Batting for gender equality: Can we normalise it via social dialogue?

We often hear the question ‘how to make the world a better place?’ While there are many pieces to this puzzle—poverty, education, climate change—establishing gender equality is one key aspect to achieving peace and harmony in the world. Gender equality, which takes the fifth spot in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, ensures that all human beings, irrespective of gender, have equal rights.

Why should one gender receive more privileges while the others have to constantly fight to make their voices heard? This inequality of the sexes is not only unfair but it holds no value in our current social fabric. There is no rationale behind discrimination against human beings on the basis of their gender orientation—be it women or people from the LGBTQ community. While Nordic countries such as Sweden and Iceland have triumphed in their pursuit of establishing gender equality for both women and LGBTQ individuals, we are still far behind attaining similar results on a global scale.

In India, women’s inequality continues to be a thorn in the country’s progress both socially and economically. According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, women’s contribution to India’s GDP is a mere 18 percent, which is one of the lowest in the world. The report further states that India has the potential to achieve $770 billion of added GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality.

Earlier this year, India slipped 28 places in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, ranked 140^th among 156 countries. According to the report, “India is the third-worst performer in the region, having closed 62.5 percent of its gap,” the report said.

Challenge cultural norms

While attempting to lead a discourse around gender equality in India, Savita Singh, a Delhi-based political theorist and a feminist poet, says that the issue is rooted in the gender division of labour.

“This layered inequality is rooted in the devaluation of gender. When we look into the job market, the data is abysmal. The female participation rate today in India in the last quarter of 2020 has come down to 17 percent. It is the lowest you can think of,” she says.

Beyond labour, we need to examine the fundamental issues at the level of culture and society that continue to restrict women to certain gender-based stereotypes that stifle their voices. Singh believes that it is important to challenge cultural values that silence women in the name of politeness. “If we talk about the cultural level, a polite woman is seen as a good woman. A woman who doesn’t complain is a good woman. These cultural values need to be challenged. There is a limit to how much a woman can endure,” she says.

There also exist dichotomies in the way women are represented, objectified and perceived, which need to be questioned at a cultural level. A woman is a human being first and her dignity needs to be respected. “Either you violate her or you just worship her. These two poles, between which she hangs like a pendulum, need to be broken. She should be treated as a human being,” Singh asserts.

The age-old adage ‘change begins at home’ is pertinent to this dialogue. Before addressing the issues of gender inequality and discrimination against women at a larger scale, we need to observe how much of it has been ingrained within our society and the way our mindsets operate.

Even today, when families search for prospective brides, kitchen and household responsibilities tend to be among the top-most prerequisites. Although women have left an indelible mark across diverse fields such as politics or science, at the grassroots level, these social norms tend to confine them to specific roles, such as being a homemaker. It’s high time that we re-examine the age-old paradigms of the kitchen being a woman’s space.