Month: April 2021

Much has been written about Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, streaming on Amazon Prime. Its truth prevails across the globe. Leisure is a male pursuit while the women chop, clean, sweep, fry, wash, simmer, serve

A screengrab from The Great Indian Kitchen.

The unannounced guest is someone we’ve all met. “The women can rest today,” he says grandly. The men are taking over the kitchen.

After dinner, you can see from the way her shoulders sag that the kitchen is an apocalyptic mess: Dirty utensils, splattered curry, onion peels, and, from afar, a voice demanding two cups of black tea.

Much has been written about Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, streaming on Amazon Prime. At an online function, Supreme Court judge DY Chandrachud referred to it. Others see it as a comment on socially-imposed gender roles, patriarchy in religion and society, a remark on the Sabarimala judgment, and the stifling of female aspiration.

Its truth prevails across the globe. Leisure is a male pursuit while the women chop, clean, sweep, fry, wash, simmer, serve. Worse is the justification of this drudgery as “auspicious” work, because what can be more important than running a house and raising children?

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There is no country where housework, or to use its more accurate term, unpaid care work, is equally shared. But the gap in India is particularly wide with women spending around six hours a day; men 52 minutes. No surprise then that unpaid care work is the “main barrier to women’s participation in the labour force,” finds the International Labour Organisation.

With so much to be done (unpaid) at home, women in India continue to leave the paid labour force in droves. It’s a situation made worse by the pandemic where the labour of housework has shot up with families at home, leading to a disproportionate job loss among women.

In the latest round of assembly elections, some parties promised salaries for housework, leading to a welcome debate on putting a value to domestic work.

Should housework be paid for? If so, what’s a fair compensation? Who will pay? Would it lead to a greater sense of entitlement by men or would it lead to more opting for paid housework?

Housework certainly needs an image makeover, stripped of all the humbug of noble work and shorn off its gender stereotyping. Media must play a role in normalising the man in the kitchen, not as a super-hero but as a regular guy putting dinner on the table every day.

Also Read | Study finds disproportionate ‘gender bias’ behind Facebook’s job ads

The courts have insisted on equal compensation to housewives killed in motor accidents, implying that their lives are of equal monetary value, even if they do not bring an actual salary home. This attitude of an equal partnership should inform other legal matters including divorce and maintenance.

The noisy salary debate does little to hide the zero policy measures to ensure a reduction in the gender gap in housework. There is silence by government around the crisis in female workforce participation. We do not have a pandemic recovery plan tailored to the needs of women who have been hit harder than men.

The Great Indian Kitchen raises the questions. The answers are yet to come.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal

A wake-up call to first set up a national-level task force to study the pandemic’s impact on gender and, next, to suggest possible remedies. The blunt truth is India cannot afford to mutely witness any further erosion in gender rights.

India’s fall in ranking stems largely from an old crisis: The exit of women from paid work. Since 2011-12, 25 million women, roughly Shanghai’s population, have quit the workforce. If you go back to 2004-05, it’s 47 million. (ANI)

Whichever way you look at it, India’s 28-point tumble to land at 140 out of 156 countries in the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gender gap ranking is a fail mark.

WEF looks at incontrovertible data on four parameters — education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment — to reach its conclusions. Within South Asia, only two countries — Pakistan at 153 and Afghanistan at the bottom of the list at 156 — have done worse than us.

India’s fall in ranking stems largely from an old crisis: The exit of women from paid work. Since 2011-12, 25 million women, roughly Shanghai’s population, have quit the workforce. If you go back to 2004-05, it’s 47 million.

There are a number of reasons why women are quitting paid work. In a nutshell, it is to do with society’s definition of “women’s work”, which is to cook, clean and care for children and the elderly, an unpaid job that increased manifold during the pandemic. Obviously, the more time women spend on unpaid care work, the less they have for paid work.

While job loss has hit everyone, data from the Centre of Monitoring Indian Economy tell us that it hit women hardest. In February 2021, female labour force participation shrunk by 9%; for men, it is 1.8%, says economist Mitali Nikore. The worst-hit are urban women where labour force contraction is 32% for the same month, the highest since the start of the pandemic, she says.

Sure, other factors have contributed to our fall in rankings. The persistence of low political participation by women; the reduction of the number of women ministers; our ongoing sex ratio-at-birth problem. But, for the first time, the pandemic and its impact on job loss have brought India’s crisis of female employment into the public domain.

The WEF report does not look into data from areas such as domestic violence that reportedly shot up during lockdown. It has not considered the impact of the gender digital divide where girls were shut out of online classes because they didn’t have access to smartphones. It did not see how this led to a surge in child marriage in states such as Rajasthan. It has not counted the numbers of women unable to access contraceptive and other health services and the impact of this on unwanted pregnancies and their health.

And, yet, limited as it is, one can only hope that the ranking will serve as a wake-up call to government and policymakers. A wake-up call to first set up a national-level task force to study the pandemic’s impact on gender and, next, to suggest possible remedies. The blunt truth is India cannot afford to mutely witness any further erosion in gender rights.

To do nothing is to wait for upwards of a century to close the gender gap, warns WEF. We simply cannot afford that wait.

Namita Bhandare writes on genderThe views expressed are personal