part of their work every day.

This April, it will be three years since the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act has been passed. It is also almost twenty years since the Vishaka Guidelines stated:
“It shall be the duty of the employer or other responsible persons in work places or other institutions to prevent or deter the commission of acts of sexual harassment and to provide the procedures for the resolution, settlement or prosecution of acts, of sexual harassment by taking all steps required.”

The 2013 Act mandates that all companies have a sexual harassment policy that is communicated to all employees and an internal complaints committee with an outside member; and that awareness training is organised for all employees. There are delays on the government’s part — making known the composition of Local Complaints Committees and communicating where reports are to be sent, for instance. There was some debate about the Rules accompanying the Act, but that does not seem to have gone anywhere. My question is: where is the rush to comply? Flexitime, good leave and compensation, good mentoring and good opportunities all come to nought if there is no way to complain about workplace sexual harassment. We, in civil society, can talk about this, but a signal that government takes this seriously would help, rather than a debate on whether this is a painful requirement for companies or not.

How many women make the journey from the workroom to the board-room? That’s the other place to push for parity. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)’s 2014 requirement that listed all companies that have a woman director resulted in the appointment of one token woman to many boards. I do not follow corporate affairs, but there seems to be a lot of resistance to this requirement that mirrors the debates about quotas in politics — unqualified women will come, there are just no women to choose from, etc. There are efforts to train and mentor women to corporate leadership, just as there are people who work with organisations to make their larger workforce more diverse. Women need more than training; they need support networks and they need opportunities to raise their own visibility.

I set forth just two contexts in which we should push for parity, but that does not mean there are not more. We need to start somewhere to make gender equality more than a slogan, and that somewhere has to be to abandon contentment with small concessions. I say, dream the big dream, and then stretch yourself to make it happen. This International Women’s Day, join the #pushforparity. It’s your world at stake.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist by training and the founder of Prajnya.