Women & prejudice

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Women & prejudice

In the last week of July the Supreme Court delivered an important judgment with farreaching consequences for the women of this country. Unfortunately, the din and ruckus of day-to-day politics in our society prevented a full appreciation of the ramifications of this judgment.

Women’s rights activists have long agitated about the status and condition of women in India. The very same women who had fought shoulder to shoulder with men to obtain freedom from colonial rule and who played in equal measure a part in drafting the Indian Constitution, which guarantees to all citizens that there will be no discrimination on the grounds, inter alia, of gender, now find that they have been left far behind in the paradigm of development of this country.

The reasons for the comparative lack of development of women in almost all sectors, including life expectancy, health, nutrition, education, employment, decision-making and a hundred other areas, are complex and diverse. However, the simplest and most profound explanation is rooted in the patriarchal, social and family hierarchy of our society.

If women were to attain true equality in all fields, especially for example in decision-making and employment, the social and family hierarchy of our society which is overwhelmingly male-dominated will become completely destabilised. And a male-dominated society can never deal with that.

This is the reason why as long as the struggle was against the alien colonial force women found space in the ranks of the freedom fighters but the moment Independence was achieved traditional male-dominated family and social structures swung back into place.

Women all over the world of all classes have been traditionally responsible for housework, cooking, cleaning, fetching fuel and drinking water, other household chores and child rearing. In low-income and middle-income families, therefore, women have always filled both roles, as wage-earners as well as of home-makers and child rearers.

However, women’s rights activists have always questioned the fact that the arduous and daily drudgery involved in fetching fuel, drinking water, cooking, cleaning and child rearing has not only been the woman’s lot but is rarely appreciated by the men in the family or by society at large.

Thus it is that a woman spends approximately one-third of her lifespan cooking and producing food for the consumption of her family. She does this with love, and that too everyday without a break, without a holiday on Saturday or Sunday, without salary or provident fund, without retirement benefits and often without even a word of gratitude from the members of her family.

However, the moment the chore of cooking which women do for their family goes out of the domestic and into the public arena, as for example, making vadas or tea in a tea shop, it becomes economically remunerative and men come into the picture.

You don’t see women but men in tea shops and dhabas cooking parathas and vadas and making tea and getting paid handsomely for their pains. In five-star hotels the most highly paid chefs are men. And yet the moment all these men step back into their own homes, it is the unpaid and under-appreciated women of their households who will have to hand them their tea and tiffin.

In agriculture and in construction sites the women do the most strenuous work. It is the women who carry bricks on their head and trudge up steep ladders to hand it to the mason who simply slaps on the cement. Also, women do the backbreaking work of sowing paddy. And yet, their work and contribution are not taken seriously by the society at large.

I once saw a TV documentary where men belonging to various professions were interviewed. Each one was asked what work he did. They answered that they were doctors, lawyers, clerks, engineers etc. Then they were asked what their wives did. Every single one of them said “Oh, she is a housewife, she does not do anything”.

Then the camera panned to their wives who were shown cooking, washing clothes, fetching cooking fuel, looking after children, toiling without break from dawn until night. The point of the documentary was that the work done by women at home is very important and productive work and should be considered as a major contribution to the national economy and the gross domestic product. In fact, it is estimated that the unaccounted world domestic output of work done by women could be in the region of $18 trillion.

Yet despite hundreds of petitions from the women’s movement, governments remained stubbornly blind to this problem and have refused to classify women’s domestic work as “productive labour” in terms of national economies. In fact, under the Indian Census rules the domestic work done by women is not only “not” considered “productive labour or work”, but is also placed in the category of beggars and prisoners.

There can be no greater insult to the women of India and that this insult exists in the Census rules framed by the government itself only highlights the level of prejudice under which women live in this country.

In this background, the judgment of the Supreme Court in CA 5843/2010 is a significant and heartwarming recognition of the contribution of women and their work.

In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court disapproved of Clause 6 of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988, which divided persons into the category of non-earning persons and spouse and as far as the spouse is concerned, the income of the injured in both fatal and non fatal accidents has been categorised as one-third of the income of the earning and surviving spouse.

In other words, the spouse (normally the woman home-maker) who does not earn is computed at a value of 1/3 the value of the earning person. The court held that this was a gender bias, in clear violation of the Constitution and was demeaning and insulting to women and tremendous work rendered by them in terms of domestic work within their own homes. The court directed that the Motor Vehicles Act should be suitably amended to remove this gender bias.

It is the demand of every right-thinking citizen that the government should not only suitably amend the MV Act, but also ensure that the Census gives due credit to domestic work done by women and that this is duly reflected in the GDP.

* Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson. The views expressed in this column are her own.