It’s the EOD (End of Day), past 6 pm in most offices and International Women’s Day has trended all day long. For me, personally, the barrage of messages started at 6.00 am. While I’m woke enough to appreciate it, this started even before I was awake. Such is the fervour.
It’s now time for the fever to go West, home to the place where it comes from.
50% off of beauty products. All-girl dining, special offers on women’s products… what not. All I can say is, I went for a couple of deals because well, all the rest of the 364 days, there’s the pink tax to pay. Details here:
According to this research, women are paying 42% more than men. Be it shampoos or deodorants or razors. If it’s pink, you’re paying for it.
On reading this you’re bound to think “Oh wait. That’s a bit blonde”. I owe no allegiances and certainly no generosity to my woke buddies here. They’ll just have to stretch the limits of their ‘woke-ness’ if they want to read me. You’ll find me calling out all sorts of stereotypes here, we are talking International Women’s Day after all!!!
Back to being a bit blonde. Yes, you’re paying more for no reason other than you’re a woman. So if on IWD they give us 15% discount on some shit, I say you grab it. I got me some anti-ageing serum that I’m already paying 42% extra for (there are no anti-ageing serums for men, are they?)
It’s a deal I already cannot afford. Factor this in: Women in India earn 20% less than men.
Considering that the gender pay gap has narrowed 5% y-o-y, and that I started working in 2004, this amazing feature of our society may have shaved off how much of my CTC… I’m a woman struggling to do math.
So this morning when I had thoughtfulness pouring all over me in the form of Happy Women’s Day messages, I began feeling envious of men for: Nobody tells them what to wear, how to walk or sit, why they were raped or feel happy that they’re a man on the 8th of March so they’d better go out with their gang and make it a day! There’s no messaging around them. Their life goes on, business as usual. BIBO. 9 to 6: Shop talk. After 6: Boy talk. Done.
We women, on the other hand, keep spinning. This clip is etched in memory.
“I love it when women go to school. It’s like seeing a monkey on roller skates. It means nothing to them but it’s so adorable for US.”
Says the guy in a pink tee and shorts.
Nobody tells him to buy something because he’s worth it. Because there can be no doubt about his worth. He doesn’t have to worry if he’s balancing work and life. Coz he’s not the monkey on roller skates. We are. I am.
As a careerist, I can’t tell you how many times I have to explain my choices of living in a big city on my own, just so I could do the work I enjoy. I cannot count the number of creeps I find on a weekly basis on a ‘serious’ platform like LinkedIn, where a request to connect and exchange of contacts can within the same work day convert into ‘when is your birthday’ and ‘what are your lunch hours’ and ‘where do you live, exactly?’. So I tell this Director-level dude at this powerful financial brand to back off. I remove my connection. That’s another Pink tax that life imposes on you. If you’re married and settled, you’re game until you send across the right info. If like me you’re living the good single life, you’re just game. That’s all.
There’s only one silver lining:
The same dude has just today wished me a ‘Happy Women’s Day’ too. Tone deaf and entitled. A dime a dozen. Imagine all those women reporting to him.
It’s always nice to come by this reminder: that as a woman, your freedom is your most valuable possession of all. Also the one most fragile. And mostly, also the one most folklored. We don’t even have the freedom to not have a day to celebrate our gender — of which there are but two on God’s Green Earth. Don’t go woke on me. Please. All the others are defined relative to these two so give me a break. We should have blended in, in equal proportions, right?
Why is it that on IWD I get platitudes and cards and gift coupons and discount offers while men get ~20% more pay?
On IWD, can there be a more precious lesson?
But now that we all have partaken in this awesomeness of being a woman today, I wonder what part of womanhood are we celebrating? We’re celebrating careers, achievements, goals. Manly things. We’re not celebrating motherhood, caring for the family, and sacrifice. We’re not celebrating the reclusiveness of someone like Emily Dickinson. We’re not celebrating the eccentricity of Freida Kahlo. We’re not celebrating the feminine.
Because, if we had been, this would be fake news:
Only 1 in 10 companies in India say they want to hire more women. The new tide of gig and freelance economy will again favour men since women’s mobility is a challenge. Women’s ability and readiness to network is a challenge too.
So what part of women are we really celebrating? The parts that fall closest to the masculine.
And that’s because the very idea of IWD is discriminatory in nature. I don’t see men framing policies to remove the pink tax. I don’t see upper echelons of the society framing organisational laws to ensure pay parity. I don’t see organisations going out of the way to achieve some balance by hiring women.
I don’t see governments giving serious tax breaks to working moms. Working moms are becoming rarer by the day and as educated, stable, women, they have a lot to offer in terms of bringing up a well-rounded next generation. Their motherhood should be incentivised in the form of the benefits that truly matter.
Give working moms tax incentives so dads have an incentive to let them get back to work, by pitching in with their own contribution towards child rearing. Give tax incentives to companies that hire and retain women and working moms. Mothers render a huge service to the society, after all. That is the ultimate nation-building. The society provides the very context for ‘work’, why we have to keep jobs, build organisations, keep the wheel in motion. This society is born of her womb.
But why do something concrete where lip service would suffice?
As I was leaving work, I only could see women gathered in droves at a bar nearby. Drinks for women were on the house! It’s women’s day so time to put their livers to work.
Somebody has said, “All women work. Only some get paid for it.”
So I’ve decided I want my money back. I see the hypocrisy. Hope you do it too. IWD is just another way to deepen a discriminative practice.
A few years ago, I found my way back to my grandma’s teachings: We’re not women. We’re goddesses. We bring life. We bring beauty. We own beauty. Beauty is civilisation. A civilisation is beautiful. Because it raises your consciousness. And of this, women are innately capable. So go out in the world believing you’re this. Not a woman weak, nor a woman merely.
So when my colleagues ask me what I’m doing for IWD my answer is Ignoring it. I’m not a woman, I’m a goddess.
Not one is not bemused.
But this is a perspective we truly have forgotten because marketing.
It’s always around.
Our women’s day is nine days and nine nights long i.e. Navratri. We worship little girls and get them used to the idea of accepting offerings. A reminder to them that they are duty-bound today and in future in a number of ways, but as they go about it, they can do so as goddesses rather than as slaves. That the attitude matters.
This divinity is not some magic when you can walk on water; it’s when you make walking on the hot coals of life’s challenges look like you’re walking on water.
My gran did it. So did my mom in many ways. And so many towering women figures in my life. When I was 25, I had an 80 year old girl friend once who, married at 16, had fought against a band of dacoits with her father-in-law’s rifle, just 3 days into her marriage in this farmer family in a village in Gujarat. She had the most wicked, rustic humour I have ever seen a woman carry off.
On the other hand, there’s my domestic help in the metro city of Mumbai, who doesn’t have a mobile phone and won’t keep one because her husband won’t allow it. Because he suspects her (She’s 50+). Hits her. Snatches away all her money. But she won’t hear of leaving her home. But, this woman is the most honest person I have dealt with in similar circs. And she’s committed to a fault. She has raised four kids on her salary. Two of them have their own kids that now go to school. She will continue to work so that her grandkids have enough.
Divinity. It comes in various shapes, sizes, and stories. It comes to goddesses and gods too. Through goddesses though. Because only one goddess can coax another into creation. We need more goddesses.
