Making equal music

One of the big myths of the women’s lib movement is that women have everything to gain from greater gender equality and men everything to lose. Both sexes have bought this argument lock, stock and barrel without stopping to think. Given widespread acceptance that women have been discriminated against, this is not surprising.

But it’s not the whole story. While there is no doubt formal power will have to be more equally shared, the real truth lies somewhere in-between: men have much to gain from a more equal society and women have something to lose from it.

The stereotyping of gender roles has taken a huge toll of men — and they don’t even know it. Men invest so much of their energies trying to achieve career and public success that they have completely failed to savour their softer sides, their relationships, their children — everything. Little wonder they are more prone to heart-attacks and more likely to die violent deaths than the other sex.

Greater equality will, of course, bring women more public recognition, money and power, but they are also more than likely to lose out on their traditional nurturing role and the psychological satisfaction that it brings. When men start sharing their home-making roles — not enough of them are doing so, one must admit — women are likely to find that parenting is not any more natural to them as to men. Women will also find that as they begin to compete for higher-paying jobs and careers, their personalities will change. Not all of it will be to their benefit.

This is not an argument for less equality. But equality is being wrongly sold both to men and women as a win-lose situation. What men lose, women gain. Men don’t know the benefits and women the penalties of equality. The reason is simple, yet subtle: most gender equality schemes are devised by men in a patriarchal society who are driven by guilt on how women have been treated in the past.

A small example will illustrate this point: we know that domestic violence is a reality. We also know dowry is a social evil, and loaded against families with girl children. So what do we do? We have draconian laws which more or less hold the man guilty as long as a woman has made a complaint. The other day, the Supreme Court went to the extent of saying that women are unlikely to lie about rape since there is huge social ignominy involved. The highest court has surely erred in holding this. Just because the probability of women lying about rape is lower, can we have laws that favour women? Where has equality gone?

Another instance is the law on maternity leave. The Central government gives women up to two years of paid child care leave over and above maternity leave. Once again, this is patriarchal overcompensation on gender justice. If the argument is that men and women must share the burdens of parenthood more equally, it makes little sense to privilege women over men in this area. If women have the right to two years of paid parenting, why not men?

Even better, why not give the couple the right to decide who will spend more time as homemaker and who as breadwinner? Most probably, the decision will be driven by economics. Whoever earns more will work more and the other partner will spend more time bringing up the child.

The other fallacy is the presumption that maternity leave is a benefit to women. Women who want careers will find that employers will bypass them for promotions and their male colleagues will march ahead. Some Scandinavian countries have laws to ensure that long maternal leave does not lead to any loss of seniority or position. Others are legislating flexi-hours for women who have children. This penalises companies (who will want to hire less women), women (who will be subtly discriminated against) and men (who lose parenting opportunities). If parenting is so important to society, why not give the same benefits to men? It makes no sense to pillory men for not helping with children and then not enabling them to do so.

While there is little doubt that men have taken advantage of their superior power roles to put women down in the past, women have also lost out due to the deterioration in the economic value of home-making and child-rearing. As one study pointed out, gender roles didn’t start out as discrimination, but as division of labour. A woman managing the home was a sound economic proposition. Today, with household gadgets and day care centres offering support and with job opportunities opening up for women, the economic value of staying at home is gone.

Four days from now, another Women’s Day will be upon us. We need to rethink the way we look at equality, and market it better to both the sexes. It’s not win-lose, it’s win-win.